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Late To No Party – By Taylor Paul

Monday
I’m running around in the dark and I’m late. Grab my board from the garage and wetsuit off the dewy lawn chair. Wax. Fins. Leash. No time for coffee. I speed down King, airing off speed bumps. Left on Bay. A pickup turns in front of me at the stoplight on Mission and my low beams illuminate a longboard poking out the back. F–k. It’s 6:17 a.m. I shouldn’t have hit snooze.

I take a right on West Cliff and see south swell lines intersecting the faint glow of a pre-dawn ocean. I’m late. I pull up to the Steamer Lane parking lot. It’s closed. I flip a bitch and park along the street. Open the door. Shut the door. Open the back. My hurried breaths are like ghosts in the morning air. Suit up. Lock the door. Stash the key. Run across the grass, over the fence and along the cliff to the jump off. I look down on The Slot and can see four silhouettes paddling toward an approaching set. It’s 6:30 a.m. Sunrise is in 27 minutes. I am so, so late.

The goal was to be the first surfer in the water. In fact, that was my goal for an entire week. Because every morning, at every good wave, some brave soul pioneers the day, and why shouldn’t that be me?   …  More

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This takes place in the Superstition Mountains in Arizona

The plan was for jumper 1 to jump from an upper exit and flyby a lower exit where a second jumper would take off. Free fall would separate the two jumpers, and then jumper 1 would do a 360 turn down and around 2. Unfortunately, jumper 1 miss judged his turn and hit 2, causing a dangerous parachute wrap nearly 200 feet over a boulder field.

The collision caused them to rotate around each other nearly three times and the speed of the accident caused 1’s parachute lines to cut through 2’s lines, leaving him with only half an effective chute. Miraculously, at 125 feet above the ground, they unwrapped in mid-air, jumper 1 still has a fully inflated parachute and was able to kick his body around and untwists his lines before landing. Jumper 2 had half a parachute spinning up on its self while he uncontrollably spiraled to the ground, before crashing into a massive bolder. His parachute hung up on the top of the bolder stopping him from hitting the ground.

The precise point that jumper 2 impacted the bolder saved him from severe injury. The angle of his body matched the angle of the bolder dispersing the initial impact was his body preventing trauma. Any smaller bolder would have broken him in half. Furthermore, if he was a mere foot lower he would have impacted a shear face, one foot higher and he would have missed the big flat spot and slammed into jagged rocks on the other side.

In the sky dive/base jump world a parachute wrap at 200 feet could easily end in one or more fatalities or at least serious injuries. The fact that the jumpers untangled and walked away with bruises, cuts and a broken helmet is nothing short of a miracle.

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Tkb interviews the riders at the 2015 Venyu Triple-S Invitational to get the story behind the one and only day of wakestyle competition at the REAL Watersports slider park.

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