A story by gizmodo highlights this big wave surfing jacket design.

If you always wanted to be engulfed by a hundred tons of shark-infested water, you really need one of these Mairine surfing jackets. It really can save your life. If this thing were real.

The Mairine—University of New South Wales student Grant Humphreys’ finalist design for the Australian Design Awards—is a jacket for big wave surfing, the kind that requires the surfer to be towed to the wave’s location under extreme weather conditions. You know, when surfing stops to be really JackJohnsonish fun and starts being extremely fun. Until you die.

To avoid the Bodhi ending, the Mairine has a air canister in the back, which can quickly inflate the jacket in case of emergency. The inflation could be manual, or if the surfer falls unconscious, a manual spring-loaded timer will fire the canister and push the surfer up so the sharks can see him better.

After having proven to be a successful concept store in Mall of the Emirates, local owners and operators Al Boom Marine, selected the new Mirdif City Centre as the perfect location for the second Rip Curl store in the region.

“Because of the brand’s international popularity, both tourists and local residents alike, enjoy shopping at these colorful stores and the brand is not only about surfboards and wetsuits, the product offering is much wider than that featuring surf wear, watches, surf accessories and even mountain wear.

“Rip Curl has truly become a source of truly functional products for anybody on The Search for the perfect wave or the perfect powder snow covered terrain,”  says Steven Holbrook, CEO of Al Boom Marine.

in the sixties in Australia, Rip Curl has earned its reputation as the world’s leading surfing wetsuit brand. Yet today the brand is about so much more than wetsuits and surf boards as this bright and colorful new Rip Curl Store in Mirdif City Centre is testament to.

www.ripcurl.com

story via surfersvillage

Kelly Slater (USA), 38, former nine-time ASP World Champion, has claimed his fourth Rip Curl Pro Bells Beach presented by SNICKERS title over reigning two-time ASP World Champion Mick Fanning (AUS), 28, in clean three-to-four foot (1 metre) waves at the backup venue of Johanna Beach.

The second stop on the 2010 ASP World Tour, the Rip Curl Pro Bells Beach was completed over four different venues this year, with Round 1 at Bells Beach, Round 2 at Thirteenth Beach, Round 3 and the opening half of Round 4 at Winkipop before the final day was completed at Johanna Beach.

Following a relatively slow start to the highly-anticipated Final, Fanning unleashed with a 7.17 to take the lead. The lightning-fast Australian strung together a series of high-speed maneuvers to pull ahead and put the Floridian on the ropes.

However, Slater would answer back with an incredible Alley-oop aerial maneuver, boosting so high his feet separated from his board before he recovered for an 8.93. Slater then paddled out into another excellent wave, scoring an 8.10 to bring his total to 17.03 out of a possible 20  a lead that Fanning would not surpass.

“It was a lot more difficult than it looked out there,” Slater said. “The tide came up and the takeoff was a lot deeper than we thought it would be. I was getting bumped and bounced and falling, and I had five or six waves before I got something going. On that 8.93, I was up in the air and when I landed, I kind of fell on my butt and did the one-footed shuffle, but I recovered there. Then I paddled straight into that second wave and that was it.”

story via asp