Sunday, December 6, 2009 North

Fred & Sonia Nichols reporting

Parko Takes the Second Jewel

A great story has suspense, builds history and is very sexy…at the 0’Neill World Cup of Surfing second jewel of the Vans Triple Crown. Two Hawaiians(H) and two Australians  (A) entered the finals on the last day of contest, Sunny Garcia (H), Dusty Payne (H), Joel Parkinson (Parko) (A) and Mick Fanning (A).

The battle was set with some of the largest surf in the history of this competition with heavy to handle 15-25’ out over the reef. Three minutes into the 35 minute final Sunny Garcia established top rating 9.4.7 with his jarring barrel ride and clear through the bowl with his neat and clean exit.  Here at Sunset the bowl – surf center- is deep and steep making wide eyes of any surfer… As the TV stations inventoried the crowd Sunny seemed the clear winner.

These gentlemen settled into their slots and with 13 minuets left into the contest the line up looked like Dusty Payne in 4^th place needing over 12.4 points to get into the lead, Mick Fanning in third with a last wave coming in at 4.83, Joel Parkinson in 2^nd place scoring a 7.0 wave with lots of speed, carving on the high rails and Sunny Garcia’s high 9.4 wave and 3.4 on the low side. Even Sunny could not improve on his lowest wave bottoming out on some and some way too-early wave collapsing around him.

Despite repeated efforts by all on the field no upset foreseen and 2:10 min remaining the biggest sets of the final were visible. We moved into 1Min 15 sect looking to the left we see red shirted Dusty Payne making a last attempt looking for a combo ride and ending in the white.  55 seconds and high in the West in yellow (Parko) carves into the crest, picks up a barrel with secure a stand followed by clean exit and entrance into a second barrel emerging with winning points - pulling through a remarkable upset.

Parko makes history as the second man to win this contest three times he ties with legendary Hawaiian Michael Ho.  As for the sexy, well the pictures tell that part of the story.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Phase One Surf News and Updates, Fun Read, Surf Travel, Surfing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.