Rod Cunthorpe Does The Peniche Portugal Pro
AAA access as Rod puts the narc in the narcotics
I’ve never really understood while fit, young, attractive women, often have a thing for professional surfers. It struck me, again, when I was covering the MEO Rip Curl Pro Portugal for the Surf Bugle. I watched on as a gaggle of raven-haired Iberian beauties were fingering their phone numbers (if you’ll excuse the pun) into the sand and fish-scaled encrusted rear windscreen of Griffin Colapinto’s hire car.
Now Griff is a great guy, don’t get me wrong. I got to know him well when we were “accidentally” locked in the athlete zone’s infrared sauna for one of the “on hold” calls that lasted from Tuesday to Thursday. The fact that he seemed to be wearing a matching tracksuit that my Mom used to wear to her one-on-one aerobics class with “Fit Kev” in the 1980s, only made our predicament even more hilarious. Anyway by hour three, such was our bonding, he was teaching me his new-age breathing techniques. Or he was having a panic attack. It’s a distinction I’ve always struggled with.
Anyway, as I said, a good guy, even if he doesn’t have much of a future in the sport. But hadn’t those young surf fans clocked the other eye candy with the AAA wristbands? What about the gaggle of 45-to-65-year-old surf coaches that roam the event, squinting into the sun, monitoring the tides, talking about the surf Reunion in 87, the coke in Brazil in 2007 and shouting at the gathering clouds on the horizon of pro surfing?
That coquettish gaggle, collective term a Carcinoma, might just be the sexiest thing in surfing since short john wetsuits. Sure some of them look older than the 900-year-old Ash tree (Portugal’s second oldest) I visited with CT commentator Paul Evans (he of the squinty eye and extended chamois leathered ball bag according to Strider), but that’s part of the attraction, right?
And speaking of surf coaches, there was one in Portugal whose actions have never been more angry, or disappointed. I was angrier than Joe Turpel when he had his guitar wrestled off him live on stage at the Ricle. And more disappointed than when we found out that while I was being shepherded (violently) from the poor man’s Blacksmith Breakwall that is known as the wedge at Mohle Leste by six angry bodyboarders that Kelly Slater was surfing perfect Kirra. I mean, where was the call?
No, it was when I discovered that one of the surf coaches whilst on a beach run had discovered a large, kilo pack of white powder that had been washed up in the same storm that had turned Supertubos into Whitewater Maxos. And did the said coach call Rod, or any of the other many drug addicts that populate the pointy, professional and piss-poor end of professional surfing? Did he fuck!
If he had, we could have swapped my razor scooter for a hired Fiat Punto and went on a three-day Thelma and Louise style bender to Barcelona, sold the 1/2 kilo left over to a guy on the Las Ramblas and with the proceeds started a sustainable wax company (tagline: slippery as fuck), a melanoma clinic and rebel tour to rival the WSL, consisting of two events in Peniche, one in Newquay, three in Pantin and the Finals in Bondi. Instead, the silly bugger alerted the relevant authorities, leaving the rebel tour in shatters and a potential drug-addled life of always looking over his shoulder. What a loser.
But I wasn’t there to monitor groupies or life coach surf coaches. That was the old Cunthorpe. The Surf Bugle had forked out on an apartment wedged between the sardine cannery and the fish fertiliser factory, the razor scooter and a Nokia burner phone so I could be all over one of the flagship CT calendar events. And to be fair it didn’t disappoint. The decision to hold an event on a south-facing peninsula, that stared straight into the teeth of a 40-knot, five-day sou-westertly storm was, if nothing else, brave.
Some surfing definitely went down, but I can’t say exactly who did it, and why. A morning diet of 12 Super Bocks, eighteen egg rolls, 18 pastel de natas, 42 machine-gunned expresso coffees, six turds and high-grade hash affected my concentration. I heard Medina did some jumps, I think, when he wasn’t in the sauna. In the women’s the new guard was blown away, not just by the 30 knot onshore, but by the same surfers that featured in the great doco Girls Can’t Surf. Jack Robinson seemed to be having regular panic attacks, and in a strange coincidence, another guy with the same name of Colapinto also was quite good at getting the requisite best four waves to the beach.
Now in the excellent The Ocean Outlaw podcast series, the Pulitzer prize journalist Ian Urbina investigates murder at sea, modern slave labour and overfishing (three of my favourite things). He said, “The reason I got into journalism in the first place was the desire to shine a light on the things that were broken.”
On Final’s Day as I trawled the plastic-riddled Peniche shoreline looking for another packet of contraband (and my wallet) I too knew how Urbina felt. Pro surfing needed fixing. It was lucky Rod Cunthorpe was there to do it. I just had to find that fucking packet...
