World Class Surfers at Rip Curl Pro Search

On the 29th of July 2008, was the start of Rip Curl Pro Search in Indonesia where world class surfer such as Kelly Slater, Mick Fanning, Tom Curren, Owen Wright and many others will be headlining the event. The location has been kept secret to add more mystique to the entire event. The evening started off with Rip Curl's Global Marketing Manager Neil Ridgeway welcoming everyone and thanking them for their support, assuring one and all that it would be another epic Search event.

Rip Curl Indonesia's General Manager Jeff Anderson followed up and thanked first and foremost the ASP for bringing back a WCT event to Indonesia. Next, Indonesia's Minister of Sports gave a short speech about how the sport of surfing is helping put Indonesia on the worldwide map.

The attendees were then treated to a Kecak dance, and those on the front row including Mick Fanning, Owen Wright, Rip Curl Global CEO Francois Payot, Kelly Slater, Tom Curren, and Pancho Sullivan had to bend backwards during part of it in order to stay out of the fire!

After the dance, the Minister of Sport banged the gong and the event was officially ON! Then a short press conference followed with Mick Fanning, Kelly Slater, Pancho Sullivan, and last but not least Indonesia's wildcard entry, the winner of the Rip Curl Cup last Friday, Komang "Gogo" Sujaya!

It was announced that all the boys should be ready to go for a 6:30 am standby call and hopefully a 7:00 am start. The swell forecast is for double overhead plus waves on Wednesday, so it should be a great day of competition to kick things off.

The next day, revealed a dawn most have called the best day of the year at the secondary “Somewhere” lefthand reefbreak of the Rip Curl Pro Search. The promising dawn rolled into an awesome afternoon where the worlds’ best surfers got shacked, shot out, and shut down on solid 5-6 foot Indo barrels all day long today. It definitely seemed that the opening ceremony yesterday pleased the swell gods tremendously!

Joel Parkinson, Andy Irons, Bruce Irons, Mick Fanning and of course Kelly Slater displayed some amazing surfing today. Kelly’s double barrel, first on his backhand and then switchfooting it to ride forehand and a sick tripling up wave, exiting to even carve a nice turn at the end…well, what can you say? A 10 and 9.17 was it? Mind blowing stuff!

Indonesian wildcard Rip Curl Cup winner Komang Sujaya was in the same heat, and probably would have rather been watching from the front rather than the back. But he had fun and hey, just to be out in the water with Kelly would be something any of us would be stoked about.

And speaking of wildcards, Made “Garut” Widiarta did a pretty good job in the water today, not able to do much about the insanely deep tubes Bruce Irons was pulling in and out of all heat long, but did himself proud getting second over Taj Burrow. That’s a good story to tell the boys about over a beer tonight eh?

The surfers had actually been told the night before to be ready for a 7 am start, but after checking the conditions, Contest Director Damian Hardeman elected to move to the site where the waves were the absolute sickest, and that was the secondary location. So, it was in the true spirit of competing in “the worlds best waves” that the decision was made to start at 10 am at location 2.

A full16 heats were run, with the final one rounding off just as the sun was nearly set over the Indian Ocean at just after 6 pm.

The event was being telecast via live webcast, which allowed people all over the world to enjoy the action. However, the internet infrastructure being what it is here in Indonesia there were some down times, and things didn’t always go according to plan (lost feeds), but for most of us watching live I think I can safely say it doesn’t get much better than this…ever! Even if you missed a few minutes here and there, the goods were certainly produced today.

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