Victory At Sea?

If you were so inclined to employ WSL’s alerts on your handheld device, you might have caught some of the weekend-spanning action in Portugal, as the WSL green lit the Nazare Challenge in expectation of a XXL-sized swell, but with a questionable wind forecast. 

Such is always going to be the case with events of that nature, but damn if the event didn’t look like a mess, the first two heats of Day one seeing solid, relatively clean conditions, followed by a blowout afternoon and a final’s day looking less XXL than just plain big and stormy, as you can see from the double-bass drum-heavy edit above.

“Not to sure what to say about the @wsl Nazare event this year, except that as someone who normally likes it as big and heavy as possible, it felt good to be competitive on the smaller end of the scale against some red hot youngsters,” Grant “Twiggy” Baker said, referring to finalist Natxo Gonzales and event winner, Lucas Chumbo.

There’s no doubt that an event held in Nazare at size and with perfect conditions would be extraordinary. While the event might not have been the straight-up suicide mission 2017 was—which saw Damien Hobgood take a jet ski to the head, for chrissake—this year’s event was still a mess, a demolition derby of guys getting bucked in big, lumpy conditions on oversized boards.