
Portuguese surfer Ruben Gonzales won his opening heat at the Billabong Pro Tahara.
Today’s action would see the completion of the Round of 128 in punchy two-to-three foot beachbreak with a variety of veterans and up-and-comers battling for the crucial ASP 4-Star points towards surfers’ ASP World Ranking.
Yasuaki Sugihara would put the first excellent score on the board, earning an 8.33 on his first wave to kick off a day of high-performance surfing. Young-gun Yuta Tsukamoto would punctuated the day’s high scores in the round’s final heat, earning a 8.67 backed up with a 7.60, securing the high heat-total of 16.27.
Event organizers will reconvene tomorrow morning at 7:30am local time with Tatsuya Fukagawa (JPN), Eli Olson (HAW), Masato Watanabe (JPN), and Koki Nakamura (JPN) scheduled to surf in heat 1 of the round of 96.
Billabong Pro Tahara presented by Xperia will be webcast LIVE via http://www.billabongpro.com/tahara13/
The ASP 4 Star Event Billabong Pro Tahara presented by Xperia, is the largest surfing event in Japan. Running for 4 days, the event starts on the 25th of July and will run through to the 28th, at Tahara in Aichi Prefecture. The event boasts a total prize pool of USD $95,000 and will be held at Long Beach or Loco Point, Irago. Tahara is famous for its consistent beach breaks, which often produce hollow waves with the right swell direction.