SURF: Inconsistent three- to five-foot Lower Trestles. Nice and glassy in the morning, but mid-morning wind continuing into the afternoon made for some slight ripples right on time for the ladies’ finals. Sixty-three-degree water temps felt extra chilly in the cloudy a.m.-nearly all competitors bundled up in fullsuits-but noontime sunshine saw Alana Blanchard skinning it in her afternoon heats.

HEATS HELD: Explorer Girls final, Explorer Women final, Open Women/Governor’s Cup final

NATURE’S CALL: It’d be too easy to make some crude red tide/girls’ contest joke here, but we’re not FHM. Let’s just say the Pacific looked bad and tasted worse. Moses, however, was nowhere to be found.

PREDICTED: Ralph Macchio will show up next year. He is, after all, the best around. And no one’s gonna ever keep him down.

HEAT OF THE DAY: While Carissa Moore impressed a packed beach in both of her final heats (Open Women and Explorer Girls), it was during the Governor’s Cup that she gave a performance reminiscent of her 2004 NSSA Nationals three-division sweep. Up against Malia Manuel, Alana Blanchard, Bethany Hamilton, Colleen Mehlberg, and Courtney Conlogue in the second-to-last heat of the five-day event, Carissa’s powerful snaps, off-the-lips, reverses, and cutbacks earned her an outstanding 8.5 not long into the 35-minute final. Alana put up a hell of a fight, taking the first wave (and the early lead) with a solid 6.0 on a down-the-beach right, as did Colleen, who consistently slashed turns on her split peaks with Alana. Carissa managed to hang back for much of the heat, seemingly focused on wave quality, not quantity, whereas the other girls paddled into considerably more waves, yet with results that hovered in the 5.0 range. Her patience and keen wave judgement paid off: three-quarters of the way through, Carissa dropped into and subsequently destroyed a nice four-footer, eliciting a 9.5 from the judges and raucous applause from the sizable crowd.

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With little more than five or six minutes to go, the judges’ tower confirmed the excited murmurs on the beach: all five of the other competitors had been comboed by the Hawaiian dynamo. But Carissa, known as much for her goofy antics as for her control and agility in the water, couldn’t sit still despite her unbeatable lead. Taking another wave, with nothing to lose, she bounced around with full turns and a just-for-fun 360 before cruising into the beach and another well-deserved win.

PERFORMER OF THE DAY: While Carissa’s precision led her to victory in her heats, fellow competitor Bethany Hamilton’s pure determination undoubtedly grants her Performer of the Day status. In 2004, Bethany surfed Nationals a mere nine months after losing her left arm in a shark attack, putting on a strong performance against such powerhouses as Carissa and Erica Hosseini. This year, the 15-year-old Kauaian seemed driven to emphasize that she is first a surfer, second a survivor. Her late takeoffs, solid, near-vert snaps, and goofy-footer know-how on Lowers’ peeling lefts made her a serious contender, as did her guts: Bethany went for just as many, if not more, waves than her peers in both Explorer Women and Open Women, taking several nearly to shore. Her aggressive surfing earned her the Explorer Women title, her first championship win for NSSA. Her every maneuver garnered unanimous praise from spectators, many of whom have monitored Bethany’s progress closely since the attack. If the NSSA has a favorite daughter, surely Bethany is she.

CAUTION: Apparently jealous of all the attention the surfers were getting this weekend, one couple pulled a hedonistic publicity stunt that will probably make more headlines than the contest. The young lovebirds (who, if you listen to some eyewitnesses, were barely old enough to drive a car) were caught doin’ the horizontal hokey pokey smack-dab in the middle of the venue. Thankfully (in a car-wreck kinda way), a member of one of the many families trapped by this uncomfortable spectacle turned his video camera from the action in the water to that on the sand, thus creating Exhibit A for the local police, who threw some figurative water on the horny toads and escorted them off the beach. Have some manners, kiddos. The only kind of mating people should to be exposed to at Lowers is the squirrel variety.

QUOTES: “That’s kind of like lapping the field in NASCAR.”-Quip from the judges’ tower after Carissa Moore’s 8.5 and 9.5 scores comboed all five of her competitors in the Open Women/Governor’s Cup final