Steph is a 3X World Champ, Carissa wins Sunset

Alana Blanchard can Surf!

The Captain's Nuts

Here is a quick fix that is strong enough for a man and smooth enough for a lady.

6oz Glass

1/2 full of crushed ice

cover ice with Captain Morgan's

fill glass with almond milk

stir. repeat as necessary.

White Mountain, CA

14, 242'

Stand Up and Be Counted

Hey, I think we need a rule. If you are going out on your SUP, you should have to stand up, the whole time. I hear that SUPing is a great workout. Good for your core. Pretty sure that sitting on one between sets does not do much for you. Being able to see the waves better, having canoe like float, and a paddle are some pretty nice advantages in the lineup I would think. So stand up!

Maverick's Opening Day 2009

Check out this video on Surfline.com

I am always impressed by guys paddling into really big waves. Some of them looked 4X Overhead.

What I noticed in this video is that these cream of the crop, big wave surfers were taking off 4 and 5 to a wave just like the folks at canoe's in Waikiki. I saw several surfers collide in the video. It looks dangerous enough without having to worry about a fiberglass enema. Our new extreme sport?

Clean Water

Flathead Lake, Montana

One of the biggest challenges facing society is access to clean freshwater. Saltwater might be in our veins and the canvas on which we surf, but you can't drink it. It will kill most plants, and can ruin land for agriculture. 97% of Earth's water is salty. Half of the freshwater is trapped in ice. The remaining 1.5% must meet the needs of 7 billion people, their industries and agriculture. A further strain on water supplies occurs anytime natural sources are polluted or by shifting global weather patterns which bring draught.

So the obvious way out of this Malthusian Trap is to tap into that big supply of saltwater. The process of distillation has been around forever. Ships used to rely on low pressure flash distillation to meet their freshwater needs on the open ocean. This process involves heating the water and then rapidly lowering the pressure to cause it to flash to steam which is then condensed into freshwater. Effective but very energy intensive and output is limited. The current state of the art in desalination is Reverse Osmosis. Reverse Osmosis which is now used on ships and for large land based desal plants in places like the Middle East uses massive, high pressure pumps to force saltwater through a special membrane through which the salt can not pass. R.O. works well and can provide large quantities of freshwater. However, it uses a massive amount of electricity to get the job done. This makes the water produced expensive and adds a large carbon footprint. Also, the highly concentrated brine which is normally dumped back into the sea can kill sea life in the area.

Perth Seawater Desalination Plant
So Reverse Osmosis has a lot of room for improvement.

Saltworks Technologies founded by Ben Sparrow and Joshua Zoshi out of Vancouver, British Columbia have hit upon a revolutionary new process for desalination of seawater. Their process uses passive heat from the sun or waste heat to concentrate a brine solution. Then low pressure pumps flow the water through a desalination process. Saltworks Technologies desalination process takes advantage of the differences in chemical energy between the highly concentrated brine and normal seawater. The result is a low cost, low carbon footprint method of producing freshwater. It should be completely scalable and could be added to existing desalination plants to boost efficiency. Here is an excellent explanation in The Economist. This could be a major step towards solving one of mankind's biggest challenges.