Jay Alvarrez Ethan Carlston

Blood Feud II: Two Pretty Instagram Boys! 

Ethan Carlston delivers (maybe) knockout to former pal Jay Alvarrez! 

Five days ago, the noted writer Chas Smith reported on the business of a blood feud between two former pals: the San Clemente pro surfer Ethan Carlston and the model Jay Alvarrez.

Smith wrote: “Jay Alvarrez (@jayalvarrez) is a very famous Instagram celebrity with 2.4m followers and a girlfriend named @alexisren that has 3.1m. I think he is a model, maybe, but I think he thinks he is a surfer too. He takes many pictures with his girlfriend and some with surfing or at least surfboards.

“Ethan Carlston (@ethanzane) is not as famous with 48.1k followers and has no girlfriend so far as I can tell. I think he is a model too but he is also a surfer and very pretty. He takes many pictures of himself sticking out his tongue and writing “Fuck Off Im Busy.”

I’m as attracted as anyone else to beauty and lives that seem as unattainable as they are perfect. Kinky-haired Jay Alvarrez and his girl Alexis Ren infest their lives with skydiving, shark diving, cliff diving, boat diving, DJ’in in Ibiza and all under a canopy of barely legal lust.

You might think it’s bullshit, but pull down the shades and watch these.

But I’ve also swung around the traps long enough to know nothing is really as good as it seems. I had a pal who got on a private jet with Paris Hilton to Las Veagas and then to some party where he frottaged the hell out of an accommodating teen and he spent the whole time texting me. Who texts when they’re having the time of their lives?

Anyway, Ethan and Jay are are war.

And, today, Ethan delivers the knockout blow. A narcissistic 11-minute address to his former friend.

“This is raw, uncut, and straight from my heart. It’s the monster known by the name of JAY ALVARREZ, his real name is John. He is a boy that’s been filled with pain and has done wrong on every person he’s crossed paths with.”

(Click here!)

Finally: A surf movie that understands us!

Die Pro is as awesome as it sounds!

Hollywood generally gets the surf thang wrong, (Am I right Sam George?). Blue Crush, In God’s Hands, The Perfect Wave, etc., etc., etc. all fall flat in one way or anoth and we leave the cineplex feeling so sad. Why can’t you just get me, H-Wood? Why can’t you put something on screen that replicates what it’s like to sacrifice all for the…the…the…stoke?

Thankfully, we have South Africa. The new film, Die Pro, has a name as awesome as its message. From what I can tell (I don’t speak Afrikaans and Dam Fahrenfort is too busy owning Venice to help!) it involves chasing the dream, being scouted, paddle-outs, overcoming adversity, big bucks, winning sponsorships, winning, murdering WSL surfers in cold blood while screaming “DIE PRO!”

Watch the trailer here and beg BEG the producers to bring it to America.


My Balls are Killing Me!

Do yours? If so, I might have a cure!

The trade winds are howling, a mixed blessing if there ever was one. The ocean is ripped to shreds, no diving, kind of okay storm surf, albeit bumpy and swirly and a whole lot of effort compared to the reward.

But the temp has dropped what feels like thirty degrees, a blessed relief after months of no wind, absurd humidity, and record high temperatures.

Which was torture, I spent the majority of our heat wave on the injury list, a gross as hell catheter running from the crook of my elbow into my heart, dumping in lifesaving meds but preventing me from ever cooling down. Even a cold shower doesn’t do much when you’re wearing a shoulder length plastic glove that looks like it was stolen from the set of some terrible horse vet themed porno flick. When the doc finally yanked my catheter it looked like a magic trick, he kept pulling and pulling, it kept on coming.

“That’s the longest thing that’s ever been inside me,” I said.

“That’s probably a good thing,” was my doc’s reply.

I guess it really depends which way you swing, huh?

It turns out that a common side effect of Vancomycin, the goop I was twice daily pumping into my bloodstream via a clever spring loaded medical device, is a weakened immune system. Towards the end of treatment my white blood cell count was hovering in the end stage chemotherapy range, forcing me to limit my already infrequent contact with fellow humans, so as to avoid picking up a terrible bug from some typhoid Mary hacking his guts out while he makes a sandwich because he doesn’t get sick days without a doctor’s note.

I once sneaked into my manager’s office while being forced to work with the flu and spit on her phone, door knob, and into an open can of soda. She was out sick for three days while I robbed the place blind. Ha! Showed her.

 

How fucked is that, by the way?  I’ve had numerous employers (and I mean numerous, I’ve been fired from dozens of jobs) refuse sick leave without paying a doctor to write me a note. Which I couldn’t afford, so I’d head to work and wring a little joy from spreading my disease.

I once sneaked into my manager’s office while being forced to work with the flu and spit on her phone, door knob, and into an open can of soda. She was out sick for three days while I robbed the place blind. Ha! Showed her.

The upshot of my sickly status, combined with weeks of sweating like a tweaker at a rave while never being able to get truly clean, was that I picked up a nasty case of jock itch, something I’d never experienced.

And, inshallah, never will again. One minute I was pouring sweat from my pores into my filthy couch, the next my balls and taint were itchy burning like I’d tea-bagged an anthill. Fucking miserable.

Over the counter remedies didn’t work, a trip to the doctor led to a humiliating conversation.

“Have you been showering? Jock itch is usually caused by poor hygiene.”

“Dude, my dick is the cleanest part of my body. I’ve been spit polishing the thing a couple times a day since I was eleven years old.”

Pissing on your own testicles is more difficult than you’d think. Twisting your dick around, cupping your taint to make sure urine gets spread everywhere, your wife joining you in the shower and asking why it smells.

A little internet digging turned up the fact that jock itch is basically athlete’s foot, something with which I’m familiar. I spent my younger years playing waterpolo and swimming competitively, your feet never truly dry, athlete’s foot is a constant problem. Unless you pee on your feet every morning, that does a great job of preventing it.

Pissing on your own testicles is more difficult than you’d think. Twisting your dick around, cupping your taint to make sure urine gets spread everywhere, your wife joining you in the shower and asking why it smells.

“Because I just peed all over my balls, dear.”

In a few days my own home spun treatment achieved what weeks of powders and sprays could not, and I was good to go. Free to start banging my wife again too, since jock itch is mildly contagious and it wasn’t fair to share the wealth.

But now the trades are back, everything is cool, and, I’ll hopefully never again experience that awful chafing itching burning hell that was my life.

Unfortunately, the return of the trades has also caused the cancellation of the Na Wahine O Ke Kai, the all female Molokai to Oahu outrigger canoe race in which my awesome waterwoman stepmother had planned to once again compete.

Real bummer, tons of ladies from around the world are on Molokai, now forced to find alternate routes to Oahu, being extorted by Hawaiian Airlines for last-minute, inter-island flights.

And now, to add insult to injury, on top of wasted money and huge logistical hassles and the emotional dump which comes with prepping hard for a challenge only to have the rugged yanked out from you last minute, they’ve gotta deal with me segueing into the news of the cancellation via a story about my itchy balls.

If Pangloss is right, and this is the best of all possible worlds, well, that’s pretty well fucked, isn’t it?


Hiroto Arai from Japan.
This is Hiroto Arai, from Japan. "Surfing is my discipline!" he says. | Photo: Red Bull

Movie: Red Bull Unleashed (Full-Edit)

New cut of wavepool event paints slightly more impressive picture…

When Albee Layer won the Red Bull wavepool event in Wales a week ago, the press was thrown a short edit of the event.

(Watch here!)

The 56-second cut didn’t do the contest any favours. A carnival of B-grade jibbers transposed to the cold river water of a tank in the unchanging hills of the Conwy Valley in North Wales. And it was responsible, I’m sure, for the blizzard of criticism that followed.

Was it really like a “bad one-star QS?” (Read here.) 

This three-and-a-half-minute edit is better and, sure, it ain’t Tahiti and never will be, but it holds the imagination a little more, shows the stir and colour of a contest that looked like it boiled with fun.


Brent Symes attacked
Should the WSL adopt the Filipino example and apply capital punishment to surfers who are slow to exit a contest area?

Big-Wave Surfer Attacked at Cloud 9 event!

Locals with bats want blood at Siargao Cloud 9 Surfing Cup…

Brent Symes is a 36-year-old Australian who is kinky, in a very large way, for big waves. Wants to be invited onto the WSL big-wave tour.

Puerto is his go-to joint and, this year, he flew into the Billabong XXL Awards running with a no-hands tub. Watch here.

Brent likes the regular WQS, too, just ’cause it keeps his name out there. Which is why he was at the Siargao Cloud Nine Surfing Cup, a QS1500 $US50,000 event last week.

But his trip to this isolated, and usually flat island (I went there in the nineties and there hadn’t been a wave over two feet for three months), was spectacularly abbreviated when he was attacked by four locals with various third world weapons in the shorebreak during the final of the locals trials event.

Or, as the police report recorded it, “allegedly mauled with broken bottle and log by more less four persons.”

Gold Coast surfing magazine Surfing Life (which I edited years back, hello alma mater!) ran a piece that interviewed “well-known and respected local Dencio Dizon” who said Symes, “got what he deserved. Or in my opinion, he got lucky, because he probably deserved more after hearing of his reputation. This same guy was also here last year, and he got disqualified after two interferences in his heat.”

The reason? Dizon says Symes wouldn’t get out of the water during the final of the locals trials final.

And so he had to die.

But a murderous attack in response to someone surfing through a contest is actually no one’s fault, says Surfing Life, least of all the simple island people.

“No matter what, it’s never cool to beat someone up. But as human beings, and surfers, we also have to remember how important it is to show respect,” it advised sagely.

Cultural relativism! Natives can’t help ’emselves!

(Read story here.)

The Philippines is fucking gnarly at the best of times. Restaurant signs tell patrons to leave their guns at the door. If you want further reminder, three tourists and a local were kidnapped from their resort a few days ago, likely by by the Al Qaida-linked Islamic gang Abu Sayyaf.

(Read that story here.)

I’d heard about the attack via a couple of pals on Facebook. One, the surf guide and artist, Phil Goodrich wrote: “Brent Symes aka “Red Dog”. Such a legend. I spent a month at HT’s with him. Classic Aussie charger. Straight talker, he put on one-man-shows every day on land and charged like a maniac in the water.  I can promise you he would give an excellent interview…”

He wasn’t wrong.

Brent, who has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, bounces back and forth between a childhood spent in poverty, his brother Darren who ghost-shapes for Simon Anderson and Pyzel, a little bro Kyle who was a junior series ripper, and his own pro surfing childhood competing against, and sometimes beating, Joel Parkinson and Dean Morrison.

While we’re talking (Facebook Phone Call) the big-wave surfer and champion paddler Jamie Mitchell apparently texts: “Are you alright?”

Brent Symes
Brent Symes, as he appears on the WSL website.

Brent’s version of the attack goes something like this. He was hanging out in the Boardwalk restaurant that fronts Cloud Nine. At one point, he noticed there were only a few guys out. No contest. Maybe a gap between semis and the final. So Brent and two others paddle out. The other guys get a set and go in. He’s out there, is too deep for a bomb, and the ocean goes flat. There’s a 20-minute lull.

Then the four surfers in the trials final paddle out. Brent says one of the finalists, Phimar Alipayo, says he can stay out and watch. But Brent says he ain’t going to get fried watching it from the water.

“I’ve got fair skin, red hair and no sunscreen… I’m out of here,” he says. “But I knew the final wasn’t going to start for five minutes. So I could catch a wave in.”

Brent says he caught a wave, pulled off, there was a set behind, duckdived one and got the next. Says he rode it all the way to the inside, did a big reverse, “went backwards for ages, didn’t spin it around, and fell off onto the reef.”

Says he was nowhere near the contest.

Then he turns around and “there’s five dudes with weapons. Knives, a fucking sawn-off bamboo. I thought, fuck, I wonder where they’re going? Guys with knives and bats? What are they going to do? Then I saw ’em heading straight for me. Is this for real? I didn’t run off or anything. Fuck it, I’m going to have to fight these dudes. They want me and they were screaming out to me, ‘I remember you from last year! You got two interferences! I remember you! I’m going to kill you!’

IMG_3726 copy

Oh, quick little interruption. Brent surfed in the contest last year and got a couple of interferences in his heat. He was surfing with a hyped contest kid, an Australian, and told him, ’cause of the small takeoff, let’s take turns. Kid got one, paddled out, and took the next. Brent said, fuck it, I’m going anyway.

The story continues:

“Then they come at me. The first swung the bat. I put my board up, blocked it. It was easy, pretty long bats, really thick, gnarly bats, and it took ’em ages to swing ’em with their little arms. As they pulled back for a second swing, I grabbed it. I train twice a week Muy Thai. I threw the bat into the water and he ran back into shore. He ran off. He knew he had no chance. I actually had an elbow ready to come down on his head, to open up his whole face. He was a sitting duck. It was like me going to play tee-ball.

He ran off. He knew he had no chance. I actually had an elbow ready to come down on his head, to open up his whole face. He was a sitting duck. It was like me going to play tee-ball.

“When I had the bat, I was thinking of killing him. I was going to kill him. I just refrained. I threw the bat into the water and I didn’t lay the elbow.

“The next guys swings… bang… there’s little holes all over the reef, deep opening, and I lose my footing. The third guy grabs my board. Another two guys come with bats, onto me, that’s when I started blocking everything.

“So, then, I easily got rid of them too. They were scared, another guy ran off. I got his bat as well. Then it was down to one dude with a knife and a baton. I said to him, put the knife down, keep the baton, come to me and we’ll talk, we’ll try and solve this, this is a misunderstanding!”

Brent says the conversation went like this.

“No! You’l kill me if I come close to you!”

“No! I want to make friends! Let’s sort this out!”

“No! You’l kill me! You’ll kill me!”

Keep the bat, put the knife down… “

“And then he wouldn’t the knife or bat down so I had to keep walking at him. He was getting scared, backing back, backing back.”

By now, Brent figured he’d better swim out into the ocean rather than face 300 people “telling me it was my bad.”

Brent eventually comes in, feels like he’s going to be murdered so he locks himself into his room.

“The police said don’t go on the road to (nearest town) General Luna. You’ll get ambushed.”

The police chief comes to see him, says Brent, tells him he’s going to charge the attackers with attempted murder. Brent says the chief then takes him to the mayor at his country club in General Luna to explain what’s happened.

Anyway, let’s cut this a little.

Brent gets his security guaranteed and splits the island back to Cebu, and then to Bali, where your ol pal DR lights up his Facebook chat line.

Will he ever go back to Cloud 9?

“Not that at this stage, no,” he says, perhaps with a little understatement.