Dec 22

Dec 22 We interrupt your Christmas weekend to save Teahupoo

I would rather be writing to you today about my first surfboard. The one I got for Christmas at 5 years old. I wanted to describe the pink rails and it’s perfect outline for learning and how putting that first bar of coconut Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax on it that fateful morning *cursed me forever to be a surfer.

Sitting there on the living room carpet, surf wax and sunscreen overpowering the usual Christmas scents, me caring little for my other gifts and just running my hands over the rails, balancing it on my toe and unwrapping every bar of wax in my stocking wondering which colorful label I would choose for the base coat and how this gift would fill my life with a joy that only a surfer knows for the rest of my life. I’d love to be telling you how wild it is that I just got home from a fun surf 35 years later and how I still get the same buzz I had on Christmas morning in 1989 about riding waves on a surfboard.

I wanted to tell you all about that day today, two days before Christmas — when hopefully many of you or your children are going to be living that same new surfboard dream Christmas morning. I wanted to reminisce about how proud my dad was to give me that board with my name etched into the foam with pencil, his friend Jeff Widener (who still shapes for Matt Biolos btw) having shaped it especially and only for me. I wanted to take you back and laugh about how painful it must have been for my dad to let Santa take the credit — might have been my tipping point year on Santa actually, I could see it in dad’s eyes. This was his doing.

But unfortunately, that trip down memory lane is taking a backseat to a bit of a disaster taking place in Tahiti.

If you haven’t heard, what should be a joyful, exciting opportunity to show the world stage how beautiful and awesome their home of Teahupoo is has turned into a nightmare, complete with barges and cranes stabbing their life-giving reef right before the entire town’s eyes to build an eyesore of a scaffolding for the three day event in July. And somehow, even the WSL — the ones we planted reef with last August in Tahiti during our Trip of a Lifetime and who have been claiming to be dedicated to ocean preservation — have refused to stand up to this travesty because they are getting a discount on using the scaffolding moving forward.

There’s obviously a lot going on in this story, but the simple bottom line is this: We’re going to have to side with Matahi Drollet — he’s become the face of issue for the local community and his kingpin status and pushback should be all the surf community needs to stand with him full stop. That’s not happening and now the “Olympic Committee” has decided that they will continue with their mutilation of the reef despite our most desperate efforts to come up with an alternative.

So tonight, instead of filling you with new surfboard yuletide, I leave you with a plea for the community of Teahupoo, currently watching their prized reef get destroyed right before their eyes.

The joy of a new board on Christmas and the life that follows it is way more valuable than gold medals or mainstream acceptance. We’ll keep our reef, you can keep your precious medals. Surfing in the Olympics sounds lame to me anyway.—Travis Ferré

*it’s a beautiful curse