Well that stung a little didn’t it?
Waking up to find The Eddie was a no go and a glum looking Pete Mel in the pre-dawn hours wasn’t the best start to the day. But what did you really expect…it’s the goddamn ocean we’re dealing with here and how many times have you come up over the hill full of beans and sherbet only to find…nothing?
Two days ago, Quik’s Global Event Director, Troy Brooks jumped on a plane to oversee the whole shebang and it must be said, one of the last things he told Tracks was…“We’ll still call this thing off it the swell doesn’t show.”
True to his word…they did.
Just moments ago, Tracks found the plucky former pro standing under a lifeguard’s tower at Waimea most defiantly not wondering what could have been.
“It wasn’t a hard decision to call it off, especially when we first saw conditions this morning as it was quite small,” Brooks said.
“It has picked up throughout the day though. I’m sitting here at sunset looking at some good sized 18-20 footers and all the guys are going pretty nuts.”
Which leads to the obvious question…is it a chance for tomorrow?
“Tomorrow drops off pretty quick, I mean there might be a couple in the morning, but we’ve already cancelled it,” Brooks said.
“We are looking at a big swell next week. The window is open till the 29th of Feb and the next storm is not as far north as this one. That was always the problem with this swell, it was just in the window for big Waimea but in the last 24 hours when it needed to hold course, it did a U-Turn and headed north.”
The pre-game hype for this swell exceeded any other for The Eddie, as evidenced by mainstream media interest largely fuelled by the sleek promos sent out by the World Surf League in partnership with Quiksilver.
But Brooks is adamant the prestige of The Eddie outweighs any external pressure and the decision of forecasters Glen Moncata and Keone and George Downing was always going to hold sway over it.
“Those guys have run The Eddie for 32 years now and pretty much called it right every time,” Brooks said.
“This is only the third time in history we have set up in a day and not run so every other time they’ve got it right. We’re not in the game of not running this event, obviously we want to see it run but this is the most prestigious surfing event in the world. It’s not going to run in any conditions.”
Still, would’ve been nice wouldn’t it? A couple weeks of big wave saturation definitely has the world looking in and Brooks reckoned a large chunk of them magically appeared on the North Shore yesterday.
“You’ve never seen anything like the crowds that are here for this,” Brooks said.
“Last night, every car for a couple kilometres had people sleeping in it; there were people having bbq’s and all sorts of crazy things. There’s not many events that attract a crowd 18 hours before it gets underway that show up hoping to get a spot on the beach. That’s how special this thing is.”
