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Arnette All-Day Antics
Launches Event #3 at 54th Street..
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Arnette All-Day Antics
Presented by Jack’s Surfboards

ASP Grade 3 Pro Junior Mens event
54th Street, Newport Beach California
6 – 7 June 2009

Arnette All-Day Antics launches event #3 at 54th Street

San Juan Capistrano, Ca — The third of 10 stops on the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) North America Pro Junior Series is just weeks away from commencement with the ASP Grade-3 Arnette All Day Antics Pro Junior presented by Jack’s Surfboards, which will run at 54th Street in Newport Beach, California from June 6-7, 2009.

The two day event will be webcast live and play host to the nation’s top ASP Pro Junior talent in what will be a critical stop in all surfer’s campaigns towards qualification for the ASP World Junior Championships.

The 2009 ASP North America Pro Junior Series is a qualifier for the ASP World Junior Championships; with all surfers on the series looking to compile their best five results to earn a top three regional finish at year’s end. Arnette’s decision to upgrade their Pro Junior to an ASP Grade-3 event translates into additional points on offer in the Newport contest, which will play a vital role in each surfer’s qualification for the prestigious event held in Narrabeen, Australia.

“We are fired up for the second annual Arnette Pro Jr,” Arnette Brand Manager Joe Freitag said.  “Coming off of such a successful event last year, and working with such great partners as Jack’s and ASG, we’ve decided to up the ante and upgrade the event to a 3-grade, giving younger competitors a greater opportunity to battle it out and earn points on the ASP North American Pro Junior Series.”

Andrew Doheny (Newport Beach, CA), 16, is a local at 54th street and was also a qualifier for the ASP World Junior Championships last year. The talented regular-footer is hungry to post an impressive performance in front of his home crowd and is out to utilize his local knowledge in the Arnette Pro Junior to help his cause.

“Newport is my home,” Doheny said. “It is just really nice having a contest at home, but in the end it is a beachbreak so it’s all about wave selection.”

Doheny is also looking to utilize the event’s ASP Grade-3 status to help him earn back-to-back qualifications for the ASP World Junior Championships next year. Since there are two ASP Grade-3 events and one ASP Grade-4, the Nike Pier Pressure, on the 2009 calendar, the Newport Beach local is well aware of the importance of a big result at the upcoming event.

“The contest is very important,” Doheny said. “Whether or not you go to Australia will be decided by how you do at the two Grade-3’s and the Grade-4. I am really looking forward to the event and I am stoked that it is at [54th Street].”

Nat Young, who is a constant threat to all competitors on the ASP Pro Junior Series, is also on the hunt for a win at the Arnette All Day Antics Pro Junior. Young hopes that a solid result at the event at 54th Street will help pave the way to a successful campaign for the 2009 season.

“I think it is very important to do well in this contest,” Young said. “Since it’s a Grade-3, there are more points involved and I think whoever wins this contest will be sitting well for qualification to worlds. There is a Grade-4 and another Grade-3, but it would be good to have a really good result early on in the year.”

Young has already had a successful year on the ASP World Qualifying Series (WQS), with standout performances against some of the world’s finest international competitors and now he’s looking to carry the confidence earned from those events over to his regional ASP Pro Junior campaign.

“I think it definitely helps with confidence,” Young said. “I just had the hardest heat of my life at Lowers with C.J. (Hobgood) and Dane (Reynolds). However, I try not to underestimate anyone, because anyone can have a good 20 minutes. And when I do underestimate someone I usually end up losing to him.”

The Arnette All Day Antics Pro Junior will run from June 6-7, 2009 at 54th Street in Newport Beach, California and will begin at 8 am local time. For the first time, both days of the event will be shot in High Definition and webcast LIVE via arnetteprojunior.com.

About Arnette: Established in 1992 and headquartered in Southern California, over the past seventeen years Arnette has firmly established itself as a respected leader in the global eyewear market. Arnette’s mission is simple; to offer stylish eyewear that fuses progressive design, maximum functionality and unparalleled quality, with the hard-charging, action sports lifestyle it was born from.  Backed by a family-like crew of talented athletes and influencers spanning the skate, surf and wake communities, Arnette’s diverse collection is available at finer retailers worldwide.  For more information and to find an authorized dealer in your area, check out: arnette.com  Arnette is a Luxottica Group company.

About Jack’s: Jack’s Surfboards reached a milestone in 2007 celebrating it’s 50th year in business. Since 1957, Jack’s has built a reputation as an icon in surf retail. It has been the place to go for surf fans around the world to find the newest surf products and clothing labels. Offering a huge selection of surfboards, wetsuits, skateboards, snowboards, apparel and accessories, Jack’s is Orange County’s premier surf shop.

About Sourceinterlink Media’s Action Sports Group (ASG): Reaching more than two million enthusiasts, Source Interlink Media’s Action Sports Group (ASG) is the dominant force in the action sports and adventure sports arenas. In addition to publishing leading lifestyle publications such as Surfer, Surfing, Snowboarder, Skateboarder, Bike, Powder and Canoe & Kayak, Source Interlink Media’s ASG delivers a cutting-edge network of online properties, events and television programming.

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Geoff Ogilvy… Surfing? Another Matthew McConaughey? 0

FORT WORTH – Golfing and surfing don’t have too much in common.

Golf, as they say, is a gentlemen’s game dominated by clean-cut players. Surfing is a sport for free-spirits often with shaggy hair and laidback attitudes.

But that doesn’t mean golfers can’t take up surfing. Just ask the Australians on the PGA Tour, who say it’s as common there as it is riding a horse in Texas.

“Whether you do it or you don’t, it’s just kind of what you do,” said Geoff Ogilvy, who’s No. 6 in the World Golf Ranking.

Ogilvy, 31, started surfing about a year ago, when he spent the summer in San Diego. This year, Ogilvy has even caught some waves with fellow Aussie Adam Scott, when the tour stops in beach towns.

Ogilvy said his surfing handicap, if there were such a thing, would be an 18; Scott is a 12.

“[Ogilvy] is getting heaps better,” Scott said. “I think he’s improving quick.”

Not quick enough, though, to quit his day job.

Ogilvy, the 2006 U.S. Open champion, has won two tournaments this season, is second on the money list with more than $3.15 million and has made the cut in all 10 tournaments he’s played.

“The art of golf is knowing yourself and how to get you to play the best,” Ogilvy said. “There are thousands of cases of guys that tried to get better and got worse. I see golf, though, as the sport doesn’t change. You are not trying to work golf out; you are trying to work yourself out.”

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Finding Space for All in Our Crowded Seas 0

The ocean is getting crowded: Fishermen are competing with offshore wind projects, oil rigs along with sand miners, recreational boaters, liquefied gas tankers and fish farmers. So a growing number of groups — including policymakers, academics, activists and industry officials — now say it’s time to divvy up space in the sea.

“We’ve got competition for space in the ocean, just like we have competition for space on land,” said Andrew Rosenberg, a natural resources and environment professor at the University of New Hampshire who has advised Massachusetts on the issue. “How are you going to manage it? Is it the people with the most power win? Is it whoever got there first? Is it a free-for-all?”

To resolve these conflicts, a handful of states — including Massachusetts, California and Rhode Island — have begun essentially zoning the ocean, drawing up rules and procedures to determine which activities can take place and where. The federal government is considering adopting a similar approach, though any coherent effort would involve sorting out the role of 20 agencies that administer roughly 140 ocean-related laws.

“It’s really an idea whose time has come, and it’s one of my top priorities,” said Jane Lubchenco, who chairs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “By focusing on different sectors, nobody is paying attention to the whole — in particular, the health of the system.”

But conducting what experts call “marine spatial planning” presents scientific and political challenges, since so little of the ocean has been mapped in detail, and so many interest groups want to use it. The federal government has mapped only 20 percent of the “exclusive economic zone” that stretches from the U.S. coast out 200 nautical miles, and that’s just its geophysical bottom, not the habitats and species that exist at varying levels.

Charlie Wahle, a senior scientist in NOAA’s National Marine Protected Area Center, said the agency is convening experts in California to chart how groups including kayakers, the Coast Guard and fishermen use waters off the state’s coast. “People have been surprisingly willing to engage and share their information and knowledge of the way it really is, as opposed to how it may look on maps,” he said. “We’re on the right path, but it’s not a simple thing.”

Marine ecologist Larry Crowder, one of several scientists at Duke University who have compiled data for such plans, said the approach makes sense because ocean resources are not “equally distributed, whether it’s oil and gas, or fish, or corals.” But he added that the sea has so many overlapping activities that “when you begin putting these maps together, as we’ve done, it quickly becomes a train wreck.”

The states pioneering this approach have charted different paths. California is establishing marine protected areas along its 1,100-mile coastline under its 1999 Marine Life Protection Act, dividing it into five regions and brokering agreements with interest groups. Massachusetts, which enacted its Ocean Act only last year, is to finalize a comprehensive ocean management plan by Jan. 1 that exempts fisheries but covers all other major activities.

Ian Bowles, Massachusetts secretary of energy and environmental affairs, said the state is working to determine “what are the areas of particular ecological value that we should be protecting from other uses” and what parts of the ocean can accommodate such diverse concerns as liquefied natural gas offloading terminals, wind projects and sand mining for restoring eroding beaches.

While a few states are leading the way in the United States, the Europeans and Australians have done this for years. Charles Ehler, a Paris-based consultant who is drafting a manual on the subject for UNESCO, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, said the demand for offshore wind farms and other activities has spurred countries such as Belgium, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands to establish specific marine boundaries.

“There’s a much greater intensity of demand for offshore space in Europe than in most of the United States,” said Ehler, noting Belgium’s demand exceeds its available space by 200 to 300 percent.

Even though they have a head start, policymakers overseas are struggling with many of the same questions Americans are contemplating, including how to reconcile new and traditional ocean uses, and how climate change will affect where marine species live. With the exception of Norway, few nations have been willing to subject fisheries to the same management regime as such activities as renewable energy and gravel mining.

“The traditional users of the sea have been the most resistant to marine spatial planning, because they’ve pretty much been free to go where they want to go and do what they want to do,” Ehler said.

While California includes the fishing industry in its planning process, Massachusetts fishermen held up passage of the state’s Ocean Act until they were reassured they would be exempt. “We don’t want to be told, ‘Oh, and this place — you can’t go here anymore,’ because we were there all along,” said Bill Adler, executive director of the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association. He added that the fishing industry is already regulated separately by the state.

Some U.S. oil and gas executives have adopted a similar stance, arguing that any offshore drilling projects must undergo a federal environmental assessment. “I don’t think the overall process is broken,” said Marvin Odum, president of Shell Oil Co., adding that when he hears of calls for additional ecological reviews, “From where I sit, some of it can just look like delay tactics.”

But as the country appears poised for a new push in offshore oil drilling, advocates such as the Ocean Conservancy’s Vikki Spruill argue it needs to take a more serious look at how it coordinates activities off its coasts. “We wouldn’t put a coal plant in a national park,” Spruill said. Philippe Cousteau, president of the nonprofit EarthEcho International, said policymakers should put environmental considerations “first and foremost” when deciding where to locate new drilling activities.

Mary Gleason, the Nature Conservancy’s senior scientist and lead planner for marine protected areas in California’s central and north central coastal regions, said “there’s a lot of drama” when the universe of users is included in ocean planning. “There’s been a negotiated solution in all of these cases, where there’s been a lot of give-and-take,” she said.

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