Volcom House
Say, you ever dreamed of sitting…here…at the Volcom House watching in real-time a pumping winter swell at Pipe? Today you can! Open a can of tuna, maybe a blister pack of smoked ham, mix a cocktail and…w atch!

Live: Epic Pipe from the Volcom House!

Pipeline is pumping… now. Watch here!

This is novel idea. The Austrian energy drink company Red Bull is broadcasting today’s epic Pipe swell from the Volcom House at Pipe.

No panelists, no commentators, no judges. Just pure vision of a building four-to-six-foot swell operated by the best surfers on the North Shore.

From Red Bull’s PR division:

“THIS IS LIVE is a simple concept: Livestream a day of freesurfing at Pipeline and Backdoor using the famed Volcom Houses and their unobstructed beachfront view of the waves as our vantage point.  Intentionally a low fi project, this livestream won’t have commentators and heat analyzers. No panelists and pundits. And no VOD. When the cameras turn off, that’s it. This is live sums up what the experience is all about in three little words. Tune in, and it should feel like your’re sitting on the back porch of the Volcom House, watching Pipeline go off right there in front of you.”

The broadcast is coming from the three-storey, four-bedroom Gerry Lopez house Volcom bought in 2007 for $US4.2 million (see the setup below) and not the little house where a BeachGrit correspondent once took a gal and never saw her again.

image1

 

Watch here!


Rumor: Mikey Wright your wildcard!

The Quiksilver Pro Gold Coast is less than one month away and Mikey Wright might don the singlet!

BeachGrit runs off your fumes. Without you we are but clanging gongs, empty vessels, and this may seem mealy-mouthed but it is entirely true. There was a time in my life when I refused to respond to online comments, Twitter things, etc. or even read them. It felt less cool to go and mix in the lowly places. How wrong I was. The lowly places are the only ones that truly exist. There is no highbrow art being created in our surf world. No cloistered few elevating the conversation. There is only this and this is very fun.

Yesterday, for example, the wonderful longtom had a legitimate question below an illegitimate post. He asked:

Sorry to change the subject, but will Quik hand out another wildcard to Dane for Snapper? Or have they now all OD’d on disappointment?Anyone got any inside info? Nick Carroll: you’re in bed with Quiksilver, do you know?

And I thought, yeah! I wonder too! Nick Carroll is so esteemed but I thought take this little morsel off his plate so reached out to a well-placed surf industry source as handsome as he is spirited. And guess who else reads your comments! He said:

My people there are telling me that, after reading all the comments on BeachGrit, there is some serious thought about giving it to Mikey Wright. Nothing official yet…

Mikey Wright would be so welcomed, no? Dane is, of course, so very exciting, but longtom is also so very right. Almost always disappointing. And older. And motivated? The internal fire in that boy seemed choked even in the best of years. Do you think he is looking back at his decision to step away from Quiksilver, right now, and thinking, “Hmmmmmmmm.” Do you think Ando is looking back at his own decision and saying, “SHIT! Shit shit shit shit shit SHIT!”

Quiksilver does look so very reinvigorated, fresh, young, happy, free. I am excited for the Snapper event. I am excited to see Mikey unofficially soar. The future is bright!

Top of the totem pole? You'd be smiling too!
Top of the totem pole? You’d be smiling too!

Brandon "Laserwolf" Campbell by Rodney Odgaard.
And this is the photographer himself, Brandon "Laserwolf" Campbell at the heaviest wave in the Mentawai Islands, as captured by Rodney Odgaard. | Photo: Rodney Odgaard

Report: Mentawai* to be Crowd Controlled!

Pay $75 fee and surf in crowds of 20 surfers or less… 

Let’s ask: who wants to go the Mentawai?

All of you?

Maybe you want to go on one of those dazzling boats like the Ratu Motu where the monied surfer radios in his aprés gin-and-tonics as he sails back in his tender to a mother vessel skippered by a worldly cap who shows off his quiver of Rollies and tells stories of being kidnapped by pirates in the Amazon? 

Or maybe you’re thrilled to be on a trad Indo sailer that’s slow but eschews modern comforts for a more cosmic experience.

However you swing, the Mentawai islands, with its perfectly foiled reef waves popularised by the Australian boat captain Martin Daly in the nineties with movies for Rip Curl (The Search, Tripping the Planet) and Quiksilver (No Destination, The Hole, Young Guns), is as much a rite of passage for surfers, maybe even more so, than the North Shore.

So you sling your three thousand (minimum) at a good boat, add a grand-and-a-half for any airfare and you wait for your turn in the boat charter cycle. And maybe you’ve got a good skipper and surf guide and you cut off your own slice of paradise, accumulating memories you’ll still be talking about in a decade.

Or maybe you wind up surfing Lances Right, Macaronis and every other name spot and you’re astonished to discover y’ain’t in paradise but’ve arrived to some kind of overcrowded, surf capitalist dystopia.

Sixty surfers… here?

But all that might be changing in August 2106, or so says the English-language daily The Jakarta Post.

In a story headed, Surfers Charged a Little More for Extra Fun in Mentawaiit reveals that the Mentawai Islands regional administration issued a bylaw last year on the “management of surfing excursions that stipulates, among other things, the imposition of ‘surfing fees’ for both domestic and foreign tourists… Under the bylaw, all foreign and local surfers visiting Mentawai are required to pay Rp 1 million (US$75) and Rp 250,000, respectively, for a 15-day period.”

Seventy-five bucks ain’t nothing when you sling it onto the five gees or whatever it is the trip costs. So what’s it get you?

Let’s examine.

“Such fees, for example, would give surfers a fair chance to ride the most sought-after waves in the region, said Mentawai Islands Tourism Agency head Desti Seminora.’Currently, many surfers must compete against each other to secure surf spots on particular beaches,’ she said. ‘By paying certain fees, surfers will be guaranteed spots on the beach as our officers will allow a maximum of 20 surfers to surf in a particular spot every morning and afternoon.’

How’s it work? Wrist bands!

“Payments are to be made online, while identification wristbands are to be collected at the provincial capital of Padang or Mentawai. The new regulation is scheduled to take effect in August after the regional administration completes supporting regulations that detail fee collection procedures.”

Wrist bands and some kinda policing to keep numbers down?

You really think that’s going to happen?

You really think it’s going to work?

Non.

Will the levy still be charged?

Let’s do a little math: 7000 visitors multiplied by $75 gives the Mentawai Islands regional administration an ongoing yearly injection of $US525,000.

I think, yes!

Read the story here. 

* (And what do you think of referring to the Mentawai Islands as Mentawai, as is the custom in those parts, and not Mentawais? Does it sound odd to you?)


It's not often that the death of a single man makes the world a better place, but this is one of them. The archconservative Catholic Supreme Court justice, staunch opponent of the concept of a living constitution, strived his entire career to retain the values America embraced back in the eighteenth century. Antonin Scalia is dead! Let's all raise a drink to the Ronald Reagan-appointed cocksucker! “Here's to hoping there's a hell so you can burn in it!”
 | Photo: White House archives

Politics: “Burn in hell cocksucker!”

It's not often the death of one man makes the world a better place, but this is one of them…

Antonin Scalia is dead! Let’s all raise a drink to the Ronald Reagan-appointed cocksucker!

“Here’s to hoping there’s a hell so you can burn in it!”

It’s not often that the death of a single man makes the world a better place, but this is one of them.  The archconservative Catholic Supreme Court justice, staunch opponent of the concept of a living constitution, strived his entire career to retain the values America embraced back in the eighteenth century. Like slavery, and second class status for anyone who isn’t a white property owning male.

A man who repeatedly stressed his desire to strike down Roe v Wade, helped George Bush 2 steal an election, refused to recuse himself when longtime friend Dick Cheney appeared before him. He supported the execution of minors and the mentally challenged, allowed his belief in Catholic polytheist mumbo jumbo to inform his decisions over the decades that comprised his tenure.

It’s not often that the death of a single man makes the world a better place, but this is one of them.  The archconservative Catholic Supreme Court justice, staunch opponent of the concept of a living constitution, strived his entire career to retain the values America embraced back in the eighteenth century. Like slavery, and second class status for anyone who isn’t a white property owning male.

His opinion on LGBT rights?

“But I had thought that one could consider certain conduct reprehensible—murder, for example, or polygamy, or cruelty to animals—and could exhibit even ‘animus’ toward such conduct. Surely that is the only sort of ‘animus’ at issue here: moral disapproval of homosexual conduct[.]” 

How about people “detained” by the American government?

“Give me a break… I had a son on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son, and I’m not about to give this man who was captured in a war a full jury trial. I mean it’s crazy.” 

From my wife, who is currently in San Diego attending a convention for death penalty defense attorneys, “The speaker stopped mid-sentence and broke out in a shit eating grin.  ‘Scalia’s dead.’  The room broke out in laughter, people were clapping.”

Fuck you Scalia! I hope a pack of wild dogs exhumes your corpse and gives it a solid buggering.


A screen shot from 7:00 am this morning, California time, 2:00 am Sydney time.
A screen shot from 7:00 am this morning, California time, 2:00 am Sydney time.

Miracle: Stab buries hatchet!

And bends the space-time continuum!

This morning I wrote about a pitiless blood feud featuring your favorite surf website aggregator, Stab, staring down the “most coveted event in big wave surfing” Titans of Mavericks!

Stab artists love nothing more than delicate repurposing. Such subtle brushstrokes harkening the great Thomas Kinkade. And yet there was zero coverage of surfing’ most exciting days. The silence belied internal rage. Some unspoken feud that boiled the blood and froze the soul. Very very hurt feelings.

A miracle! Like the Shroud of Turin! This story posted three hours ago yet it appears to be from twenty hours ago! Hallelujah!
A miracle! Like the Shroud of Turin! This story posted three hours ago yet it appears to be from twenty hours ago! Hallelujah!

But a very few hours ago the story popped up! NIC LAMB IS THE TITAN OF MAVERICKS! And, miracle of miracle, it was back dated by 20 hours! Oh the glorious wonders when one side of a blood feud recognizes its error and rectifies immediately, even bending the laws of physics to make the other side feel better.

Stab displayed a warm, beating heart this morning and crafted a tale of redemption that will live on in the hearts of our children and The Committee of Five’s children’s children.