“Baseball Bats And A Bucket Of Water Won’t Quite Cut It”

Edition 115.

style // Jan 6, 2018

Words by Jake Embrey

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Here’s a very late Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year, Chronica! Whatever you are no longer celebrating, hopefully, you had a good one. While Stab’s online presence has been on the sombre side for the past two weeks, there’s still been enough Xmas scraps to feed the usual fiends.

Pre-Xmas, we witnessed a Brooklyn hip-hop x Californian logging collab, followed by some above average shredding from Mr Reynolds on a new CI bonzer model. Episode 4 of “The Drop” dropped with the perpetually entertaining Christian Fletcher and Rory spun a yarn with Ian Walsh about the biggest barrel ever ridden in competition.

We received a Chrissy clip from Mason Ho, young-gun Jamie Krups released his latest, “Weep”. The ‘Fun Boys’ glistened on our screens, we watched Reef Heazlewood surf 10x better than most 18-year-olds and Asher Pacey delivered some seriously smooth sliding in Iceland. Justin Jay also presented us with photographic and literary insight into the happenings on the North Shore.

For your own holiday viewing pleasure, Stab slow dripped some archived Stab in The Dark clips – featuring drones, unseen water angles and the JS copping a hammering from Jordy. Additionally, we presented the much loved, season of ‘listicles’. We relived the 10 best rides, best Insta pixels and Insta clips; as well as having a peek at the top 10 selling boards, most read Stab stories, most decorative waves and of course, Stab presented the annual list of who’s earning a lot of money because of surf!

In the new year thus far, the Vans team rode some Dane handshapes, Chippa proved that being cold is no excuse for poor surfing, Mason strung together some sentences about Pipeline and Owen Milne dropped a damn glorious 2017 showreel. Someone else started Michael’s work for him by compiling a clip of (almost) all the 10-point rides from the WSL this past year and just yesterday I learned that a board and wetty are no longer necessary as the surfing world will soon succumb to the inexorable powers of virtual reality. Gasp!

In my own personal holiday generosity, I left my car unlocked allowing some local youths to ransack my poor Subaru, but, the karma God’s repaid me by allowing me to run over some kid’s floating Christmas present on Boxing Day. If you’re interested in a comprehensive wrap up of my festive season I’m more than happy to elaborate below and can also direct you towards some of my personal go-to hangover cures (e.g., crying, pissing yourself and my all-time favourite, failing to paddle out the back).

Unfortunately for COTW, the Disqus gang seems to have been relatively subdued of late – from what I can only assume is a concoction of eggnog and illicit substances. So, we’ve scraped the barrel dry and now present to you the first COTW in 2018.

9. Two Weeks On The North Shore With Justin Jay