With only three days left in the waiting period contest organizers were left with no choice but to run the contest in small but contestable surf. Reducing the heats from 30 minutes to 20 minutes in order to run the contest before Thanksgiving, the surfers were forced to adjust.

Kauai's Roy Powers, the 2007 Reef Hawaiian Pro champion, posted a convincing win in his opening heat today but will be the center of attention for a different reason tomorrow: He has drawn female wildcard and ASP women's world champion Carissa Moore. Also drawn in that heat are Cory Lopez (Florida) and Maui teenager Ian Gentil.

The round of 96 looks to resume at 8am local time in larger surf than what was on offer today.

Here's the official recap of Today's action.

ASP-Australian Jack Freestone, 19, the reigning ASP World Junior Champion, set a high-flying pace at the Reef Hawaiian Pro today. The event finally got underway in head-high surf after nine days of waiting and Freestone wasted no time in posting the day's highest score - 15.66 out of 20. The Reef Hawaiian Pro is the first stop of the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing, presented by Rockstar Energy Drink, at Haleiwa on Oahu's North Shore.

Freestone opted to sit on the fickle break known as 'Peaks' - an inconsistent but high-performance right-hander to the north of the main Haleiwa break. With heats reduced from 30 minutes to 20 to ensure the event can finish by Wednesday - the final day of the waiting period, Freestone gambled on separating himself from the 4-man pack. It paid off; the young Australian found several long rights that allowed him to take flight with some of the best aerials of the day. His top two wave scores were 8.83 and 6.83.

"I sat on the little rights at Peaks and it sort of went my way, no-one came over to hassle me," Freestone said. "I've been doing a little bit of training with (6-time Vans Triple Crown champion) Sunny Garcia and he's sorta giving me the insight to all the places, so big thanks to him. It's been amazing.

"Every event there's going to be aerials, it's more exciting, it's progressive and I guess that's what the judges want to see."

With the Hawaiian Air Show award offering 250,000 Hawaiian Miles to the best aerial of the Vans Triple Crown, airs were at the top of every surfer's list today.

Basque surfer Hodei Collazo posted a major upset when he eliminated Haleiwa local and 2009 Reef Hawaiian Pro champion Joel Centeio (Hawaii) in the round of 96. Collazo got super busy in the lineup, determined to get the best waves on offer in the heat.

"I got lucky in the beginning," said Collazo. "I got a 7.33 on my first wave, so after that I was more relaxed. I knew the other guys needed more big scores. It's good to have good results in Hawaii. It's one of those places where normally you're surfing bigger boards. These contests are more special than the others on the tour."

Santa Cruz's Nat Young, 20, was another stand-out today. The Reef Hawaiian Pro, and the Vans World Cup at Sunset Beach are critical events for the Californian who is hoping to qualify for the ASP World Tour's elite ranks next year.

"(The Vans Triple Crown) is pretty much the biggest surf contest in the world," said Young. "Everybody's here doing it, so to do good here is a real confidence boost. It's a really important contest. As of now this could count for qualifying halfway through next year, so that's real big and it would be awesome to get a good result here."

Competition will resume at 8am tomorrow morning. Surfline.com forecasts similar conditions and wave heights to persist through Wednesday.

RESULTS:
Round of 128

HEAT 1: Jesse Merle-Jones (HAW) 10.50pts ; Tyler Newton (HAW) 9.33pts ; Gony Zubizarreta (ESP) 4.10pts ; Jeronimo Vargas (BRA) 2.53pts

HEAT 2 : Hodei Collazo (EUK) 12.60pts ; Kevin Sullivan (HAW) 9.67pts ; Billy Kemper (HAW) 8.00pts ; Marcus Hickman (HAW) 7.33pts

HEAT 3 : Maxime Huscenot (FRA) 12.57pts ; Dylan Goodale (HAW) 10.60pts ; Alex Smith (HAW) 8.04pts ; Gabriel Villaran (PER) 4.74pts

HEAT 4 : Keanu Asing (HAW) 14.06pts ; Adrien Toyon (REU) 12.13pts ; Austin Ware (USA) 10.06pts ; Chris Foster (HAW) 7.86pts

HEAT 5 : Dege O'Connell (HAW) 12.33pts ; Sebastien Zietz (HAW) 9.60pts ; Brian Toth (PRI) 9.07pts ; Flynn Novak (HAW) 8.00pts

HEAT 6 : Evan Valiere (HAW) 14.60pts ; Davey Cathels (AUS) 10.57pts ; Rudy Palboom (ZAF) 9.83pts ; Kamalei Alexander (HAW) 6.17pts

HEAT 7 : Jano Belo (BRA) 13.40pts ; Love Hodel (HAW) 9.67pts ; Sunny Garcia (HAW) 9.40pts ; Dale Staples(ZAF) 3.63pts

HEAT 8 : Kekoa Bacalso (HAW) 12.16pts ; Charles Martin (GLP) 11.56pts ; Pancho Sullivan (HAW) 9.86pts ; Solomon Ortiz (HAW) 8.27pts

HEAT 9 : Yuri Sodre (BRA) 10.33pts ; Jamie O'Brien (HAW) 8.23pts ; Jason Shibata (HAW) 8.04pts ; Tonino Benson (HAW) 8.03pts

HEAT 10 : Joan Duru (FRA) 14.23pts ; Luke Davis (USA) 9.87pts ; Makai McNamara (HAW) 8.63pts ; Luke Stedman (AUS)7.90pts

HEAT 11 : Torrey Meister (HAW)11.50pts ; TJ Barron (HAW) 10.23pts ; Liam McNamara (HAW) 9.34pts ; Gavin Gillette (HAW) 4.23pts

HEAT 12 : Vincent Duvignac (FRA) 12.33pts ; Tanner Hendrickson (HAW) 11.53pts ; Tim Reyes (USA) 10.20pts ; Olamana Eleogram (HAW)10.07pts

HEAT 13 : Jack Freestone (AUS) 15.66pts ; Ian Gentil (HAW) 10.90pts ; Jack Perry (AUS) 9.57pts ; Ricardo Santos (BRA) 7.24pts

HEAT 14 : Roy Powers (HAW) 14.44 ; Shaun Cansdell (AUS) 13.60pts ; Albee Layer (HAW) 9.00pts ; Ian Walsh (HAW) 9.00

HEAT 15 : Perth Standlick (AUS) 11.83pts ; Eric Geiselman (USA) 11.67pts ; Matt Pagan (USA) 8.64pts ; Myles Padaca (HAW) 6.97pts

HEAT 16 : Casey Brown ((HAW) 14.57pts ; Nathaniel Curran (USA) 11.30pts Makuakai Rothman (HAW) ; Caio Ibelli (BRA) 9.30pts


Round of 96


HEAT 1 : Evan Geiselman (USA) 14.83pts ; Heath Joske (AUS) 9. ; Kevin Sullivan (HAW) 9.43pts ; Jesse Merle-Jones (HAW) 5.03pts

HEAT 2 : Hodei Collazo (EUK)11.16pts ; Kai Barger (HAW) 10.53pts ; Joel Centeio (HAW) 6.34pts ; Tyler Newton (HAW) 1.12pts

HEAT 3 : Adrien Toyon (REU) 12.67pts ; Maxime (FRA) 11.30 ; Brent Dorrington (AUS)10.57pts ; Dane Gudauskas (USA)10.40pts

HEAT 4 : Nat Young (USA) 14. ; Tomas Hermes (BRA) 11.87pts ; Keanu Asing (HAW) 10.93pts ; Dylan Goodale (HAW) 5.
HEAT 5 : Glenn Hall (IRL) 12.93pts ; Davey Cathels (AUS) 11.76pts ; Nic Muscroft (AUS) 10.00pts ; Dege O'Connell (HAW) 8.33pts

HEAT 6 : Sebastien Zietz (HAW) 14.50pts ; Stu Kennedy (AUS) 10.87pts ; Junior Faria (BRA) 10.80pts ; Evan Valiere (HAW) 8.70pts

HEAT 7 : Nathan Yeomans (USA) 15.00pts ; Mason Ho (HAW) 13.27pts ; Jano Belo (BRA) 11.53pts ; Charles Martin (GLP) 9.00pts

HEAT 8 : Leonardo Neves (BRA) 13.20pts ; Kekoa Bacalso (HAW) 12.83pts ; Alain Riou (PYF) 10.67pts ; Love Hodel (HAW) 1.87pts

BMX star Dane Searls is hospitalized in critical condition after attempting to jump without his bike from the balcony of a popular night spot in Queensland, Australia, into a pool.

The incident on Sunday night occurred at Billy's Beach House in Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast. The world-renowned dirt jumper remained comatose Monday morning, according to reports.

Unit Clothing, which sponsors the athlete, issued a statement confirming that Searls was "badly hurt in a non-riding accident" and asked that his many fans send their "positive energy, prayers and strength."

News.com quoted Unit owner Paul Everest as saying: "On the weekend he had been performing 60-foot BMX jumps with backflips and other tricks and doing them comfortably, and now to think he's been hurt like this.



"He does some amazing stuff on these dirt jumps, real Guinness world record-stuff. But now we're really looking for a miracle at the moment."

Searls soared into the BMX spotlight in August of 2010 when he debuted in Part 1 of the "Giants of Dirt" Internet video series, which featured the rider soaring over a series of progressively taller jumps. (The video is posted above.)

Searls' Facebook page and Twitter pages of BMX riders and Searls' many fans have offered messages of support.

-- Image of Dane Searls soaring over a dirt jump is courtesy of Unit Clothing

While shorter days and colder weather move many of us to hunker under the covers, researchers who spent their summers in fieldwork are more likely to be hunched over microscopes and curled over keyboards, scrutinizing samples and crunching data from their summer's labors.

One such researcher is marine biologist William Gilly, who spent a month last summer in Mexico's Sea of Cortez tracking the sometimes-elusive Humboldt squid. Researchers from several universities were on the voyage. Gilly is in the second year of a quest to understand the surprisingly strong impact on the squid from an El Niño weather pattern during the winter of 2009-10 and, perhaps more important, how they are faring in their recovery.

In May 2010 Gilly was in the Sea of Cortez -- one of the biologically richest marine environments in the world -- with a biology class of Stanford undergraduates when they discovered that the squid, usually present in such large numbers that they are a staple species of the local fishing industry, were largely missing from their usual haunts.

"There were far fewer of them than normal, they were spread out over a huge area and they were very small. But they were also sexually mature and spawning -- at a ridiculously small size," Gilly said.

"It was obvious that the squid were pretty screwed up."

On this year's research cruise, ship's crew member Jack Purdy hoists a hefty Humboldt squid. Ian Wilson, an undergraduate at Colorado State University, stands in the background.

Normally Humboldt squid spawn when they are 12 to 18 months old. But the precocious little spawners Gilly and his students found were less than 6 months old and weighed all of a pound apiece, compared with the usual weight of 20 to 30 pounds at maturity. One of the larger squid species, Humboldt squid are sometimes referred to as "jumbo" or even "giant" squid.

Searching the Sea of Cortez a month later on a research cruise, Gilly and two of the students eventually found large squid in an area about 100 miles farther north than usual, near the Midriff Islands, where Gilly suspects they had migrated in search of food.

In the squids' usual coastal habitat off Baja California, upwelling brings cold nutrient-rich water up from the deep, causing phytoplankton to bloom and marine animals of all types to congregate. The squids' palates are particularly partial to lantern fish -- a slender, silvery, pinky-finger-sized species named for the small light-emitting organs on its sides.

But during an El Niño, warm nutrient-poor tropical water from the open ocean flows into the Sea of Cortez and pushes cooler water down 150 feet or more below the surface. The usual upwelling, driven by the wind, is not strong enough to pull the cool, nutritious water back up. So the upwelling just recycles the warmer water, causing the phytoplankton population -- and all the creatures that depend on it -- to crash.

That crash likely sent the squid searching for better food stocks, which could have led them to the Midriff Islands, where upwelling is driven by strong tides unaffected by El Niño.

"Squid can move to an area of tidal upwelling, which remains productive during an El Niño, and continue on their merry, giant-squid lifestyle and live to spawn when they are a year and a half old," Gilly said. Or they can move away from land into an open-ocean environment, where food is less abundant but the supply is steady, as its availability doesn't depend on upwelling.

"It is comparatively meager fare and you will not get to be a big giant squid, so instead you reproduce when you are six inches long. It is a different strategy, but it works," he said.

With oceanographic conditions back to normal this year, when Gilly headed down to Baja again, he expected that the squid situation would probably be normal, too. But big squid were again only found around the Midriff Islands.

While small squid were present throughout the Sea of Cortez, the little ones were larger than the year before by about 25 to 30 percent. And they were beginning to repopulate their old feeding grounds.

A researcher examines small squid on the ship's deck. Normally Humboldt squid this size would be too immature to spawn, but in the aftermath of the 2009-2010 El Nino most of the squid in the Sea of Cortez reached sexual maturity early, even though they stayed small.

Humboldt squid only live 12 to 18 months, so memories of other feeding grounds probably fade fairly quickly when the squid relocate, especially if they are only living to be 6 months old. But Gilly suspects that with each new generation, more squid may rediscover the rich lantern fish feeding grounds of their forebears and the average squid will grow a little larger.

Whether the descendants of the squids that moved north will stay in the Midriff Islands and create a new, stable squid fishery remains to be seen -- as of this October, they were still there. The food brought up by the tidal upwelling is mostly krill, tiny shrimp-like creatures that are a lot smaller and probably less nutritious than lantern fish, so it takes a lot more krill to help a Humboldt squid fatten up to its full potential. It may be that a revival of the lantern fish as a food source will eventually lure most of the squid back down south, with the whole squid diaspora reunited.

Gilly credits the undergraduate students in the holistic biology class with recognizing that the changes in the size and distribution of the squid population -- along with different stomach contents in the squid they sampled -- were the result of an El Niño year. That was unexpected, because the usual changes that come with an El Niño had not been seen along the California coast that winter. But the phenomenon that year was centered more toward the western Pacific than normal and thus did not extend as far north.

"The students really got it right, which is very cool for undergraduates to put that together," he said. "They convinced me that all the strange observations on squid were due to the fact that it was an El Niño year."

During 2011, commercial squid fishing in the Sea of Cortez has been slowly picking up, but fishermen are still struggling, because with smaller squid, it takes a lot more effort to catch the same mass of saleable squid as in previous years.

Fishermen have been so concerned about the sustainability of the squid fishery that a fishermen's cooperative orchestrated a meeting in June in Guaymas, Sonora, with scientists, government fisheries regulators and some nongovernmental fisheries conservation organizations. Gilly attended the meeting after his 2011 research voyage ended.

"It was a really good way to go about resolving a problem without waiting for the government to come and do something," he said. "They want to have a more stable fishery, and they are taking steps to make that happen."

Text and Photo by Stanford University

Hello and welcome to this week's edition of Surf-Boner-Cinema, I'm your host Paul Rubens. To answer your first question, Federal Law strictly prohibits me from coming into contact with any pornographic material of any kind, pending my next Parole meeting. Until then, all I've got is these surf clips to watch. Join me, won't you? *wink

First up we have the Brothers Coffin chasing some tail in Hawaiian waters..



Hawaii Vacation from youngwisetails on Vimeo.

Maui's Ian Walsh seems to be allergic to cold water. Does he even own wetsuits?? Is there a scientific term for fear or shrinkage?



IndonesIAN from Justin Clark on Vimeo.

Kiddie porn of the week: Grommie Taylor Clark ditches school to ditch his fins in socal.



Jules Wilson does his best to ride a surfboard without getting devoured by the hordes of gorgeous French females waiting for him topless on the beach

Second chances don't happen everyday but Levi LaVallee will get his shot at redemption on New Year's Eve in San Diego when he attempts to break his own world record jumping his snowmobile 361ft over the San Diego Harbor.

The mental hurtle LaVallee must get past may prove more difficult than the jump itself. He's only one year removed from critically injuring himself attempting to break the same record. The night to which LaVallee was to make his leap into stardom on National Television didn't pan out as he had to settle for the world record in practice. That is until this year when LaVallee gets a second opportunity.

"I am so pumped to be able to come back to Red Bull: New Year. No Limits.," said LaVallee. "Last year obviously didn't go the way I was hoping, and I am excited to have another chance at this amazing opportunity."

This time he'll be joined by Robbie Maddison, a two-time alumni of Red Bull New Year. No Limits. Maddo will be looking to jump his bike more than 400 feet to eclipse the current record of 391 feet.

"Jumping long distances is a passion of mine, and I'm excited to come back for New Years Eve and sail over San Diego Harbor," said Maddison. "400 feet is my goal. It's not all about getting the world record to me, it's more about understanding this feat and the commitment ahead to achieving what most would consider an impossible jump."

Maddo kick-started No Limits in 2007 by jumping his motorcycle 322 feet over a football field in Las Vegas and followed it up in 2008 by jumping onto - and off - the 96-foot-tall Arc De Triomphe at Paris Las Vegas.

The event will air live from San Diego, Calif., on Saturday, December 31 at approximately 11 p.m. ET / 8 p.m. PT on ESPN.