Breathtaking: Watch Russell Bierke in “Pull the pistol’s foreskin back and enjoy the orgasm of a crushed trigger!”

An excellent document of a young big-waver operating giant surfboards in uneasy waves…

A few words about the Hawaiian-born, Australian-raised big-wave dealer Russell Bierke while the going is good, before another leg snaps, before his tiny antlers are sucked dry like they were at monster Nazaré last year.

(Or, two years before that, when he was “blue as a Smurf” and “on all fours spewing” after a wipeout in fifteen-foot waves in Victoria, an injury that put him in intensive care.)

Russell is twenty-two years old, diminutive and old world, deceptively fragile looking. He is the son of the noted Californian-born shaper Kirk Bierke whose boards are sold under the label KB Surf and made in Ulladulla, three hours south of Sydney. Russell’s earliest memories are of watching his dad run out the door whenever the surf was big, going to the beach and seeing him ride these big, blue-water reef waves, and wanting to be part of the game.

Kirk’s been making boards since 1975. He likes big waves and shifted to the North Shore, made a baby (Russ), then moved to Australia where Russell was schooled and raised in the art of strangling reef ledges. Russell grew up riding Kirk’s seven-foot and eight-foot guns at a lefthand outer-reef that had only ever been towed before the Bierkes got to town.

This film, which is called Flow State, was made by the Sydney filmmaker Andrew Kaineder and, in a neat twist, has another South Coast big-waver Brett Burcher interviewing Russell in the front seat of their four-wheel-drive.

It features footage, mostly, from 2019 although a failed paddle-in at the start and the closing wave are from a Shipstern session in 2018 which Russell says is the best he’s ever seen it.

“And the last wave was the wave of my life,” he says.

You’ll examine Russell in Flow State and note his tight mouth and the very plain-face in his black rubber headgear tinkering with waves that have the ferocity of an angry cuckold, a cranky Italian denied his lunchtime siesta.

I can’t recommend highly enough.