"There is a cabal of world leaders..."

Listen: “Famous and beautiful actress Natalie Portman has chemtrail eyes” and other things overheard on Oahu’s North Shore!

Including, but not limited to, the Robinson affair.

I actually don’t believe anyone suggested that famous and beautiful actress Natalie Portman has chemtrail eyes there on Oahu’s bustling North Shore because everyone was too busy weighing in on the Jack Robinson/Zeke Lau affair but don’t you agree that she might? There’s something about the piercing yet far-awayness of her stare. Something about the color and tone that suggests she believes in the airborne conspiracy.

In any case, food for thought.

And David Lee Scales sat across from each other, yesterday, at the most beautiful surf shop in the entire world discussing much about surfing. Discussing where the World Surf League’s President of Media, Content, Studios and Savvy has outwitted us all by jumping off social media first. A visionary. A trailblazer. Discussing Zeke Lau’s official surf category (David Lee says “Power.” I say “No.”)

Discussing if Kelly Slater is the world’s single largest individual polluter.

Rude?

Look at his eyes.

Very suspicious.

I think you will find much value, anyhow, in this episode. Much good. Please enjoy responsibly.

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"Shaw" (pictured) likely dreaming of vinegar-based BBQ sauce.
"Shaw" (pictured) likely dreaming of vinegar-based BBQ sauce.

Beware: In “extremely rare” case, 10 foot-plus male Great White shark refuses to leave waters off of North Carolina!

Best to stay out of those sweet waters.

Cackalacky, both North and South, are some of my favorite bits of America. I sometimes wish I was born in that genteel south with an inbred taste for pimento cheese, vinegar-based BBQ sauces and cornflower blue. Those folk know how to live with their Cracker Barrels and she-crab soups, their Oakley Razor Blades affixed to mullet-heads with neon green Croakies. They also know how to surf with their Outer Banks and… I’m sure there’s another surfable stretch of sand somewhere but a certain horrifying beast may be putting an end to all of it, whatever the case, save the pimento cheese.

According to science, it is very rare, extremely rare even, for Great White sharks to stop and park off of North Carolina, preferring to race further north, in order to eat Bostonian Celtics, or take their talents to South Beach and patrol greater Miami for a spell.

Well, a 10 foot-plus man-eater named “Shaw” is bucking all trends and has researches scratching their receding hairlines. The latest from Sea World’s mouthpiece OCEARCH.

Great white sharks are known for racing past the Mid-Atlantic states to get someplace else, so experts pay attention in rare cases when one not only stops, but stays put.

That’s happening now along the Virginia-North Carolina border with a 10-foot, 3-inch male tracked by OCEARCH.

“It’s interesting watching white shark Shaw since unlike other sharks on the Tracker, he has been hanging out off the Virginia coast for over a month,” OCEARCH posted Tuesday on Facebook.

“The other sharks breezed past, only making a quick stop on their way south. What do you suppose he likes so much there?”

OCEARCH offered no ideas in the post. Data collected by OCEARCH suggests young sharks will stay close to their nursery in the first two years of life. However, Shaw is categorized as a “sub-adult,” not a juvenile.

Etc.

And while the researchers may be confounded, surfers are in the crosshairs. Or jawlines, as it were.

Genteel southern surfers should very much reconsider paddling out this winter unless they are paddling out in the relative safety of an inland wave tank.

And as long as  Shaw” is lingering, I think the most understandable thing is to hang that surfboard on the wall until we learn what that man-eater knows and when he knew it.

More as the story develops.

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Buy: Surfboard shaper to the star’s $3 million-plus “Masterclass in contemporary design” waterfront palace!

A swinging beach house in Australia's own version of the Hamptons.

Almost a dozen years ago, the Australian shaper Hayden Cox presented his teamrider Craig Anderson with a surfboard of a surprising hue. Narrow in the tail and with a forward wide point it resembled something from the seventies but spruced up with the carbon Fiber Flex (now FutureFlex) rails and a regular three-fin setup.

The Hypto Krypto.

It was an easy-to-ride surfboard that was a little bit Dave Parmenter Stub Vector and Matthew Biolos Round Nose Fish. And with Craig Anderson, one of the most admired surfers in the world riding ‘em in such a sublime fashion, they become so popular they accounted for more than 30 percent of Hayden’s worldwide sales.

Well, success buys pretty things.

Three-and-a-half years ago, Hayden and his wife, the marketing whiz Danielle, bought an old waterfront house with 180 degree views of the estuary called Pittwater at Palm Beach, Sydney’s version of New York’s The Hamptons.

That house was $A1.8 mill and you can examine the before and after photos here.

Before

Pretty but it ain’t gonna win awards.

After

Oowee.

Before

No one’s gonna want to sex in this bleak shower room.

After

Oowee.

Now, after a renovation that sings with the couple’s monochrome design aesthetic, this “masterclass in contemporary style and innovative design” with its “crisp, minimalist lines” and “robust palette of natural materials and organic finishes” is on the market for a little over three-million Australian dollars.

It has four bedrooms, three bathrooms, fits a couple of cars in the driveway and is a five-minute haul to the beach on the other side of the peninsula.

Such a pretty, pretty house.

Buy here.

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Watch: The heretofore ignored upside of just discovered “one million times more microplastics” in our oceans!

Let's think rationally.

As we continue our brave sojourn into the very heart of important news, using our elevated sense of being, our surf-ness, to discuss and/or solve the world’s most pressing issues, it is important that we do not forget the environment, as dull as it sometimes seems.

The ocean is our playground, after all, and we are expected to have extra insight into what it needs and doesn’t need. Scientists rang the alarm bell, yesterday, suggesting that there is one million times more microplastics floating around and let’s turn to Gizmodo for more.

“For years we’ve been doing microplastics studies the same way (by) using a net to collect samples,” said Brandon in a press release. “But anything smaller than that net mesh has been escaping.”

Indeed, as independent research from 2015 pointed out, thousands of trawls done between 1971 and 2013—all with the same kind of net—were only able to capture plastics larger than 333 micrometers in size, or one-third of a millimeter. So while these nets were small enough to filter plankton, they were subsequently too big to capture the smallest plastic particles, known as mini-microplastics.

“I saw these published size ranges and thought, we are under-sampling this smaller range. There’s a big knowledge gap,” said Brandon.

All very bad, no?

Possibly.

We surfers, we enlightened few, are not swayed by the seemingly obvious and look for the story behind the story, as it were. Look for subtlety and nuance where dogma reigns.

So, re. microplastics, what if the ocean is merely responding to market forces? Wave tanks, from Surf Ranch to Surf Lakes to The Wave, are becoming very popular on land. Might the ocean replicating their appeal in the water?

An evolution of sorts?

Worth discussing, at the very least, alongside World Surf League data mining and the plight of Nicaragua.

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Surfline Man is an expert. He knows all the swell angles and he knows all the best spots. Rincon? Yah, brah, that place won’t be good today. It needs a longer period. Like, a 310-degree swell at 18 seconds. You don’t want to go there today. You’re totally gona get skunked. Surfline Man likes to believe he’s scoring somewhere no one else would possibly think to go. Surfline Man is generally wrong in his expectations.

Surfline Man: An anthropological study!

Know before you go!

On Monday I tucked my favorite board under my arm, slung my backpack over my shoulders, and wandered down to the beach. The buoys suggested that there might be waves, which sounded damn fun to me and a break in the storm track made nasty winds unlikely.

There I was, happily scampering down the trail, blissfully ignorant of what I would find in the lineup. Oh, there seem to be a lot of people out, I thought, as I tugged my wetsuit over my hips. I shrugged. It is the first day without terrible, angry winds, of course people want to go surfing, I thought. It’ll be fine.

I did not know it was a Surfline Day, when untold hordes come crawling out from every nook and cranny. There is surf today! Everyone go surfing! Omg! And, obediently, Surfline Man and all his besties go surfing.

Surfline Man has the app and the notifications. Surfline Man gets the newsletter. Is there a newsletter? If there is, Surfline Man has it and reads every last word of every edition. Surfline Man spends many hours thinking about surfing. He scrutinizes every swell forecast meticulously. He loves all the colors and arrows. Someone once told him about a site called 17ft, but it was just a bunch of numbers. What the fuck is he supposed to do with that? Surfline Man needs his colors and arrows.

Surfline Man is an expert. He knows all the swell angles and he knows all the best spots. Rincon? Yah, brah, that place won’t be good today. It needs a longer period. Like, a 310-degree swell at 18 seconds. You don’t want to go there today. You’re totally gona get skunked. Surfline Man likes to believe he’s scoring somewhere no one else would possibly think to go. Surfline Man is generally wrong in his expectations.

Without his entourage, Surfline Man is nothing. He never surfs alone. If he went surfing alone, he would have no one to impress with his deep knowledge of surfing. Surfline Man always brings a carefully selected friend or two to surf with him. Carefully selected, because they must be worse at surfing than he is.

Surfline Man has a lot of opinions about boards. He privately thinks his friend’s board has too much volume, but he’s trying not to say anything. Eventually, though, he can’t help himself. It does have a lot of volume, bro, he says, eyeing the colorful fish that his friend is attempting to ride. His friend will play along, because after all, he got a free ride to the beach today. Anyway, he likes his board just fine. Sure, it’s got volume, but that’s how to catch more waves. Everyone knows that.

He’ll tell you all about his fins and how they work and how they’re so much better than the old fins he used to ride. He doesn’t really know why, of course. But he will go on and on for far too long about what he read on the website and what the reviewers said and what he saw on Youtube. Obviously, they’re better than your fins.

If you want to talk about boards in the lineup, Surfline Man is your guy. He’ll tell you in infinite detail all about why his board works so perfect, man. Taking ten set waves on the head is generally preferable.

You might be thinking that Surfline Man sounds like an Asshole, and it’s true that there is some overlap between the two species. When Surfline Man burns one of two women in the lineup on a decent day, he is also an Asshole with a capital A. Beneath his surface knowledge, Surfline Man is sometimes very insecure and he expresses his insecurity by acting like a sexist dickhead. Don’t be a sexist dickhead in the lineup. It is bad.

More commonly, though, Surfline Man is the golden retriever of surfers. He is stoked! So stoked! He wants everyone to know how stoked he is! Surfing is the best and he loves it so much.

He walks back to the car, reliving every single one of his waves. He’s generous, too. He’ll be just as enthusiastic about the waves his buddies rode when it’s all said and done. Dude, that one turn you did, it was so mental. Praising his buddies makes him feel good and helps him retain his feelings of superiority. He knows what a good turn looks like! He is an expert.

Surfline Man arrives at his car and carefully unfolds his changing mat. His precious wetsuit must not touch the ground, though he probably won’t get around to rinsing it out later. Life moves so fast. Check out my rinse kit, bro, it’s the best! Warm water, and I don’t even have to shower later. My girlfriend bought it for me for my birthday.

Yes, Surfline Man has the rinse kit and the changing mat and the poncho. It’s so hard to change with a towel, bro. You should totally get one of these ponchos. It’s so much easier. Surfline Man has a lot of advice.

But he had the best time! Back at the car, and he’s already checking the forecasts. Check this out, he says, showing his buddy his phone. Next Wednesday, it’s gona be firing! I bet we’re totally going to score!

With his technology, his accessories, and his perfect board, the Surfline Man is a perpetual optimist. It’s always going to be good and he’s always going to score. You just have to stay on top of the forecasts, bro. You just have to be in the know. It’s gona be so epic!

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