Kelly Slater Competed On A Board He Grabbed Off The Rack Of A J-Bay Surf Shop

If you watched the second day of the Corona Open J-Bay, you may have noticed Kelly Slater riding a stickerless spear. 

This isn’t necessarily abnormal. Kelly’s been on Tour for three decades and has boards scattered around the world like the children of Genghis Khan. He’s also had his own surfboard company, Slater Designs, since 2016 — which certainly hasn’t hurt his quiver numbers. 

As a result, we often see Kelly riding an old faithful board that he’s tucked away at someone’s house, waiting for the exact conditions to align for it to be the board to ride (the Simon Anderson at Bells in 2019 comes to mind). However, Stab recently learned that the story behind this stickerless incident is…different. 

Kelly, who missed El Salvador and Brazil due to severe injury, got in the day before J-Bay started. “My arrival procedure wasn’t exactly perfect,” he said with a laugh, after winning his Elimination Round heat against Barron Mamiya. 

When at J-Bay, Kelly typically stays at a gentleman named Brandon Krezner’s house. Brandon is an entrepreneur who has founded and/or invested in everything from surf factories, restaurants, hotels, brands, and more. His current business baby is called Koodoo Global, which describes itself as an equity crowdfunding platform for social impact. 

Upon arrival, Kelly realized that the boards he’d stashed at Brandon’s house — 11 custom Slater Designs shaped by Dan Mann and Wade Tokoro — were not there. 

According to a reliable source, Brandon has a lot of “hangers-on” who lurk around his place. It was presumed that one of these folks, or perhaps 11 of them, had taken the liberty of borrowing the boards. 

Shit. 

So, Kelly — still glowing from the Indonesian sun — had to figure out what he was going to ride at pumping J-Bay. In the first Round, before the swell had fully arrived, he rode a board that he’d been riding in Indo. J-Bay is not Temple’s, and Kelly lost to Miguel Pupo and Connor O’Leary in the first round. 

With XXM waves expected, Kelly realized the conditions were about to be beyond his Balinese boardbag’s paygrade. So, he grabbed a Slater Designs FRK model from Country Feeling surf shop in J-Bay. He proceeded to beat Barron Mamiya in the Elimination Round while riding it. 

In his post heat interview, he told Peter Mel the following: 

“The board I rode today is the board I’ve been riding for years, just a little bit longer. I know that board really well. It’s not the perfect board for out here, but it works well enough to do some carves and get barreled.” 

Riding the same board, Kelly ended up losing to Jack Robinson in Round 3. It’s hard to blame the equipment when a heat is decided by a last-minute 9.10 — but it’s also hard to say how different that heat could have looked had Kelly been, you know, riding an appropriate board the whole time.

As for those 11 boards?  

“They were at a friend’s house we forgot they ended up at,” Kelly told Stab. 

Phew. He might need them for the event next year — but it probably depends on the forecast. “If the waves are good, life’s great,” Kelly recently told Sports Illustrated. 

Fair enough.