Fifteen perfect tuberides were entered into the first leg of the Monster Energy Pitstop powered by Zigzag in association with O’Neill and iON Action Cameras. However, only one can win the monthly prize and go through to the Final with a shot at the grand prize for ‘Pit of the Year’ worth R30 000.

With so much tube time to analyse it’s never going to be easy for the judges to pick a winner, and indeed this month saw a split decision. But in the end it was Dustin Wilson’s classic KZN winter barrel that wins the first leg with a 2 -1 vote from the judging panel and 133 votes from the public. The judging panel consists of international hellman Nic Von Rupp (Monster Energy), former WCT campaigner Paul Canning (O’Neill), and Zag online editor Calvin Bradley.

Dustin’s winning ride.

“For me the winner is Dustin Wilson. Its the longest, deepest barrel and he managed to negotiate the chandelier section at the end perfectly,” said Nic when casting his vote.

Honorable mention goes to Gary Van Wieringen, who managed to secure one of the judges votes as well as 312 votes from the public with a long and technical tube of his own (see below), but it wasn’t enough to pip Dustin. The vote allocation is split 50/50 between the judges and the public*.

It’s not only Dustin who wins though, Byran Wigmore also scores for capturing the winning ride on video. Byran’s prize is an iON Air Pro Lite Wi-Fi worth R2 500, while Dustin claims a stacked R5 000 hamper from O’Neill. If their ride gets chosen as ‘Pit of the Year’ against four other monthly finalists that are still to be decided, they would then win a further R25 000 cash (R15 000 for the surfer and R10 000 for the videographer) plus an iON Air Pro 3 Wi-Fi valued at R5 000.

Check out monsterpits.co.za to see all the other entries, or to enter your own sick pit for the next leg which kicks-off today.

*HOW THE VOTING WORKS:

• The public vote and judging panel’s vote is split 50-50
• This means each of the three judge’s votes counts 16.67% of the overall vote (to make up the judges’ 50% of the vote).
• The public vote for each surfer is then worked out as a percentage of the total number of public votes across all contestants and divided by two to work out how much it contributes to the other 50%.

It sounds complicated, but makes sense when you do the sums. So let’s do the maths for the top two rides who were in the running this month:

Gary Van Wieringen
1x judge’s vote = 16.67%
Total public votes across all the contestants = 1185
Gary’s public votes: 312 votes = 26.3% of 1185 / 2 = 13.15%
= 29.82% of votes overall

Dustin Wilson
2x judge’s votes = 33.34%
Total public votes across all the contestants = 1185
Dustin’s public votes: 133 votes = 11.2% of 1185 / 2 = 5.6%
= 38.94% of votes overall