The crew that work on and around the tour pretty much all surf, some better than others and at a lot of the tour stops there has been a loose running tradition called the ‘cameraman’s cup’ or the ‘commentators cup’ and depending how many people involved they might just roll it into who has surfed the best on any single day.
With the addition of former pro surfers and big wave riders to this year’s web commentary team the stakes have been raised and there is a lot of trash talk around the breakfast tables and dinner tables about sessions that have gone down or are about to go down.
When the forecast for a big Cloudbreak swell was in the wind last week the jibbing between the webcast crew went up a notch with Hawaii’s natural footer Ross Williams and American goofy-footer and Pipeline specialist Strider Wasilewski calling each other out.
Fast forward to Thursday and the Women’s comp is first called on at Cloudbreak in solid 6’ surf but then the decision was made to move it to Restaurants as the swell continued to build. Unfortunately the Restaurants call was made as the tide was dropping and the event was put on hold till early afternoon.
Once the call was made for a tow hour break the island boats raced to Cloudbreak with all sorts of crew wanting to score some waves. Ross Williams was basically dropped off the boat just off the take off zone and within minutes was paddling into one of the waves of the day, sort of like when Dave Wassel got dropped out the back on the big swell two years ago and scored one of the waves of the day.
Ross dropped in, bottom turned, stood on the tail to stall and pulled into a open pit and parked himself in there as the wave reeled off down the reef. Notch up the first score to Williams.
Ross ended up putting himself in another bomb which he didn’t come out of while Strider hunted the line up looking for anything that slightly resembled Ross’s first wave. The ‘hooter’ sounded to end the round of the ‘commentators cup’ when the contest was called back on and all the workers bailed back to there respective jobs at Restaurants. Williams had smashed the heat and had bragging rights until the next round, whenever and wherever that goes down. – Joli
