The third annual Red Bull Riders Cup, formally known as the Red Bull High School Cup, kicks off its first game at Hermosa Beach, California on April 1st and then comes to Santa Cruz April 7-10 at Pleasure Point. Presented by The National Surf League, The Red Bull Riders Cup bills itself as the USA’s “premiere high school surfing tournament, bringing together the best young surfers in each region.”
Thirty two schools from eight regions will battle it out in games sanctioned by the National Surf League until a champion is crowned. The winner of each region will be invited to San Onofre for the national finals on June 13th-15th for the chance to be crowned the best high school surf team in the country.
Surf teams from five local high schools—Aptos, Soquel, Santa Cruz, Harbor and Scotts Valley–will vie for the Santa Cruz regional title and the opportunity to compete at the national finals in San Onofre.
The Red Bull Riders Cup will use “The Game” format for its tournament. The format is modeled after traditional team sports like basketball and football. The Red Bull Riders is the first step to bringing a new outlook to the sport of surfing through the community and a structure people are familiar with.
“The Game creates an easier understanding of surfing as a sport. The entire game spans less than two hours, with three periods, coaches and time outs. Family and friends are encouraged to come out and show support,” said NSL founder Brad Gerlach in a statement.
The Red Bull Riders Cup will feature professional surfers coaching each high school team during their competition. Some of the pros on hand for next week’s Santa Cruz game will include Hawaiian chargers Jamie Sterling and Ian Walsh, as well as local legends Omar Etcheverry, Ratboy, Peter Mel, and more.
Look for daily coverage and results from the Santa Cruz regional game in the Santa Cruz Sentinel and The Green Room.
Following is the full list of participating high school surf teams as well as the full season schedule:
“Why are all gringos so good looking?” the young waitress asks you in Spanish.
You’re sitting at a small outdoor bar and restaurant somewhere in the tropics, watching the sunset and waiting on a plate of food after a full day of surfing. The waitress—a short, curvy girl with dark hair and dark eyes—is spunky and direct. This is likely due to her spending the last year serving boisterous—and sometimes arrogant—young surfers from around the world who have begun to flock to this tiny fishing village in search of perfect waves.
The surfers stay at her family’s recently-built cabinas. Though the accommodations are rustic—stuffy rooms of bare plywood walls and no A/C—the surfer shacks are a bargain at five dollars a night and, most importantly, just steps away from a truly beautiful wave.
The reef at the southern tip of the bay is a swell magnet, channeling wave energy and focusing it into long walls of moving water that peel perfectly into the emerald bay. Still just a blip on the radar of international surfing destinations, the wave has yet to become “discovered,” and thus remains relatively uncrowded despite its world-class caliber.
You laugh, not sure how to answer the girl’s question. Why are all gringos so good looking? What a funny thing to say. Is she just flirting?
Classic sketch comedy with Ben Stiller and Donavon Frankenreiter as a pair of salty locals vibing kooks like the Malloys, Taj Burrow and Andy Irons who attempt to surf “their” break (ankle high Zuma Beach down in L.A.). Remind you of anyone?
The gray whales are in town, making pit stops along our coast on their journey back from their winter breeding grounds in southern Baja to their summer feeding grounds in Alaska.
Whales have been seen spouting right off Mitchell’s Cove Thursday morning and there have been numerous sightings up north in the last few days. Keep your eyes peeled for whales breaching and spouting just beyond the breakers at a surf spot near you.
Spring officially started Thursday, but for many of us spring has been in the air since the beginning of March. That’s because for the past few weeks the northwest winds have been coming up like clockwork every afternoon, pushing whitecaps into the Bay and blowing out all but the most protected spots.
Meanwhile, kiteboarders, for whom spring’s typical howling winds are a boon, couldn’t be more stoked about the solid start to their prime season.
Oh, and windsurfers too. Almost forgot about them.
“There’s definitely more kiters than windsurfers now,” admits Joe Dihl, owner of Davenport Surfsail and a diehard North Coast windsurfer for thirty years. “Occasionally there’s a new person who wants to learn how to windsurf and that’s really exciting, but usually it’s someone bringing a friend in saying they want to teach them how to kite.”
Local kitesurfer Josh Nehf throwing buckets on his kiteboard. Photo: Kim Kern
Head up to Waddell or Scotts on any windy afternoon and you’ll likely see almost all kites flying around the lineup instead of sails. Just ten years ago it would have been all windsurfers out in the water on such a day, but kiting has proliferated rapidly in recent years, attracting both rookie wave riders as well as many experienced windsurfers. In fact, Dihl estimated that upwards of fifty percent of the local windsurfing population has crossed over to kiteboarding in the last eight years.
One of Santa Cruz’s finest underground surf photographers recently returned from a trip to the islands with “the goods.” Below is a sampling of Howard “Boots” McGhee’s classic shots from perfect Pipeline, mid February, 2008.
“Insane to shoot it…wish I knew the guys in the pics,” Boots said. “I used a 300 and a 600 @ pipe. Hooked up w/the old owner of Camera Club, Mark Berkowitz. He set me up shooting next to him and let me use both lenses. Now I have to have one, a 500 or 600.”
Look for more of Boots’ work in the upcoming April issue of The Surfer’s Journal. He’ll have a spread–a rumored eight pages!–in collaboration with legendary surf travel pioneer and surf scribe Kevin Naughton focusing on a tricked out “Baja mobile.” Looking forward to both the story by Naughton and the photos by Boots.
Luxury accomodations in Central Baja. Photo: Boots McGhee
Just looking at these shots gives me butterflies in my stomach. I’m reminded of waking up at 5:30 a.m. filled with adrenaline and anticipation and riding my bike down Ke Iki road in the dark to go surf Pipe before the crowd swelled out of control.
Pipe was pretty much perfect for almost two weeks straight during my stay this February. I surfed it twice this trip. Both times I paddled out before the sun had risen above the mountains and got a few memorable rides before the heavies came out. The IBA World Bodyboard Championships were happening around this time, so during all hours of the day there was a constant army of spongers attached to the peak like flies on a steaming pile of dog doo.
Pipe is the only spot I’ve ever surfed where you can paddle out literally a half hour before the first morning light is even poking up above the mountains and there are already a handful of rabid surfers–mostly spongers–out on the bowl trying to get that one perfect barrell before the gridlock sets in. As the light fills in the crowd doubles about every ten minutes until there are thirty to forty people packed together and trailing onto the shoulder and it’s not even 7:00 a.m.
One morning after I locked up my bike and was stretching on the beach in the dark, I saw a shooting star fall out of the sky right above a feathering Pipe lip in the swampy darkness. No matter how crowded, hyped, and commercial the North Shore gets, it will always be a magical place.
I surfed it much smaller than the waves in these photos. It was 6-8 foot faces with the occassional ten footer every twenty minutes or so. Still plenty of a rush though because it’s such a fast wave, the ever-present shallow reef, and the intensity of the crowd. I distinctly recall the sick feeling in my stomach when I tried paddling for one wave that slipped underneath the crowd and failed to get into it only to turn around to see a big set getting ready to unload right on my head. Never paddled so fast in my life.
Later on, sitting on the beach with my board just watching the show, I watched as one of the best Pipe surfers in the world, Tamayo Perry, paddled out. On his very first wave, Tamayo dropped in backside at Backdoor and got tripped up at the bottom and went over the falls. He popped up with his board in two pieces and had to swim back in. Once on shore he collected the two pieces of his board and ran back to the Ehukai parking lot for a spare stick.
Then, just minutes later, I saw 1982 Pipe Master Michael Ho straighten out on his first wave of the morning and immediately come into shore to examine what turned out to be a huge reef gash torn into the bottom of his board. Interesting to see how Pipe can humble even the best.
This just in from Kim Clary, beach marshal for the ISF and founder/director of The Core. Since Kim took the reigns of the local ISF contests halfway through the season, we’ve heard nothing but positive feedback from the groms and the parents. Thanks Kim!
Here are the results for Sunday’s (3-16-08) Jr High ISF Contest at the Hook:
Team Results:
1. New Brighton - 216 points
2. Mission Hill - 108 points
3. Scotts Valley - 94 points
4. Aptos - 73 points
5. Shoreline - 52 points
6. Gateway - 31 points
Individual results:
Girls Longboard:
1. McKenzi Stair - New Brighton
2. Sarah Shaughnessy - Scotts Valley
3. Nikki Hiltz - Aptos
4. Asia Carpenter - Mission Hill
5. Saige Manier - Shoreline
6. Hannah Everett - Gateway
Coed Bodyboard:
1. Roman Kluck - New Brighton
2. Scott Ueberhein - Aptos
3. Sage Engbers - New Brighton
4. Rylee Rentschler - New Brighton
5. Henry Young - Mission Hill
6. Austin Park- Scotts Valley
Boys Longboard:
1. Nathan Keane - Scotts Valley
2. Austin Martindale - Shoreline
3. Barrett Hegerle - Aptos
4. Erik Segura - New Brighton
5. Jesse Lopez - New Brighton
6. John Robinson - Shoreline
Girls Shortboard:
1. Brooke Giuffre - New Brighton
2. Anissa Torres - Aptos
3. Asia Carpenter - Mission Hill
4. Aria Leonard - Scotts Valley
5. McKenzi Stair - New Brighton
Boys Shortboard:
1. Garrett Colfer - New Brighton
2. Jake Logan - New Brighton
3. Satchel Dauphine - Shoreline
4. Ryan Fulton - Mission Hill
5. Wille Eagleton - Mission Hill
6. Sam Anderson - Mission Hill
Received some interesting–and some not so interesting, I’ll spare you the outright trash talk–responses to the story on surf kayakers operating on the margins of the surfing world and their three-day free pass to surf Steamer Lane during the annual contest.
One thing that I alluded to in the article–and a primary concern for surfers–was the safety issue of kayaks in the surf. A kayaker in a crowded lineup with surfers is kind of like a Hummer in a bumper car ring. Basically, surfers could easily get hurt because they are at a supreme disadvantage should a collision occur. Kayaks have a lot more mass, and the kayakers are higher up on the water and wearing protective gear along with a paddle. One reader elaborated on this subject, pointing out that the law actually forbids kayaks in surfer areas:
Hi, Leo - Actually the State of California Harbors and Navigations
rules & regulations expressly forbid kayakers in any area where there
are bathers (of which surfboard is specifically listed)….or any
watercraft that uses a mechanical means of propulsion- listing oars
and paddles.
State Parks is onboard and forbids watercraft with oars/paddles in any
area where there are swimmers.
Why does the City of Santa Cruz willfully break State navigation
regulations for kayakers but go after surfers at the harbor, even when
the harbor is not navigable?
Another reader also made some keen, albethey slightly antagonizing, observations:
Congrats to the kayakers who have stepped up their performance by leaps and bounds in the last 10 years…Your discovery of fins and surfboard design theory has (obviously) resulted in huge performance gains. One might ask…why not just surf (on a board)?
However, you are a hazard (beyond the weekend warrior grem longboarders that crowd (seemingly) every spot) when surfing in a crowd with other people who aren’t covered in armor/boat/lifejackets/etc (i.e. board surfers) like you are.
For god’s sake, you can bounce off rocks in a kayak (I’ve done it) and keep on surfing…Kayaks get rolled through the lineup like a log when sets come in, you can’t unweight (and reduce the mass on impact) by bailing when confronted by an “obstacle” (i.e. someone paddling out)…The impact of a kayak with a surfer can be catastrophic…Impacts between surfer/surfer happen all the time and rarely result in more than banged up rails. Like the longboarders, kayakers need to find their spots and stick to them…Davenport, South wind/high tide big middle peak, after dark…even Pidgeon Pt (ever notice how many empty waves go through there? Do sharks like to eat boats?)….Lot’s of little (and big) wedges suitable for kayaking to be found up and down the coast if you look…
That said, having been almost run over by several kites at 2nd peak on Friday, I think we’re now confronted by something even more dangerous than mixing kayaks with surfing…only the 2 (kite/board surfing) rarely ever interact, luckily…
Oh…and about using public trust resources for the commercial gain of a select group…how is it that you can rent out middle peak on a beautiful weekend with overhead nw swell? Yes, this is good commerce (after all, those kayakers might actually spend a few dollars in the bars or hotels and it continues to help SC maintain it’s Outside Magazine “status”), but the exclusion of other surfers (who have often paid dearly in lifestyle choices to be able to surf this spot on a regular basis) seems questionable. Perhaps that flavors the informal “regulation” that is imposed on kayaks the rest of the year?
We’ve all heard the elitist — but clever — cliché that surf kayakers, along with bodyboarders and kneeboarders, are all less evolved sub-species of standup surfers, lagging behind on their knees, bellies and butts in prehistoric times while surfers shred on two feet millions of years ahead (by that logic I guess SUP surfers represent the final stage of surfing evolution since they remain standing upright at all times, never paddling on their stomachs).
“‘Go back to the river.’ That’s one you hear all the time,” said Graham Meese, 20, a ten-year surf kayak veteran and a founding member of the UCSC Kayak Club.
Even during the opening rounds of this weekend’s 22nd Santa Cruz Kayak Festival — the largest surf kayak competition in the world — Meese and his fellow surf kayakers couldn’t seem to get much respect in the Steamer Lane lineup. While the main competition area at Middle Peak was left clear for the kayakers to run their heats Friday morning, eight surfers monopolized the waves off the Point, occasionally connecting a longer ride through the Slot and surfing right through the competitors’ area.
Imagine if a kayaker tried to pull something like that during the Cold Water Classic. The offender would probably be dragged out of the water and have his kayak and paddle burned bonfire-style in Lighthouse Field.
Aside from the three days out of the year when the kayak festival comes to town, you rarely ever see surf kayakers out at the Lane, or at most other heavily trafficked surf breaks for that matter. Why? Well, quite frankly, because surfers make it clear that they’re not welcome.
For example, if you look at one of the city’s warning signs by the staircase at the Lane, cautioning the public of the “unstable cliffs, high water and slippery rocks” that can all “badly injure you,” you’ll notice that someone decided to add “kayaks” to the list of hazards with a permanent marker.
Demany Smith, who first took his kayaking skills from the river rapids to the waves eight years ago, said that it’s not impossible for surf kayakers to earn a spot in the lineup, so long as they show the prerequisite skills and respect to fellow surfers.
“Like anywhere, you have to prove yourself,” he said. “Don’t come in and paddle straight out to the main peak and try and catch all the waves. First you have to prove you can control your kayak and then try and dazzle the crowd a little with your skills. Then guys will let you surf.”
“I’ve surfed up and down the coast at places like Swami’s, Sunset Cliffs … some hardcore, localized spots. You might get some bad looks at first, but once they see you can surf and aren’t hogging all the waves, eventually they’re hooting you into waves.”
Most surf kayakers around Santa Cruz, however, tend to frequent the less glamorous, more out of the way spots up north, according to Meese.
“You have to go where other people don’t want to go because we’re not the dominant, accepted group,” Meese said.
While many of the kayakers I spoke to said surf kayaks and wave skis are big in other parts of the world, especially Europe and Australia, the consensus was that the ranks in California are still small.
“Locally, I don’t know that it’s so big,” said Dennis Judson, a 30-year surf kayaking veteran competing in the International Class Masters Division this weekend.
While he said that Santa Cruz is an epicenter for surf kayak design, Judson estimated the total number of surf kayakers in Northern California to be only 200 or so.
Because of that, surf kayakers are a more close-knit group, said Judson. These days while it seems as though everyone and their dog surfs, most of the surf kayakers at the kayak festival know each other, even though they come from all across the U.S. and as far away as England, Ireland, Scotland, Costa Rica, and Japan.
“It’s kind of like a big family get together,” Judson said of the Santa Cruz Kayak Festival. “We’ve all known each other forever. I think surfers have lost that.”
Check out the Sentinel’s full coverage of the 2008 Santa Cruz Surf Kayak Festival:
The City of Santa Cruz Parks & Recreation Department and the Santa Cruz Wharf Association are looking for artists interested in displaying their artwork in a new exhibition focusing on local surf and skate culture. Artists working in all mediums including painting, photography, glass works, metals, wood working, board making, handmade clothing & accessories, etc. are encouraged to contact the city for review of their materials.
The exhibit will be held on the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf and will feature premium booth spaces for a nominal fee, top musical entertainment, and art demonstrations. Artists’ work will be on display for the thousands of visitors who enjoy the Santa Cruz Wharf every weekend and artists will also have the opportunity to sell their pieces. A panel of artists and festival organizers will select the participants for the exhibition. Selections are based on quality of workmanship, originality, and artistic conception. Selections by the Jury are final.
If you’re interested send a description of your work and any sample photos to City of Santa Cruz, 323 Church Street or by e-mail to Jeanne Oberstar at JOberstar@ci.santa-cruz.ca.us. Photo files must be JPEG or PDF format only. The deadline to apply is March 31st, 2008.
Surfboard art by Marciano Cruz. Photo: Boots McGhee
