Toes on nose

The Cuervo Surf Ranch Classic Delivers Perfection for Honolua Blomfield

I just spent the day watching the Cuervo Surf Ranch Classic, where 36 of the world’s best male and female longboarders competed for world tour points at Kelly Slater’s wave pool.

My first impression was that the Surf Ranch wasn’t built for longboarding! The wave is perfect, but for longboarding it just seemed a little too fast and a little too big—not quite ideal for noseriding, which is the main focus of the new, revamped longboard world tour with its emphasis on traditional surfing. Surf, people were hanging five all over the wave, but hanging 10 looked super difficult on the wave, and we didn’t see any of the extended 10s that we normally see at perfect, waist-high logging waves like Noosa. After watching for a few hours, I started to wonder if maybe it was a mistake to bring the longboard world tour to the Surf Ranch—if it wasn’t making longboard look a little bit boring and pedestrian, compared to the shortboard world tour that the wave was originally designed for (and even compared to longboarding in the ocean.