Sarah Baum and Nao Omura earn a spot in third round of Estoril Surf & Music Billabong Girls Pro
The seventh heat of Estoril Surf & Music Billabong Girls Pro’s second round went down at the beach-break of Praia do Guincho in Estoril, Portugal, on Friday, June 10th.
While majority of the surfers struggled to hold their own during the four-way battle, South Africa’s Sarah Baum managed to come up with a decent performance to clinch the win and secure a place in the next round of the competition.
Japan’s Nao Omura successfully avoided elimination by clinching the runner-up position to qualify for the next round. Puerto Rican Francisca Santos and Australia Nicola Atherton finished in third and fourth place respectively and were removed from the event
title race as a result.
The surfing conditions at the primary event site had turned out to be somewhat of a nightmare for the female surfers on Friday. The two-to-three foot tides did not have enough juice to allow the ladies to go for really technical tricks and if that was not
enough to put them in a handicap, there were offshore winds to make surfing even more challenging.
With hardly anything going the surfer’s way, it was not an ideal situation for surfing. However, the South African surfer, Baum, refused to completely succumb to the difficult circumstances and exerted a great deal of effort to earn herself a decent score
in order to survive the round of 48.
She went to work quite early in the heat, locking a wave to score 5.75 points off it. After desperately searching for another good score for almost the entire course of the heat, she got rewarded for her effort in the final moments, when she caught a good
wave to earn 6.50 points. Finishing with a heat-total of 12.25 points, she eventually grabbed the first position and consequently qualified for the round of 24.
Omura tried to put up a fight to keep the South African from surfing away with victory, but the task proved to be too much for her. Catching a wave in the early stages of the heat, she scored 3.40 points off it and later followed it up with a 5.25-point
wave to finish in runner-up position, ending up 3.60 points short of first position.
Santos and Atherton both failed to make any significant impact in the heat and ended up rounding out the bottom-two positions. The Puerto Rican only amassed a score of 4.20 and 3.50 off his two waves to finish with a two-way total of 7.70 points, while the
Australian earned 3.75 and 3.50 points off his two waves respectively to with a final score of 7.25.
The Estoril Surf & Music Billabong Girls Pro is an Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) 6-Star event and the second of four stops of ASP Women’s European Tour.
Tags: