San Clemente Boardriders has just advanced to the quarter finals when teamrider Kirra Pinkerton tells me, “When I was here two years ago for this event, my coaches gave me a bit of money to play the pokies and I ended up winning a few thousand dollars – just here at the surf club.”
Teammates Kolohe Andino, Patrick Gudauskas and Rex Hennings take shelter from the rain with her beneath their tent.
“What did you do with the money?” I ask.
“Well, I left my credit card in the ATM at LAX on the way here last week, so that cash from two years ago has been what’s keeping me afloat on this trip. I forgot I had it.”
I take this as a good omen for San Clemente. They’re one of 17 international boardriders clubs to come to Snapper Rocks this weekend for the 2026 World Club Championship (formerly called The Usher Cup). 23 Australian clubs are in the mix, including heavyweights like Kirra, Snapper, Burleigh, and North Narrabeen. Three days of competition in a four-surfer team format (Open Men’s, Open Women’s, Junior (U20), and Master (40+)) crowns an official Boardriders World Champion.
Competitive fires began to spark as soon as airplanes were boarded: Nick Marshall, Encinitas Boardriders aerial specialist, was already taking on Aussies on his way over here from the US. “Some 50-year-old guy thought it’d be fun to start kicking the back of my seat because he thought I reclined it too far back. We got into a nice back-and-forth battle. He starts putting his feet up in between the footrest and all that… It was a pretty epic flight.”
“Who was the guy behind you?” I ask Nick.
“Mick Eugune Fanning,” he says, although the wind and the rain are so loud this weekend that they cause a number of communication mix-ups over the course of the event and possibly in my voice recordings. It’s plausible that was Nick’s answer to a different question, which was: if you could steal a surfer from any other team and add them to yours, who would it be?
Another comms mix-up happens at the keyhole on Saturday afternoon, when it’s unclear to a team whether surfers need to paddle out from the sand or if they can jump off the rocks.
“Just paddle from the sand – you’re gonna beat them all out anyway!” A teammate shouts to a young surfer at the ready. The nostrils of his opponents flare as they stand in knee-deep water.
But the biggest mix-up of all is Sunday morning in the quarterfinals in a heat featuring Torquay, Snapper, San Clemente and Byron Bay. In the final moments, Leihani Zoric of Byron catches a wave with 50 seconds left in the heat. The understanding of the rules is that if all four surfers on the team are standing on dry sand by the end of the heat, the team gets an additional three points. Leihani completes the wave, dismounts onto her stomach and paddles hard towards the beach. At 18 seconds left, she ditches her board and starts swimming. At 11 seconds, she’s running through the wash. Her feet touch the tide mark at three seconds left and she collapses onto the sand – Byron gets the extra three points just in time.
Meanwhile, Snapper’s interpretation of the rules is different. They understand there to be a competitive loophole in which only the last surfer of the heat has to be on dry sand, not the whole team. Sierra Kerr of Snapper is coached to stay in the water as long as she can to maximise wave-catching potential. Instead of paddling in during the final moments, she releases her dad, Josh, who stands at the keyhole. Josh walks back onto dry sand and is technically Snapper’s last surfer of the heat.
Tension and confusion are high as the final scores are waiting to be dropped. Snapper ends up getting the extra three points, which puts them ahead of San Clemente by 0.41 points. The final standing of the heat is Torquay takes first, and Snapper takes second – San Clemente and Byron are knocked out of the competition.
Protesting follows over the next couple of hours and it eventually comes to a decision that there will be a re-heat just between Snapper and San Clemente, which will lead into the semifinal rounds.
Kolohe Andino of San Clemente tells me, “We were under the impression that the whole team had to be on dry sand. I think that’s what it says in the rule book. To our benefit, a lot of other teams went up to the judges afterwards and argued for our sake. From my perspective, after being on the tour for over a decade, I really love this event because there’s really a crunch time. You know, you’ve got a girl running over rocks and cutting her feet for her team – it’s exciting and cool and different. To have the last surfer just standing on the beach feels corny, you know? I think for us, we just wanted it fair and straightforward – whatever the rule is, at least everyone knows it and there’s no grey area.”
Dean “Dingo” Morrison of Snapper is frustrated because he had openly sought clarity about this rule and was given the go-ahead on it from the contest director.
Dean tells me, “I asked the contest director: ‘Do you actually have to have all four surfers on the beach?’ And he said no.”
“So I said, ‘Well, so that means that we can release a surfer. He can go out and come in. So technically, if you’re onto that rule, everyone can score three points if they know what’s happening.’ And the contest director said that was correct,” he continues.
“I talked to him about it over the last few days so that if we got ourselves in that situation, we were able to do it. I even talked about it on the commentary. I thought it was really unfair because San Clemente was in there protesting for three hours. We didn’t have our representative in there and they did not contact us to come up and state our case. They just told us we have to re-surf. And I was like, ‘hang on, you’ve told me one thing and now you’ve reneged on it and done another,’ and that’s the truth of it, right?” Dingo says.
San Clemente beats Snapper in the surf-off as the conditions in the water keep improving into the afternoon. Kirra Pinkerton gets the highest heat score of a 9.47. The Snapper crew holds their frustrations gracefully and the semifinals carry on.
Theo Vairaktaris, the event co-founder, says, “There’s probably gonna be some controversy that’s going to hang around for a long time. I feel for the Snapper team because they were the ones who did the research. They asked the questions. Dingo was on the live stream from day one, mentioning the little loophole. The commentators called it the Dingo Rule. Everyone knew that Dingo was going to try to coach the team into doing it. Now they’ve suffered a defeat for it, so it sort of sucks both ways, because the view of San Clemente was still fair and reasonable. Next year in the rule book, that one paragraph will have that one magic word that is ‘members.’ It’ll specifically say that every team member must be on dry land.”
The final heat at 2:30 PM had the best conditions of the whole weekend. The swell had built to a proper Gold Coast tube-fest that Torquay Boardriders ate up like ramen noodles. The elder, Troy Brooks, scored a 9.53 tube out of the gates that had the commentary booth squealing with schoolgirl joy. San Clemente followed in a high-scoring close second, followed by the local heavyweights of Burleigh, and ASCC Portugal in fourth.
“We’re a pretty mellow club,” Ellie Harrison of Torquay tells me. “Xavier is his own character, Troy is real calm and knowledgeable and Willis is mellow too – always looks like he’s just rocked up out of bed.”
The win is a long time coming for Torquay Boardriders, who laugh together about how they didn’t even qualify for the ABB this year.
Overall, the event is a friendly, high-spirited tradition born out of the Covid lockdown in which clubs from all over the world have a chance to compete alongside and against old friends. As Ricardo Christie of Kirra Boardriders reflects, “It’s been so good just seeing all the other retired pros and stuff. There’s a lot of old memories there. Some people I haven’t seen in five or ten years. It’s just like we never left, you know? We’re a little bit older, a bit more rusty and the body doesn’t move as well as it does, but you get out and you still try to beat everyone.”
I wondered if San Clemente had been saving a bit of their luck to be used on the pokies tonight instead. Regretfully, Kirra Pinkerton tells me she’s forgotten her wallet today. Unclear what the tea leaves are trying to say on this one, but $6,000 for second place isn’t a bad outcome when you’re a block away from Twin Towns.
