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Wednesday 28th October 2009
Pasta Point is such a high performance wave, a full blown, high speed race track. One of the best things about being in my position, is that I nearly always get to go surfing before the decision is made on wether the next round of the Oxbow WLT will be run. The contest director put the event on hold till midday, I got to ride lot's of electric lefts before the first heat hit the water. The take off was
tricky, the cross shore wind created an annoying bump until you made it through the first couple of turns. To put it mildly the bump on take off played havoc with all the surfers game plans for this the 2nd round of the Oxbow WLT. When the current world champ Bonga Perkins fell off on take off, on his first wave and then continued to sit out the back allowing plenty of mid size waves go to by, the writing was on the board. Ben Skinner from Great Britian took full advantage of these slighty smaller waves and won the heat comfortably. The match up between the two Aussies from the same town was interesting.Harley Ingleby won the last Oxbow event in Japan, in this heat his surfing was flawless but he to chose to wait it out and only take off on the bigger sets. His good mate, Jared Neal almost pipped Harley at the post, with long swoopiing cut backs and solid nose rides on his forehand, it was very close.The dust up between American Taylor Jensen and Brazil's Phil Razman was a fight right from the start. They wrestled each other for the first wave but then settled down to the most amazing display of powerfull back hand surfing the whole round.
The styles of both of these men is very similar, Phil got the better of the waves and surfed them brilliantly to go on to win the heat by the narrowest margin. Josh Constable was behind the eight ball right from the start, Antoinne Delpero had a convincing win with his deep turns and solid nose rides. Unfortunately Josh had a collision with the water cameraman causing him to loose a fin right in the dying seconds of the heat. The official ASP position is that is that the surfer gets and extra few waves but this was not conveyed to Josh.
By Nat Young
