Don’t look!
If you’re squeamish.
This is an actual photo of Keala Kennelly, a professional surfer. She came close to losing her eye the other day in Tahiti, towing into big waves last week and hitting the reef after a bad wipeout. So much for her modeling career poor dear.
I’ve been thinking for a while about the Mentawais, and this photo gave me further pause. As the Mentawai Islands get more and more crowded, the surfers that enjoy waves to themselves are venturing farther afield. We surf waves that we’ve never surfed before because they were too fast or shallow. We surf our regular waves on lower tides than we used to surf before. We surf when we’re tired or failing light, just because everybody else has left the lineup. There are much more people to avoid as you’re racing down the line. There are surfers in the lineup at big hollow waves that perhaps shouldn’t be there, but are because everywhere else is “too crowded”. It is all adding together to be a much more dangerous past-time than it used to be.
In a normal season, on average I would stitch up 6 guests by the end of the season. This year we’ve done over 14. 6 in just the first 2 trips! Is it a coincidence? Is it just a roll of the dice? No. The reason more people are getting injured is because there are more boards and reefs to bump into, and we’re taking more risks just to get waves to ourselves.
There’s no point to this rant, and Keala’s photo has nothing to do with this post.
Maybe just showing you what big waves and reef can do to people’s faces. Maybe just using my crystal ball to predict that surfing will become increasingly dangerous for the people who visit or live in this small island chain in the middle of nowhere, and that injuries such as Keala’s are more common. For that matter surfing will get more dangerous everywhere you go. Peace and hati-hati.
