Joel Parkinson goes fishing, misses heat

Yup, you read that right. As you probably know, Joel Parkinson is very fond of fishing, and Fiji is a very good place to be a fisherman. He’s been making the most of his la(z)y days by dropping bait, and on day one he pulled in four big game fish, the biggest being 21kg. So, it ain’t surprising that when the sideshow VQS event was called on, Joel jumped in a boat to go cast off.

The problem? There were only four heats run before organisers decided to call the main event on. Heats one and two of the main event were completed, and then Matt Wilkinson and Heitor Alves paddled out without Joel. Heitor won the heat, and Joel goes to round two.

“I was 100 percent convinced last night that the contest would be off today so we went fishing early this morning,” said Joel. “There’s so much good surf coming in the contest window that I thought there was no way we’d be surfing so we grabbed the fishing rods and took off down the coast in the boat. But the swell filled in a little early and the conditions at Cloudbreak were so good they had no choice but to run. There’s no way you walk away from waves that good. I was out of phone range and by the time the contest was called on I was too far away to make it back because I was in the third heat of the morning.”

“I was pretty bummed to miss the heat, but I was even more bummed that I missed out on waves like that. That was pretty perfect Cloudbreak. There were some absolute bombs out there and the boys got tubed out of their brains all day. But I guess you’ve got to be philosophical about it. You’re never too old to learn a lesson and I’ll definitely pull back a bit on the fishing during events. I definitely won’t be fishing tomorrow morning! The upside I suppose is that I get to surf an extra heat and the forecast for the rest of the event is looking insane.”

Kelly Slater was another no-show for his heat. He was back in the States hoping to be around for his nephew’s birth. But, the newest little Slater wanted to continue enjoying the warmth and stayed inside longer than he was supposed to. Kelly is on his way now though, and you can expect to see him in round two.

You’d wanna think that missing a no-losers round ain’t the biggest deal for the 2012 number one and two, but both these men love competing, love winning, and this is still a kinda big deal.