Nikki Van Dijk (AUS) wins the Swatch Girls Pro France and runner-up Mahina Maeda (HAW) was awarded the wildcard place for the Swatch Women’s Pro in Trestles. The 19-year-old Australian defeated Maeda to take the US $8,000 first prize and 3,500 Qualifying Series (QS) ranking points.
Make a wrong move at one of these spots, and you can expect a (well-deserved?) beating
Surfing has always had its fiercely protected local breaks. It seems localism, where local surfers intimidate visiting surfers to discourage them from surfing “their” waves, doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. A somewhat recent example occurred in Streaky Bay in South Australia when a local group called the The Mid West Coast Surfriders Association put a halt to a proposed Big Wave World Tour event at a relatively new big-wave spot called Yanerbie Bombie. Since we were thinking about this incident the other day, we decided to come up with five of surfing’s most “localized” beaches, where the extremely dangerous waves are the very least of your worries … More