Welcome to the 23rd Edition of The Bodyboard Report! 🤙

Locals call it the most perfumed championship in bodyboarding, on account of it being an all women's affair, and this weekend it made its way back into the sport in a big way.

The Miss Quebramar Cup, now in its 22nd year, returned to Praia da Costa Nova in Ílhavo, Portugal, running its open surf trials yesterday before handing the beach over to the bodyboard world today and tomorrow.

This year the event rejoins the IBC World Tour as a confirmed stop on the Women's Rising Series, its first appearance back on tour since a Covid era hiatus took it off the calendar.

Let’s see what’s cooking 👇

Thanks to Jay & Vicki Reale at eBodyboarding.com we have a special treat for Bodyboard Report readers today!

Grab one of these superfly Tribe Boards keychains absolutely FREE with any purchase at eBodyboarding.com

Simply add the keychain to your cart and apply the coupon code 👇

Quick trivia question for you. How many bodyboard events do you know that have changed their own name 6 times and somehow nobody blinks?

Meet the Miss Quebramar Cup, which has spent over 2 decades on Praia da Costa Nova in Ílhavo, Portugal, quietly proving that a beach with the right waves does not actually need a fixed name to become legendary.

The contest kicked off in 2005 as the Miss Sumol Cup, named for the fizzy drink sponsoring it. Then it became the Miss Activo Cup, then the Miss Costa Nova Cup through the Covid years when nobody was signing sponsorship cheques, then the Miss Prio Cup, and now, since 2023, the Miss Quebramar Cup, backed by the Portuguese sailing and lifestyle brand of the same name.

Same beach, same women, same waves, 6 different name tags. Portuguese bodyboarding just quietly rebrands the party every few years and keeps dancing.

Here's a fun one for the trivia file too. For its first 4 years, this was a bodyboard only affair. Surfing did not even get invited until 2009, when organisers finally opened the door and let the standup crowd share the sand, now running as a U20 open comp the day before the bodyboard world tour stop kicks off.

The locals have their own name for it regardless of what the sponsor banner says. They call it the most perfumed championship in the sport, on account of it being entirely women only, and 2 decades in, it has earned the right to that nickname properly.

Which brings us to this year's headline story, one you already know the setup to. Neymara Carvalho, 5 time world champion, is competing on that same sand as her daughter Luna Hardman for the first time on a world tour stage, at the exact beach where Neymara herself won the title 18 years ago under the very first name this event ever wore.

There's a Portuguese saying the local press used to describe it, filho de peixe sabe nadar, which translates roughly to the fish's child knows how to swim. It is their version of like mother, like daughter, and honestly it might be the tidiest way anyone has summed up this family story yet.

👉 Miss Quebramar Cup official site

👉 IBC event page

There's a bodyboard deadline sitting on the calendar at the moment….

From 10 December 2026, just over 3 months away, it will officially be illegal to sell, rent or distribute disposable polystyrene foam bodyboards anywhere on the island of Kauai.

You know these boards… Cheap, thin, sold for around $15 at Walmart and such around the globe, grabbed by tourists for one holiday and left snapped in half on the sand by the end of the week.

Once in the water they break down into microplastic fragments that seabirds, fish and turtles can mistake for food, on top of everything that just ends up in landfill.

Kauai’s mayor Derek Kawakami signed the bill back in December last year, put forward by Councilmember Fern Holland and passed unanimously by the council.

Once the clock runs out this December 2026, violators face a $100 fine first time round, rising to $200, then $500 for repeat offences in the same year. Proper durable boards, the PE or PP kind most of us actually ride, are completely unaffected.

Kauai is not breaking new ground here either. Maui already did the same thing back in 2022 under its Foam Free Maui County push.

Worth keeping an eye on whether the rest of Hawaii follows before the year is out.

This jogs another thought: What is the impact of our PE and PP boards? Hell, the footprint of our entire industry and sport!? 🤔

I’ll go fishing and get back to you…

👉 Hawaii News Now coverage

Continuing our series on custom boards, shapers and pioneers of bodyboard aquadynamics 👇

For most of the 1980s Mike Stewart and Ben Severson were each other's fiercest rivals, meeting in final after final, with Ben usually the one walking away as runner up more times than he probably cares to remember.

Yet, both Mike and Ben are pioneers in their respective ways.

Ben grew up at Sandy Beach in Hawaii, part of a crew that included JP Patterson, Pat Caldwell, Jack Lindholm and Keith Sasaki, the kind of lineup that was inventing entire manoeuvres out of boredom and ambition on a daily basis.

Dropknee riding and the El Rollo both trace their roots back to that same stretch of sand. At barely 5 ft 6, Ben earned the nickname The Troll for the sheer amount of time he spent buried in the tube, and it stuck for good reason.

He started out on a Morey Boogie Mach 7-7 as one of the original Morey Team riders alongside Mike Stewart himself, Jay Reale and Keith Sasaki.

By 1984 he was already pulling the board apart, reshaping the rails and adjusting sizing specifically to survive heavy days at Pipeline.

1986 turned out to be the year it all clicked, he won both the Morey World Championship and the National Pro Am, becoming the sport's official World Champion.

A year later he signed with BZ and released the board that made him a household name, the Ben T-10.

High wide point, a wide nose, a narrow tail with deep wide channels built specifically to suit his own riding.

The innovative design was quite expensive for the era, and yet it still became one of the best selling bodyboards ever made.

Here is the part that puts him in proper legend territory though.

Ben is credited with helping pioneer the use of channels on the bottom of bodyboards, a feature so effective it became standard across the entire industry within a few years.

He is also behind the Transitional Rail and the Rounded Rail, plus the Diamond Rail slick skin finish that made the T-10 so distinctive.

And alongside Mike Stewart, he was one of the first two people on the planet to ever surf Teahupoo, back in the late 1980s, years before it became one of the heaviest, most famous waves in the world.

He left BZ in the late 90s and started Ben Severson Designs, BSD, building on the same design theory that had made his name, and he never really stopped.

Ben is still a lifeguard in Hawaii, still runs BSD, and in 2018, off the back of a genuine spike in vintage bodyboard collecting, BSD brought back the classic T-10, T-20 and T-30 shapes as numbered limited releases, same look and feel as the original 90s boards, built with modern materials underneath.

👉 Ben Severson Designs

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