It’s been a real week of conflict in the surfing world. We saw Jamie O’Brien and Ricardo dos Santos come to scraps in the water in Tahiti, and then take it to the next level on the interweb. And like school kids at a school fight we couldn’t resist egging them on, the internet comments the cyber version of yelling “Fight, Fight, Fight.”

In America another internet squabble has erupted, this time between USA based shaper Daniel Thompson, aka Tomo Surfboards, and industry heavyweight Matt Biolos of Lost Surfboards.

It was started by Tomson, who posted this Insty. In a fairly inflammatory accusation he alluded that the two biggest shapers in the US, Lost and Channel Islands, had been stealing his Vanguard V4 design, which are being made by Firewire.

Biolos, never one to take a backwards steps, (see below) was quick to reply, castigating Tomson, the highlight of stinging comebacks being this gem. “I don’t copy your Wakeboard designs that every garage shaper on planet earth is making to seeming punish all the friends and make them@surf worse.”

Tomson responded with an image of Darth Vader, which again only served to pour fuel on the fire. From there, to use another schoolyard analogy, it was simply a case if piling in as the comments started flying in left right and centre. It spread to other social media forums, and by the time Kelly Slater mentioned it to his 4 billion followers it was trending like a Hipster on Friday night.

Some heavyweights joined the fray. Kamalai Alexander weighed in with some carefully chosen words, saying “Only thing dark about you is your twinnies ya Fucken clown, yor old man deserves a few teeth knocked out to !”

That was probably as helpful as Bishupdon who said, “I herd from @kookface that @tomosurfboards ate dog shit for 10 bucks. Just what I herd from that guy.”

And so it rumbled on, both the terrible spelling and guys taking sides. Tomson clearly probably didn’t predict the extent of the mainly negative publicity and must be wondering whether it was all worth it. Of course by tomorrow, it will be old news, the surfing world moving on to the next online spat. And we’ll be there yelling, from the sidelines, “fight, fight, fight!”