Coup: Nissan steals Jeep’s thunder, designs car with built-in “surf shower!”

Chas Smith

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And a waterproof wristband key!

Jeep’s collaboration with our World Surf League and its subsequent “surf the world” campaign was one of last year’s highlights. We live in fractured times, extremely tense with people all across this globe angry at one another for various things, mostly politics, but anytime Jeep’s ad came on we could all share a laugh.

“I surf the air. I surf roads, lanes and alleys. I surf dirt and mud and muck. Drop in on mountainsides and carve through valleys. I rip forested trails, pull aerials in the sand. I surf the ocean. I surf adventure. I surf it all.”

Very hilarious but while Jeep was being very hilarious Nissan was out designing a car for real surfers and let’s read about it together. Let’s dream like we used to.

With a starting price of just $17,990, a roomy cabin, and attractive looks, the Nissan Kicks is arguably one of the best offerings in the entry-level crossover segment. It’s targeting primarily young people, and the new Kicks Surf concept is here to prove you don’t need an expensive, super high-tech vehicle to have fun and practice your hobby.

As the name itself reveals, the study is designed for “those in search of the perfect wave,” or people with an active lifestyle enjoying surfing. Nissan says it has installed roof crossbars for carrying boards and a rear deck for wetsuits and different accessories. What’s even more interesting, the car has a portable shower system and a water-resistant wrist band that actually locks and unlocks the vehicle’s doors.

The funky concept has been developed with input from brothers Alejo and Santiago Muniz, who are both surfing champions competing for Brazil and Argentina respectively.

“We imagined it would have to be the perfect ally for the lifestyle and needs of surfers,” John Sahs, who led Nissan’s design team that created the Kicks Surf concept, comments. “Blue is an evolving color that goes from dark to light, and we used it to represent the variety of tones in ocean water. The bright yellow-green accents, together with the blue, gives the Nissan Kicks Surf concept vehicle a dynamic and sporty feel.”

Are you sold? Did the evolving blue kick you over the line?

Once again, for the record, I hate surf showers. I want the ocean to linger on me all day.

I surf the ugly looks from people in the grocery checkout line. I surf girl scouts turning up their nose as I pass.

I surf the world.

An auction for dreamers! Bid for a session (with pal) in Surf Lakes’ Yeppoon Test Pool!

Derek Rielly

By

How much you gonna pay for a date with the Big Plunger?

I do admire the bullish, can-do attitude of Queensland wavepool company Surf Lakes.

Despite not having a functioning pool, 0r having created a wave over two feet, we’ve read the announcement of their first commercial pool (Gold Coast, opening 2020, waves with “eight-foot faces”) and, today, a charity auction where two people can join the licensees/shareholders at the testing tank in Yeppoon, Central Queensland.

There’s a catch.

You gotta be in the Wollongong area in two days time for the KidzWish annual barbecue, which will host the former world champion surfer Mark Occhilipo who is also a Surf Lakes ambassador and minor shareholder.

KidzWish is a charity in the area whose goal is “to provide support, love and laughter to children in our community who are sick, disadvantaged or have a disability.”

Tickets cost between one hundred and five hundred dollars to get into the Wiseman Park Bowling Club, Gwynneville, on March 1, where the Surf Lakes package will be auctioned.

Now tell me.

You’re at the barbecue, you got a little ink in your veins and you want to take on the Yeppoon Plunger.

Presuming it gets going again, how much you going to throw at a day there?

Listen: “Don’t homeschool your damn kids unless they’re going to make you a millionaire!”

Chas Smith

By

Come spend time with the utterly charming Matt Biolos of Lost surfboard fame!

It is almost always a pleasure to sit down with Moncler Jesus aka Matt Biolos. His lovably cantankerous take on life in general, and surfing specifically, is such a welcome relief from the usual jibber jabber of any day. It is refreshing like the last sip of French press’d coffee in the morning. The one where lukewarm and bitter grounds dance in perfect harmony.

Today, I had the pleasure of sitting down with him and David Lee Scales at the Surf Heritage and Culture Center in sunny San Clemente. We spoke of surfboard design and professional surfers. Of Brazil and a world title landing nowhere but Brazil for the next decade. Of the surf media’s love of looking at normal heart rhythms and turning them into the massive spikes and falls of a heart-attack.

“You guys take the smallest thing…” he says “…and just blow it all the way out. It’s garbage, it’s lazy and it’s damned nonsense.”

We also spoke about movies, energy drinks and the bullish surfboard market.

That enjoyable crinkly sound you’ll hear is not bad audio. It is Matt Biolos’s insistence on playing with a small piece of velcro for the entire second half.

I think it may be our best show yet.

darren handley
The great shaper Daz Handley jackrabbits his ski during last year's run of swell.

Cops: Jetski pilots fined for Kirra whip-ins!

Derek Rielly

By

How much y'gonna pay to avoid the rip and the takeoff at Kirra?

Ain’t nothing Australians like more than blowing whistles, riding car horns and, if a uniform is involved, handing out fines.

And therefore, when surfers used jet skis to avoid the rip and the takeoff during Queensland’s recent cyclone swell called Oma, the cops thought Christmas had arrived early, photographing the ID numbers of jet skis and sending fines in the mail.

According to local surf mag  18Seconds, “The fines have started arriving in the mail for people using skis during the Oma swell. According to sources, they’re being fine for going over 6 knots within 60 meters of (scarce) paddlers. They have even issued fines to several lifeguards going over 6 knots near the Alley breakwall. There have been lots of cases where skis are the ones helping surfers who are in trouble during dangerous cyclone swells. In fact, we were only speaking to a guy (fit in his fifties) yesterday who wiped out over the weekend. He said it was such a heavy belting, when he surfaced he couldn’t see anything – was just seeing black. With eight-foot sets washing him around, he thought he was gone. Luckily, a ski grabbed the man and took him to the safety of the beach.”

Other fineable rules include, not having an observer on the back when you tow or whip and if you’re in partially smooth waters, ie Kirra, not carrying drinking water, a map, a compass and a GPS.

Fines range range from $250 to a mandatory court appearance.

Perhaps this event, from last year, prompted the arrival of the police.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BfW9uGSDds0/?utm_source=ig_embed

Now, some questions.

Do you appreciate it when police officers execute their duties to the letter?

Or does it make your native contempt for authority and for anyone who picks up a badge flourish?

You'll get to surf in front of tens of excited fans!

Win: A wildcard to the WCT Women’s Trials Event on the Gold Coast!

Derek Rielly

By

Do you identify as a woman? Do you shred? Do you Instagram?

In a month or thereabouts, the tour is back on the Gold Coast. And if you identify as a woman, or have a suitable pronoun, and you have an engaged gang of Instagram followers, you can be a part of it thanks to event sponsor Boost’s Search For a Wildcard Contest.

Real simple to enter. 

Upload a one-minute clip, surfing, to Instagram. The top ten most-voted clips go into the final. Boost-sponsored surfer Sally Fizgibbons chooses the winner.

Three or so days in and they’ve been four entries, with Isabella Caldow, a fifteen-year-old from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast leading the votes, 100 to 66, two and one.

The concept of giving away a tour event slot ain’t new.

In 1991, Coke offered a wildcard into the main event of the Coca-Cola Surf Classic at Narrabeen in 1991 as the prize for their Classic Wave Competition. The winner, Allan Willis, a bricklayer from surfless Bundaberg in North Queensland, had surfed twice in the previous six months and was recovering from distended vascular structures in his anal canal, which made sitting painful.

Willis lost his heat against Ross Clarke-Jones, although not after causing Ross immense worry, and was awarded a cheque for $1750 and free run of the VIP area.

Glory days.

Jon Pyzel and Matt Biolos by @theneedforshutterspeed/Step Bros
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