Me and the Buondi coffee girls. They begged me for a picture and eventually I caved. Photo: Higgo

“It’s gonna be like, ten feet tomorrow for sure,” someone sporting a RC event hoodie confidently announced in an American accent last night in the Hotel Soleil Peniche bar, even giving the exact direction of the swell in degrees minutes and seconds. “We’re looking at a 218 by 15 and two over a 187 by 25 in the water kicking in around midnight tonight local time pulsing through the night time hours, man.” 

It wasn’t.

They ran the remaining three heats of round two in 4-5ft peaks at Belgas, the same spot as yesterday and then called it off. Called off?!? Everyone was wondering why. Just after the off call Bobby Martinez pulled into a sick pit and got spat down the street. A massive crowd cheered. Huge. Half the population of Lisbon had crawled up the excruciating coastal road network and come to align delicate looking sandstone cliffs just north of the town of Baleal. It was kinda pumping, but buoyed with an excellent forecast for tomorrow (Monday), conny director Damien Hardman reckoned proper better barrels would be on hand and decided to finish the remaining heats if the round and that was all, and that was it. Timmy Reyes, De Souza and Freddy P got through those. There were so many people on the beach no one really had the heart to tell them the contest was off, so an extended TMN Expression Session was sent out and it was hoped that noone would notice. They did notice that Owen Wright went absolutely mad and won that with a massive frontside punt. Jordy also went pretty batshit out there. Impressive stuff.

It has been brought to the attention of many that things look a little different in Portugal these days. Older dudes, the kind who were here in the 80’s and now have properties or surfcamps or contests on down these parts will tell you that back in the day, Portugal wasn’t known for the eye-pleasing nature of its maidens. Some of the nastier made up immature names to describe the symptoms, like potato butt, or cod face. They will tell you about an era when much of the XY chromosome carrying population had bad skin and moustaches. These days things aren’t really like that. It seems like there are really attractive ladies everywhere. Olive skin, shiny black hair, athletic, shapely physiques. So what magic potion could have turned around an entire population’s fortunes in such dramatic fashion? Food, they tell me. Apparently they all used to eat bad factory chicken and rice all the time and the chicken was pumped full of growth hormones and it gave the ladies acne and moustaches. Now they eat really well and they look hot, so next time someone close to you tries to pick up the factory farm discount Lidl chicken for dins dins, tell her to get the free range organic one and some fresh veg, she’ll thank you later.

In other news, a man told me last night at drinks that another man here used to buy and sell gold. He’d find a seller, find a buyer and bring them together. At times he’d get busy with this and be too busy to talk to the friend even. “I have to go,” he’d say, “It’s the guy with the gold.” He even took to driving around the Australian outback in a Land Rover looking for opals, but didn’t find any. The one day he looked really upset. “What’s up?” asked the friend. “The gold business is shitty,” came the reply. “As soon as you put the seller and the buyer together, they want to cut out the middle man, these fuckers!”

Big Jordy Smith went menthol expressing himself with his full capability, not livin in correctional facility.

Owen Wright got skills to pay the bills. He shot Kelly Slater in the face so his mother couldn’t give him an open casket, then the very next day he stole Jordy Smith’s tuck shop money.