“There’s nothing to wait for but delayed inevitability. Heats completed in sub-par conditions, dictated by a forecast that hasn’t changed from beginning to end and still won’t.”

Dream location; nightmare forecast.

It seems to be passing in an opioid haze. Time feels thick and jelly-like, the way it can on a surf trip where all there is to do is surf. The sun rises and the sun falls.

The weather remains the same. Days merge into one.

There’s nothing to wait for but delayed inevitability. Heats completed in sub-par conditions, dictated by a forecast that hasn’t changed from beginning to end and still won’t.

In situations like this, desperate situations, there should be a contingency to move the waiting period for a couple of days. I don’t profess to know the intricacies of planning permits and jiggery-pokery of greasing palms, but what we’ve ended up with here serves no-one.

Salt rubbed vigorously into weeping wounds has been the spectre of 1997, which the WSL haven’t had the decorum nor the sense to stop banging on about.

Don’t they realise the contrast is killing us?

Images of reeling tubes and voices from the past telling us how epic it was are laced through heats, serving only to make them seem more flaccid.

Here’s what you could’ve had…

It should be a gambler’s dream, a comp like this. I can’t remember a time when it’s been so predictable. But it’s been too dull a prospect even to bet on. Mostly.

“Jungle fever” was noted a couple of times in post-heat conversations today. The dancing has clearly died. It has to happen. The worst part of a comedown is not the comedown itself, it’s the moments when you’re still immersed in revelry but you feel it coming on. It might be hours away, even days, but you see in neon flashes…