Huw Morris was chosen as the first winner in our ‘Write To Surf’ surf journo competition and scored himself this epic Billabong hamper valued at over R6000 (see below for details).
“Hey Zag, I got all the goodies. Thanks so much. I’m so stoked and blessed!” wrote Huw, after receiving his prize earlier this week. “Please send my thanks to Billabong too, it’s awesome that they are supporting this initiative with such great prizes.”
There’s still loads of loot up for grabs and we’re still looking for your stories. Travel features, hard news, investigative journalism, opinion pieces, profiles, fiction, enviro stories, photo essays…anything goes, as long as it is your original work and has some connection to surfing. Entries are unlimited and we encourage you to build up a portfolio throughout the comp, which runs until March 2014. The only proviso is you cannot be a professional writer already. Submissions will run on the Zag website with one winning submission selected every six weeks to appear in Zigzag magazine. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. At the end of the contest, the aspiring surf writer with the best portfolio of work will get to go on an all expenses paid trip to cover a major feature for the magazine.
See all the terms and conditions below and send your stories to calvin@zigzag.co.za
Here is an excerpt from Huw’s winning entry – The French Resolution – a story about his surf mission to Côte d’Ivoire, which features in the latest issue (Zigzag 38.5).
The hangover of conflict was still being nursed here in the vacant, touristy spots, which were now home to only a few feral cats and roosters. Chapelle and I were in the oil company’s Nissan Patrol, with security glass and two spare wheels, beer fridge in the back. You needed a few beers to nurse the guilt of comfort when driving past the squalor. The uprising last year had pressed pause on the children’s smiles on the sides of the roads. Blank stares at my camera: ‘seen-too-much’ stares, ‘can’t-unremember-this-stuff’ stares.
I left the car to photograph a woman in a field, but she chased me away with a machete. Chapelle had just stood next to the car, laughing at me, his back to the warm bonnet, sucking on a cigarette in arrogant pulls. I recall a whimsical thought crossing through my mind as I sprinted back over that yam field, banshee close behind. Perhaps I would be spared and the woman would take a slice out of Chapelle instead. That she would take his smile and put it on the burning heaps of refuse along the roadsides, with all the other upturned smiles between Abidjan and Tabou.
We’d eventually found the break we were looking for near Sassandra, down a goat track, pointed out to us by an old farmer who had some English in amongst his French. There were signs of life here from a time long ago, the walls of a concrete dwelling, abandoned during some trouble that preceded this most recent trouble. The jungle, like a schoolyard bully, had wrapped vines around the weakened walls and squeezed them till they cracked and fell apart. Chapelle was like that. A bully.
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You’ll have to grab a copy of the latest issue to read the rest. In the meantime, you can check out some of our other Write To Surf entries here>>
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THE FINEPRINT:
Send your stories to calvin@zigzag.co.za. One submission will be selected every six weeks to appear in Zigzag magazine. The selected submission will also receive a hamper from Billabong. Zigzag retains the right to use any work submitted for the Zag Surf Journo competition on www.zigzag.co.za as outlined in the rules and terms of the competition. Zigzag reserves the right not to award a published winner in the magazine every six weeks, depending on the quality of entries. Zigzag is not obligated to run any and all entries submitted, either online or in print. Zigzag retains the right to edit all work submitted for brevity and / or clarity.
For the next three issues the Billabong prize hamper includes: 1 x Billabong Wetsuit; 1 x Billabong Boardies; 1 x Billabong Cap; 1 x Von Zipper Sunnies; 1 x Set of Kinetic Racing (KR) fins. After which the hamper will get a shake-up with new product of equal value for the following three issues.
