Battle of the Paddle–Lots of Pictures

…The beach break behind me looked about head high. I thought “oh great, I’m going to finish the race by getting worked in front of 500 spectators” but I managed to catch it before it crumbled and got out in front of the whitewater. I beached the board at full speed and stumbled up the steep bank. I ran into the chute for the finish line, but my legs started wobbling as soon as I hit the soft sand. So I just walked through the serpentine and crossed the line, losing four places with my geezer plodding. But hey, I made it…

The Rainbow Sandals Gerry Lopez Battle of the Paddle was remarkably well organized for a first year event. Simply put, it was a historic occasion, and the organizers rose to the challenge, and then some. I’ve put on an event or two, and achieving this degree of organization is very hard and very expensive. Everyone involved deserves more than just congratulations. They deserve your support and encouragement. Next year should be amazing. One word to the organizers–get some food vendors for the spectators. A thousand hungry people on a beach is a great opportunity.

On to the pictures, I’ll flesh this article out more later:

Set Up Day: The day before the BOP

New quickblade paddles with beautiful wood blades

Modeled by the lovely Diane

“But I don’t want to be on the Internet”

There were paddles everywhere, here’s some new colored quickblades

New 12′ starboard for the pro race with a centerboard fin. Ekolu Kalama (right side) paddled it and looked fast during practice but retired early as the race conditions made the board impossible.

Everyone was so happy with the flat conditions. They lasted until about two minutes after the race started.

Jimmy Lewis came with three of his Distance boards and others to demo.

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Ke Nalu is a big experiment, and one test was making people jump a small threshold to leave comments (register and respond to a Captcha spambot test). The result is not many comments. I consider comments to be the lifeblood of online publishing, so I’ve turned all that off for the time being. I’m still going to work to minimize the spam, but I need to hear from all of you readers about what you like and don’t, what experiences you have, and where you’d like this publication to go.

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