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Shea won the Red Bull Tow-At. Here he busts it out unassisted. All Photos: ©Micah Weaver/aurasurf.com.
A professional surf contest in Florida with perfect conditions. When it gets like that you just gotta go. This was the 4th Sebastian Inlet Pro since the contest started running in 2005. It is the best contest on the East Coast with 100’s of surfers from all over the world competing. Props to Mitch Varnes, the contest director for bringing pro surfing back to Florida on this level. This year met with favorable winds and wave conditions. Maybe it’s the smile of the surf gods or global warming but the conditions were just perfect. A little more swell would’ve been nice. Anouncers PT and Ryan Dyval kept swearing that this was the best surf yet. Maybe they have a short memory or they were high on sunshine but for the 05’ contest the surf was at least a foot bigger and also a stronger swell. You can keep comparing contests, upping the purse and and tacking on stars but I don’t think they can ever top 05’. Here’s why: Number one: Curren. Number two: Cory won. Number 3: Slater... Still this years event was nothing to sniff at. And the same conditions that made for glassy surf caused a lot of fog for the inland counties. The day before the finals saw the worst traffic accident in Florida history on I-4 as fog caused a 70 car disaster. This was the challenge I was presented with as I shirked tons of responsibilities to drop everything and head east. I had to go. Cory and Shea were still in. CJ and Damo were still in. Dylan was still in. And it was gonna be sunny and warm with clean swell. Ding, gotta go. I decided to take my 7-year old daughter with me and head over the night before to avoid the early morning fog. We arrived at SI at 2am and slept snug as a bug in the car with pillows and blankets till 7:30am. My daughter was totally stoked on the adventure. The surf was good, a little fat with the am tide. Dylan’s heat was up first. Dylan is a super nice kid who lives in a house on the hill up above Middles in Isabela, Puerto Rico. The adopted Boricua is one of my favorite surfers to watch but the ‘Boot’ had other ideas. Pat Gadauskas and his rubber boot quickly disposed of him and sent him back to paradise. Pat, wasn’t that the ambiguous person on SNL? Sprained ankle my foot. How do you think he pulls all those front side airs? The next heat I was interested in came shortly thereafter. Shea vs. Sterling. P-Cola vs. IRB. Shea is a stud. Such a cool guy. I think his style is so fluid he goes underappreciated. Sterling, I don’t know too well. He’s a fellow gulf coaster but he may as well live on the moon, his home being an 8hr drive away from WFL. But P-Cola gets great waves and Sterling is the real deal and he quickly put Shea out of the contest. Sterling got some good lefts in 2nd peak and kept busting the same backside 360 air and landing it every time. Shea got some fat, mushy lefts at 3rd peak and couldn’t match the scores. I think if Shea had surfed 2nd he could’ve beat him. But CJ had got great lefts at 3rd and Shea must have been following his lead. Unfortunately, for Shea’s heat, 3rd got soft. That’s about what it all came down to. Who got the set waves and who busted the radical airs. There were a ton of good aerials the last day and guys like Nathaniel, Sterling and Boot Boy could call up a sick air on queue and land it every time. They’ve got them down Pat! Too bad a bunch of Californians took it over at the end but we’ll get em’ next year. So the 08’ SI Pro was a complete success. This is Florida in January. It could’ve been 32 degrees and onshore but Mitch, O’Neill and Sebastian pulled it off again. What a surf spectacle! When it gets like that you just gotta go.
