Lincoln City Oregon – The waiting period for the Nelscott Reef Pro-Am kicks off today 1st October, and holds steady until 31st march 2018, with one day needed to run the event to completion.

This year is the 13th year of the event as well as the third year that there is a women’s event included. It was this tournament that paved the way for women to be included in big wave events, to have their own division.

There are also a number of surfers from the Big Wave Tour who are surfing in the event, even though it isn’t part of the World Surf League Big Wave Tour. This bodes well for a positive approach to tour surfers competing in non-sanctioned events. It’s fair, and lets those guys have a chance at making some more salary in between the three sanctioned Big Wave Tour events, being Jaws/Pe’ahi in Hawaii, Nazaré In Portugal and Puerto Escondido, the Mexican Pipeline.

World Surf League surfers confirmed for the event so far are Australian surfer Jamie Mitchell who is currently ranked 2nd on the Big Wave rankings, USA’s Greg Long who is unranked, USA’s Nick Lamb, ranked 7th, South African 13th-ranked Grant Baker, USA surfer Will Skudin (21st) and Hawaiian Trevor Carlson who currently sits at 6th after the single event so far this year. The rest of the surfers are locals and hard-charging big wave surfers who are relatively lesser known than their WSL counterparts.   

More details can be found on the official event website here

The highlights from 2016

An interesting backstory is that there has been so much attention for this event – it does have over 30 sponsors – that there is just not enough slots for all the big wave surfers who have expressed interest in surfing the event. Out of the 35 remaining entries of legitimate big wave surfers there are only 10 slots left, so the contest organisers are going to have a random draw for 10 slots out of the 35 entries, which is pretty cool, and pretty random, as discussed.

Another interesting backstory to this event is the fact that the event has a great sponsor in Surfline.com and it has two more even greater sponsors in a craft beer company title sponsor called 10 Barrel Brewing Company, as well as Oregon's premier farm-to-table cannabis company Oregrown – Find the dispensary menu here

To have the boys at Surfline as well as a crew pumping out classic beer, and an organic cannabis company, we have the chances of something great happening here. The crew in Oregon could be onto something, on so many levels…

This comes at an exciting time for the Big Wave Tour for a number of reasons.

Firstly, we’re into that time of the year when the Northern Hemisphere could go off at any time. Last year the tour ran a crazy event at Peahi in November with Billy Kemper and Paige Alms emerging victorious in pretty monstrous conditions

If that wasn't enough craziness, the Nazaré Challenge soon followed this; an event that many thought was impossible to pull off, but the WSL and winner Jamie Mitchell showed the world just what was possible in the realm of big wave surfing.

So we could have a flurry of big wave surfing on its way. Let’s hope so.