Dane, Sally, and B-Rad making it another good week in the world of all things surf.
T’was a good week in the ocean. Nothing mind blowing brewing in the waters of SoCal here, but then again there isn’t much to complain about when she still offers up enough to make you jump out of bed at 5:30 in the morning. And there were waves of all sorts made through the rest of the surf world as well. The girls got it on in Fiji, we got our daily dose of videos and edits to push us all through each workday, and a tad more to chat about. Here’s my best from the week that was…
Video of the week: SAMPLER
I remember when Dane was “the next Kelly”, and truth be told many people still aren’t letting him live down the unfulfilled promise of that label (purely from a competitive perspective). In basketball, Lebron has to win more titles than Michael in order to live up to the hype. It’s that black and white…kind of. But this is surfing. Guys like Dane can still go out, do their own thing, and show us that they never had to live up to anybody else’s accomplishments. He can still fly anywhere in the world, with or without a contest jersey, and show us all he’s one of if not the best surfers on the planet.
SAMPLER from Marine Layer on Vimeo.
From the Tour:
You know who I’m infatuated with? Sally Fitzgibbons. Did you see her in that new Land Rover commercial? #Swoon. Anyway…this is where I’m supposed to talk about the tour.
Sally winning at the Fiji Women’s Pro with a busted ear drum is about as impressive as it gets. Carissa Moore and Courtney Conlogue are still holding this year’s title in the palms of their hands, but a 9th for Carissa and 5th for Courtney gives the field a breath of hope, and Sally capitalized. She made the leap on the Jeep Leaderboard from 6th to 3rd place, passing Tyler Wright and Steph Gilmore in the process. As for the tour’s top 2, until this point they had combined to win the CT’s first 4 stops (2 each), also combining for a pair of 3rd place finishes and one runner up. The ladies are on fire, but mostly I was just pumped to see Sally be a badass ambassador for a segment of our sport that rarely gives its props to how great these women are.
Who’s blowing my mind?
I’m going to admit it right here, Brad Domke is becoming my surfing man crush. I love that he does crazy and random crap. No disrespect to Shane Dorian’s ridiculous winter last year, but part of me wanted to see Domke take the Ride of the Year Award at XXL back in April. He takes a lot of heat through the interwebs message boards for riding skim boards on stupid waves I’d never be caught dead on, but you get the sense the dude doesn’t care what we think. He’s eating it up. On the night of the XXL Awards he joined us on the red carpet, the one dude dressed in a suit, and when I put him on the spot in front of the camera with some of my standard obnoxious beat boxing he cooly obliged with a solid minute of freestyle rapping. That’s kind of rad in my book, but mostly it just reinforced my opinion of the guy: Domke’s just doing Domke. Hate all you want.
Turns out the day after our first group single was conceived he got back to more gnarly shenanigans. He went back to Puerto and channeled his inner JOB on another bomb, because it’s Brad Domke’s world and we’re all just living in it.
