Kelly Slater is not the biggest fan of Sunset. He’s had a tumultuous relationship with the place for years, but maybe, just maybe, that relationship is on the mend.
““Look, I don’t love Sunset,” he said in a post-heat interview after getting knocked out of last year’s event. “I don’t like the wave. I don’t like the crowd out here. Everyone’s on a 10-foot board. I don’t respect the wave and it doesn’t respect me back. Unless I change, it’s not going to change.”
It appears, though, that at least something has changed. In opening round of Sunset, Kelly looked like a different man. He looked like a person who enjoys surfing at Sunset Beach. He was riding a 6’3” with five fins and a vee double concave, which is not what most people were riding out there.
“It’s something I’ve kind of been messing with for a few years,” he said after his heat against Maxime Huscenot and Miguel Pupo. And whatever it was, whether it was the board, his mindset, the conditions, or a mixture of all those things, the GOAT looked much happier in his post-heat interview this year.
