Who’s Going To Ruin Your Surf Trip?

We’re up to our elbows in surf trip season!

Southern hemi folk are taking breaks from winter’s frigid waters and blustery winds, while Northerners are fucking off the summer doldrums and attendant hordes of boogieboarding kooks.

Storms are stalking Antarctica’s rim, sending swells north in organised, aggressive columns. Indo’s been all time, Fiji is firing. South America, Central. Much of Mex.

There are waves everywhere with a reasonably exposed, south facing coast, and we’re making the most of them.

But while waves abound in this bountiful surfing season, the problem is that every-effing-body knows about it. This is the bittersweet season where the waves of your life are waiting to be ridden by every arsehole and his six dickhead mates.

Did you see Shane Dorian’s recent clip from Nokanduis? It was as crowded as Duranbah corner, and a heckload less user friendly. Surf tripping in the southern hemisphere swell window is oftentimes more frustrating than an extended flat spell at your local, as the main impediment to you getting great waves isn’t the largely mysterious and unalterable machinations of mother nature, but the presence, and attendant shitty behaviour, of your fellow man.

So it’s high time we outed the surfers who are most likely to fuck your upcoming, or ongoing, surf jaunt. Keeping with Stab’s supposed tradition of race baiting, too, we figured it best to organise this list into oddly specific, nationalistic blocks. Have we been unfair? Did we leave anybody out? We know you’ll let us know if we have.

Will all 992 of this Israeli paddle out be making chandeliers out of your shoulder?

A Rabid Pack Of Israeli Army Alumni

Froth and arrogance personified, these recently released conscripted killers have a lot of pent up energy to unleash on Sri Lanka’s unsuspecting lineups, but not much practical experience to back it up.

There’s little in this world as frustrating as being systematically snaked by a phalanx of semitic incompetents, compounded by the emasculating reality that you can’t call them on it due to their competence in Krav Maga and shellshocked willingness to pressure point you out of the next week’s surfing.

Use your superior ocean knowledge to sell them on closeouts and drag them out of position whenever you can.

Just add a surfboard… or five.

A Boatful Of Brazilian Thick Necks

Travelling Brazilians cop a lot of flack, a lot of it undeserved, so we have to say here and now #notallBrazzos.

A lot of it, a whole lot of it, however, is absolutely deserved, and none more than the protruding-forehead, cauliflower-eared type. The visage of their arrival, bulging trapezius stretching their repurposed wrestling shirts, sinks more fear in a boat trip than a porous bilge.

These knuckle draggers exist only to menace, to throw their time-honed menace around, by staring down anybody catching waves, dropping in, and then standing pigeon toed and pointed straight down the line.

Like the Israelis they’re tough to pull up, as they’re more than equipped and willing to pull your head off. Maybe compliment them on their pecs. 

Isn’t it strange when the locals are foreign?

The Pair Of Grizzled Aussies

Talk about fucken entitled! These two leathery old pricks are convinced that they introduced surfing to the world, and as such everybody is now forever indebted to them: meet, the Grizzled Aussies.

Jeff and Thommo will pretty quickly inform you that they have been coming here a month at a time for the past six years, and they definitely know how to infantilize the barman while taking pride in him knowing their imbibing whims—back-to-back big Bintangs as soon as the wind comes up.

The Grizzled Aussies are incapable of respecting anybody younger, older, from another country/state/town/family. He’s got a pretty ill-formed but closely-held opinion of everybody he comes across based on looking at them, and will get shitfaced and obnoxiously regale anybody with the misfortune of being within slurring distance about his experience and achievements in the archipelago every night, despite the fact that the stupid old cunt* quite clearly rides a mini mal, and even then barely so.

And if you think the old Aussie is bad now, wait ‘till he turns up with his teenaged surf brat sprogs. If possible, bait these old dorks into an arak session and then hit the early.

An Enthusiastic American

This bright eyed young man will shit you up the wall with his prozaic stare and translucently false optimism. In the grand scheme of things he’s harmless, but the bastard never shuts up with his relentless over-estimation of a session’s quality, as well as his unashamed descriptions to the minutiae of whichever ride deserves over dinner recounting.

The Enthusiastic American is sickenly wholesome, unsustainably positive. So while his too-white choppers are flashing around a story about how meeting a smiling poor kid has completely changed [his] outlook on shit, you know that he’s one missed bus connection away from a full-scale breakdown and parent-funded medivac home.

You can really fuck with him, and preserve your sanity, by relocating his ukulele every afternoon.

Surfing!

The European Surf Dork

Whether it’s a Belgian bloke chewing your ear off about fin size, or the Swiss moron slacklining right where you’d like to be scoping the surf, northern Europeans have shamelessly taken up surfing, despite having no real right to do so.

Europeans are generally pretty fit in their young adulthood, and can easily grow young golden locks, so whichever unsuspecting Argentinian filly that has stumbled out of a chicken bus and into being the object of your creepy attentions will go for these smooth skinned “surfers” way before they have a second glance at your weathered, pterygium infested crumpet.

The European Surf Dork is a walking faux pas, unaware that SUPing, “longboard” skateboarding, and stretching before a surf absolutely do not come under the banner of what is acceptable behaviour for a travelling surfer (whose activities are limited to actually surfing, eating, drinking, smoking, laying in a hammock and reading, if you’re over 30).

The European Surf Dork’s lack of skill is only matched by the fearlessness that comes with never really being flogged, so hopefully when the surf comes up they’ll cop a beating that’ll scare them back to Gili T.

Did we describe you? Who did we miss? Drop in on the comments with your usual cavalcade of astute scorn.

*While we’d never use this term to describe a North American woman, an old, entitled, know-it-all Aussie bloke is about as cunty as travelling surfers come – especially those in long-sleeved white rashies and waterproof bucket hats.