Noa Deane: “Is Derek Rielly a pussy?”

The beautiful honesty of Coolangatta grip mogul and gibber Noa Deane.

“It is in my experience that a man with no vices has few virtues” – A Dead President

Lest I should have to remind you, this is BeachGrit. A place to loiter and talk shit about surfing. Call it “Ultra Hard Surf Candy”, say it’s “Anti Depressive”, but know that you are not alone for your obsession with waves and the words written about them. You’re not crazy even if explaining your love for this website strikes others as queer. Remind them that we are BeachGrit and we are proudly libertine.

We all keep coming back showering Chas and Derek with our clicks because all other surf journalists (except you Sabre Norris!) don’t quite scratch the itch. BeachGrit is the only place where our convoluted world revolving around surfing makes sense. It has become in a weird way, a home for me.

I’ve written some pieces that I’m proud of here.

And here. 

Here.

Here.

Here too! 

Despite the negativity that I’ve spawned in the comment section, I’ve taken the hits and kept coming back. Because this is BeachGrit, we air our grievances publicly. Sometimes it’s funny, and sometimes we lose Rory, but it wouldn’t be the same if we didn’t.

Today, I’m gonna attack Michael Ciaremella’s story on Noa Deane, a kid whose family helped me through the darkest time in my life.

If you didn’t catch it, the paragraph that threw me was this:

“It will be interesting to what comes of Noa, who is dripping with talent but has an apparent proclivity for substance abuse. We’ve seen what happened to Andy, to Bruce, and to tens of other world class surfers who were all but destroyed by their taste for the hooch or the crack or the smack”.

When I confronted Michael about this, he said by “substance abuse”, he meant alcohol and the “or” between vices was to infer that it could be any of those three things. I thought his words were built on whispers and not true.

Last I checked, Michael has never spent any time with Noa and to say that he has a substance abuse problem is to judge him for that one time he said “Fuck The WSL” at Surfer Poll awards or because he didn’t want to do that lame story idea for Stab.

Noa has slowed his roll when it comes to partying. At the Cluster premier, a red-carpet event held in the Ace theater, Noa who went with his proud father, Wayne, and spent the night sober so that he could soak it all in. His life had been a blur of surf trips and he wanted to remember it all.

Just because the guy enjoys a VB, a quarter-pounder with cheese and a cigarette, preferably in the same sitting, doesn’t mean he deserves to be vilified as a train wreck. A five hundred k contract with Volcom suggests something is working.

Yeah, he would surf better if he ate healthy, and he didn’t smoke or drink, but you could level the same charge at Dane Reynolds. And, last I checked, he was still free surfing’s king. If you think Noa’s personality is a contrived marketing technique, you’re wrong.

I called Noa to apologise for the story.

He said: “Stopped giving a fuck what was written about me a long time ago.”

I told him Derek was going to change the story from substance abuse to booze in order for people not to misinterpret that he wasn’t a crack-head or a junkie.

He said: “Isn’t Derek edgy? Why is he changing it… hahah… that’s pussy.”

Aren’t characters like Noa exactly what surfing needs?

Don’t we want more people who aren’t afraid to be ’emselves and don’t treat riding waves like a sport to be taken one heat at a time but as an artful self expression to be done only at full speed?

Don’t we?

Or am I wrong?