Shot-shot... Jordy celebrates a big win at home. //Kirstin/ASP

Consigned to the lounge with his gammy foot, Joel watched every heat at J-Bay. Here’s his rap on what he saw…

THE WAVES

The waves were epic. That first day looked unreal and it made it a hard contest for me to watch. The waves looked a lot like last year – my kind of conditions, fast with long walls – and it was definitely the kind of waves I’d been surfing at home before I cut my foot. I found myself mindsurfing everything. The first four heats were really hard to watch because I was getting pissed off that I wasn’t there and it was perfect, but after I got over it I started analysing everyone’s moves and strategies. I was the supercoach on the lounge. I learned a lot sitting on the couch and watching it, all the strategies and tactics from a new angle, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

THE RIGHT WAVES

It’s a hard wave to surf when it’s a bit bigger. When it’s four foot every wave is good, but when it’s six foot like it was on the first day some of them can be burgery. You really had to pick your waves. But it’s more the man-on-man heats when you see wave choice becoming really crucial and there were plenty of guys making mistakes… which is easy to say from my lounge. I was ripping on my lounge. There were a couple of things I pinpointed that guys should and shouldn’t have done and it cost them the heat. Bottle did all the hard work against Adriano but then let himself down by taking the wrong wave. There were a lot of crucial wave choice decisions that cost guys heats. You really see the pressure element at J-Bay. Because they’re generally long period swells and you can have long lulls, the scoreboard pressure at J-Bay is really important. If you’ve got one good score at J-Bay you can apply pressure and force the other guy into a dud wave and get him panicking. The scoreboard pressure is one thing I really noticed when I was watching heats, playing the chess game from the couch.

ANDY

Andy was great. He definitely had flow for sure. J-Bay was never his prime wave when he was on tour, despite the fact he won out there before. It was never his comfort zone. It was no Teahupoo for him. Watch him though in this next contest. If they get some good waves this year in Tahiti look out. One thing that never really changes with your surfing is your ability to ride the barrel, and I reckon in Tahiti he’s going to find himself in his first final series for the year, for sure. Every event this year he’s looked better and better, and if he manages to make a final somewhere soon or even wins one, then look out. He’s the kind of guy who feeds on confidence.

DANE

Dane lives by the kind of surfing we saw in J-Bay, it’s all or nothing and that’s what you’re always going to get. He can do every move in the book and he goes for it, but if he doesn’t make it he’s going to end up with a shocker heat like he had against Taj. He probably only needs to pull himself back 10 per cent in some situations and he’d be winning some heats he’s losing, but the way he surfs he’s not going to do it. That’s not Dane. And if he did pull it back then you wouldn’t be seeing those heat scores of 18 or 19, you’d be seeing 15s and 16s, and then again it’s not quite Dane. He’s still the most exciting surfer to watch on tour and he always goes for it… whether he makes it or not depends on how he’s felling.

KELLY

I was pretty surprised Kelly lost. I thought he was looking real comfortable and calm in his first heat, and when he’s comfortable and calm at J-Bay he’s gonna win. But it didn’t happen against Shaun [Holmes]. Maybe he was thinking too much about Shaun. He’s such a nemesis out there and he gets guys so spooked that maybe he got in Kelly’s head a bit. Or maybe Kelly just had a shocker. I wonder if it was board choice even… his board didn’t look that great to me. Sometimes J-Bay doesn’t have a pocket to surf in, and when that happens and you get longer barrelling sections you can see which boards are really going well and which ones aren’t, and it looked to me like Kelly’s board wasn’t really working for him.

UNDERDOGS

Melling obviously was good, and Bottle was really good too. Shouldn’t be a surprise, they’re both pointbreak surfers and should be suited to J-Bay. In that one heat Bottle showed us what he can really do, he showed how good a pointbreak surfer he is. The Burleigh came out in him. But J-Bay’s inconsistency got him in the end… it got a few guys who were in form. Guys who just didn’t get the chance to ride waves. J-Bay can do that to you; you can be the most in-form surfer in the contest but if you don’t catch waves you won’t win a heat.

MICK

Damo has got some form at J-Bay, he’s no slouch out there, but in saying that you’d think going up against Mick, well, you’d have your money on Mick. But I thought Mick would have surfed a little better – read that it was a slow heat and caught a few more waves because he’s so good at turning four and five waves into sixes and sevens. He kinda waited for solid waves I guess, but if he had of surfed what was in front of him he would have won. No one surfs those little rock barrels better than Mick, he’s so fast and can fit turns in quicker than anyone. But in saying that Damo surfed the heat – and the whole contest – well I thought.

BEST HEAT

The Bede and Jordy semi, for sure… a bit of controversy. Jordy definitely got the score he needed on his last wave, but I thought maybe he should’ve needed more. Did he deserve what he got with his Superman on the first score? Probably not. I only watched it once and haven’t watched a replay, so that’s off one viewing, and there’s a big difference between watching it on TV and watching it live on the point. I might have given it to him if I’d been there, who knows. But I’m not much of a Superman fan. I don’t really get off on them. You might as well do a double grab. They just look a bit ugly to me. But it was great to see Jordy get a win, and to get his first win at home too must have been incredible for him. You could see how much it meant to him.

THE WORLD TITLE

Jordy’s got to number one but it’s the one time of the year you don’t want to be. The first thing I thought about when Jordy won and was that first place on the ratings was that he’s going to draw Manoa Drollet at Chopes. And Kelly went down a bit, so did Mick, so they’ll avoid Manoa. You can’t forget how gnarly that guy is at Teahupoo, especially if there’s swell. Once they get to Trestles I think those guys are really going to start firing up – Mick, Kelly, Taj and Jordy are all amazing out there. From Trestles it’s heading into such a heavy stretch. As hungry as Jordy was heading into J-Bay, he’s gong to have to be just as hungry coming into Pipe in four months time if he’s going to win the title, and there’s a lot of surfing between now and then. Every one of those guys still has a good chance at winning the title and I wouldn’t even be looking at the ratings and the numbers right now. They don’t mean a lot.

Job's back on. //Swilly

Even the clichés have taken a break.

Gauging how absorbed a pro surfer is in The Game can usually be measured by talk of sprints and marathons. Talk of one heat at a time. Talk of the opposition knowing every grain of sand out there. Truth guarded and refreshing honesty hidden behind game-faces. But for all involved, right now the tour and its attendant hyperbole is a million miles away.

“Sweet f*ck all,” states Joel Parkinson of what’s been up to lately at home in Coolangatta. It’s the longest unbroken stretch of home-time Joel has had in a decade. There’s no talk of training. No talk of boards. No talk of the next contest. Instead there is talk of children’s parties, football games, and his long-held goal of one day dropping daughter Evie at school by paddling her across the river on his paddleboard.

The pro tour has gone into hibernation. The Tahiti event moving from its traditional window in early May to the end of August in search of better swell has created a 10-week black hole. A mid-season break longer than the entire off-season. The tour bus that had been travelling at a hundred clicks an hour has suddenly ground to a halt, and surfers have had to formulate strategic plans around doing nothing. The more cynical amongst you who consider the life of a pro surfer tantamount to a holiday at the best of times aren’t going to like what comes next.

“I’ve had two weeks of, hang on… [yawning at 3pm]… not much I suppose. I’ve been surfing on little fishes, hanging at the beach and the surf club. Just cruising. Haven’t been training, haven’t been surfing my contest boards. It’s been awesome not doing any of that. Just be a family man, be a dad, do the school runs every day. I’m picking Macy up from kindy right now.” The weather and waves have fallen into place; the kinetic summer long gone, replaced by lazy lines, balmy days, empty car parks. The only 12-hour days going down around here are all in the water.

After dropping the kids off at school, Joel’s daily ritual has only really extended to driving down to check Snapper. “It’s been so fun every day. It’s a phenomenal bank. At two foot it’s the best I’ve ever seen it, the best two-foot pointbreak in the world. The other day it was waist-high and too small to get barrelled, so I grabbed a boogieboard and got an eight-second tube out there. No shit. It’s been so much fun. The kids have been all over it. Jagger Bartholomew, Sunny Cohen, and Luka Stevenson, all these kids are on fire. It’s like what surfing Snapper in 2020 is going to be like.”

The break has also allowed normal transmission to resume with Mick Fanning, who’s also been at home for the best part of a month. After spending the back end of last year trying to avoid each other while duking out the world title, the two have been living in each other’s back pockets lately. “He faded me,” barks Joel of the wave he and Mick split at Snapper last week. “Don’t believe him if he tells you otherwise. I was riding his board, trying to fit into the same small barrel. It was such a fun little surf.”

The pair has even been daytripping down the coast together, invoking teenage days when Joel’s Commodore Vacationer with the leopard skin seat covers would be piled full of boards and blackguards and pointed south. “Yeah, it was kind of like the old days; me, Mick and Shags in the car going down the coast. We used to do a lot of trips down the coast in the old days, but in the past few years we’ve been so busy that we never have time to go down there,” recalls Joel. “It’s such a full day, you leave at 4am and get home at six that night. But we had a ball down there, got some really fun waves, got bogged. It seems like when we get together like that something hilarious happens.” The fact this time it was only Joel’s car bogged in the sand and not Mick’s ski being washed onto the rocks, as has happened during previous incursions, saw them drive home laughing instead of trying to get their stories straight for the insurance assessor. They even ran into Big Artie Beetson while getting a feed on the way home, the chance meeting with the walking headland of a man proving a good omen for Joel’s Queenslanders, who would go on to win the first State of Origin game two days later.

But while the surfers have had a break from clichés, rust never sleeps for surf writers. This 10-week spell is a false dawn, the calm before the storm if you like. The back end of the season is going to be frenetic; five events back-to-back between Tahiti and Puerto Rico where the world title will be won and lost. “It’s a hard year to prepare for,” says Joel. “It’s been so stop/start. If this was last year, my roll would have stopped after three events because the events stopped. This year no one will have any momentum coming into J-Bay. It’ll be like the first event of the season all over again. So I figure it’s the time to recharge the batteries now. With a break like this you’ve got to take it slow. You can’t rush into it and surf yourself stupid. You’ve got to have a program for your holiday. J-Bay’s not so far away I guess, eh?” I tell him it’s in six weeks. “I’m back training soon, doing a lot of paddling, back on my normal shortboards. I’m surfing my normal 6’1” this arvo. Then I’m off to Bali next week and I’ll be starting to fine tune. Come J-Bay you want to still be eager to surf and in good form. You don’t want to have surfed yourself into the ground in the break.”

Although Mick and Joel are currently holding down fourth and eighth places respectively on the ratings, neither seem too perturbed. As both found out last year, it’s momentum at the right time that wins world titles. “I think I’m in a pretty good spot,” says Joel. “I’ve had two decent results, and it’s the guys who get on a roll at the back end of the year who will fight it out. It’s all a matter of timing.”

“It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon,” says Joel.

Clock punched. Job on.

[For video from the boys trip down the coast click here, and for more photos from Joel and Mick's trip down the coast check out next month's issue of Tracks]

Hey guys, just letting you know Joel will be signing copies of his book on Tuesday afternoon (May 25) at 4pm outside the Coffee Club in Marine Parade, Coolangatta. Mick will be there with too, signing copies of his book. We’re sure their English teacher from Year 9 will be on hand to see how they managed to write a book each without ever showing up for a lesson.

Have just switched my computer on for the first time in 48 hours and looked at the site and was totally overwhelmed. I read every word of every comment, and some of them had me in tears, fully brought me to tears. There were crew from Brazil, crew from South Africa, crew from Israel, as well as my friends from home, people from all around the world. They were telling me they were so proud of what I’d done, and that I’d been courageous and been a good sport. To be honest, it’s freaking me out a little bit. It was such an emotional day that I just kind of rode it wherever it took me. Losing the title was tough. I came up to the house after losing and shed a few tears and just wanted to hide. But I knew carrying Mick up the beach was not only the right thing to do, it’s exactly what Mick would be doing for me. For all the messages you guys have sent I can’t thank you enough. As much as I lost the world title I gained the respect of so many good people all around the world and I reckon that means even more.

Secondly, to all my fans I have met along the way through Twitter, my website and around the world, my friends and family, thanks so much for your amazing support throughout the entire year. This isn’t the end, it’s just the beginning.

See ya in 2010… Parko