The draw of good surf attracted Susan (19), an architectural and draughting student at the University of Otago, to Dunedin.
During the weekend, he displayed the form that has cemented his rise in the national ranks andfranked his wins in the men's open and men's junior sections at the Otago championships in February.
He thrived in the 1m-2m swells on Friday that provided competitors with clean "A-frame" peaks, and continued this form through the elimination rounds on Saturday.
A southeast swell on Saturday provided larger waves of up to 2.5m that had Susan progressing with ease to claim finalist spots in both open and junior competition yesterday.
It was in these rounds last year that he was forced to withdraw from competition with a broken board.
"It's hard to recover from that," Susan said of his first attempt at winning a South Island title last year.
"Thankfully, it wasn't the case this year. The conditions and waves have been great."
Although the water was a lot flatter yesterday for finals competition, Susan was mostly untroubled. But his results were to mirror those he achieved in the Go For Gold event at Greymouth earlier this year, where he had to content himself with second place in junior competition behind Cody McCusker (Canterbury), before dominating the open final with a masterful display of reading the right waves.
Putting the junior result behind him, he lined up in the open final with Zen Wallis (Piha), Jake Scott (Dunedin) and Sam Dunfoy (Kaikora), who was third last year.
Susan made the best possible start with his first wave of the final, when he of latched on to a "sneaky little insider" that none of the other three finalists saw coming. It scored him a handy 7.6.
With the sea flattening out over the middle stages of finals competition, Susan had the Midas touch with his final two waves when he scored heavily with a good left-hander and again with a right-hander on his last, to submit a score of 13.5, with Dunfoy going one better than last year's result, second with a score of 8.3, and Scott third on 8.13.
Wallis (20) dominated long board competition to win the title with a score of 12.17, in pretty tame conditions.
It was a case of back-to-back South Island titles for Dunedin's Hayley Coakes, who won the open women's title for a third time, scoring 11.67, with Pip De Lacey (Canterbury) second with 10.58 and Brooke Money (Canterbury) third on 10.18.
