"No surf, but the party is on!"
That's the latest from Half Moon Bay, Calif., and the good people at the Maverick's Invitational.
In a winter plagued by small, La Nina-influenced surf, the waves never
consistently rose to the requisite ferocity needed to hold the one-day
event.
"Looking at the charts, it doesn't look like
anything of significance will show up at Maverick's before the end of
the waiting period this Saturday," told, the event's pr representative
Jessica Banks. "We're still going to go ahead with the music festival
this weekend, but as far as the contest goes, it looks like we'll have
to wait until next winter and try again."
It's been that kind of a winter in the Pacific. Waimea never got big enough for The Eddie, south of the border, The Peligroso at Todos Santos was shelved, and save for a few good days of filming for the upcoming Jay Moriarity Hollywood production, Maverick's didn't do much to make headlines either.
"We
had some days, but it was a pretty slow season," told contest invitee
Ken "Skindog" Collins, who's been up in the Lake Tahoe area enjoying the
late-season snow. "There were definitely some moments, but it wasn't
one swell after another after another after another like we've seen."
"The
2010 Contest is going to be hard to match," adds water safety director
Frank Quirarte, "and at some point they'll have to pull the trigger on
one of these smaller but no less epic days. This winter came in like a
lamb in went out like a lion with some of the best big wave surfing we
seen yet. There are still blobs on the radar, but it just wasn't meant
to be, I guess."
The Maverick's Invitational's official
waiting period ran from Jan. 1 through Mar. 31. In theory, when the
conditions lineup and the contest is called on, contest director and
Maverick's pioneer Jeff Clark is to put out a 24-hour notice. Obviously
that red alert was never sent out this year.
Spring's here, and it would appear we can officially close the book on the 2011/12 big-wave season.
