Adorable maniac and toy. | Photo: @jackbatesphotography

Heavyweights: Watch as a tiger shark wrestles, eats hammerhead in three-feet of water at Juno Beach, Florida! “There was a guy swimming with his dogs who had no clue this was happening!”

"Witnessing this tiger's power and beauty chow down blew my mind…"

Pretty little Juno Beach, Palm Beach County, Florida, is a sleepy little joint of three thousand souls more famous for its loggerhead turtles, its pier and a drowsy golden brown climate than undersea battles ‘tween leviathans.

Here, as snatched by Jack Bates Photography, we see a tiger giving hell to a lifeless hammerhead thirty yards off Juno Beach.

“Sorry to see the death of this hammerhead but witnessing this tigers power and beauty chow down blew my mind,” writes Jackie. “Interesting fact: 30 yards down the beach there was a guy swimming with his dogs who had no clue this was happening.”

https://www.instagram.com/p/CCm2NDXFHqv/

Tried to call Jackie to check if it was real or not; that cut between above water and below is a little sudden, but time diff maybe making connecting difficult.

Tigers eating hammerheads ain’t a new thing. Here’s a little something from Nat Geo.

As for Jackie, kid shreds.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B2c660QBJaU/

And has an eye for imposing, goddess-like beauty.

Junoesque, y’might say. 

https://www.instagram.com/p/B1BmAcshDgW/

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Destroyer swell hits Australia’s east coast: “This was the biggest and best wave ever ridden in Sydney! The wave of the day, the wave of the swell. A freak!”

"I've been shooting for ten years and it's the biggest and best wave I've seen for sure."

It ain’t no lie to say that Australia’s east coast lit up like a Christmas tree these past couple of days. 

Didn’t matter if you were curled up away from the brunt of the swell at Snapper, easing into six-footers among the Whites at Lennox like Longtom or seizing control of a Sydney reef with refrigerated composure, these were the days when surfers became, like days of yore, the Gods of Olympus. 

And yesterday, Sydney’s Chris Lougher, pictured below, slammed his excalibur into a wave at Deadman’s, a reef halfway between Manly and North Head, filmer Spencer Frost describes as “the wave of the day, the wave of the swell. A freak. I’ve been shooting for ten years and it’s the biggest and best wave I’ve seen for sure.”

This joint, Deadies, will yank you out of your bean-bag and crack you over the head with grenades of power.

Breaks on a cliff.

A little chip-shot into a section that, usually, don’t have an exit door.

“For a paddle wave, that’s incredible for Sydney,” says Frost.

Frost has been busy as hell fielding calls from news outlets and surf sites since he threw the frame grab from his RED camera onto Instagram.

“I went and did some training, didn’t look at my phone, came back and it had gone absolutely bonkers. Missed calls from everyone. Local newspapers trying to call me. Stab, Surfer, Coastalwatch, every surf media outlet. I didn’t think it would blow up like it did.”

What makes the image even more remarkable is that it was shot using a giant 800mm lens with a two-time converter from Freshwater Beach, a couple of nautical miles further north.

“Getting cheeky with a long lens,” says Frost.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CCp7OXYB7wQ/

So far, the bidding for his RED footage has hit two gees, but Frost is hoping for a little more.

Whatever happens it’ll be loosed in a day or two.

In the meantime, here’s a reel of raw footage shot from the cliff.

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Watch: Great White Shark named “Helen” drowns a thirty-five foot humpback whale off the coast of South Africa!

"Very strategic."

Remember back when the world was pre-apocalyptic, hair salons were open, refillable sodas were the norm and we humans had two main concerns?

1) Keep the Country Country

2) Save the Whales

We have done a good job, all things considered, with number one. Country is still, ostensibly, Country thanks to many brave North Shore property owners painting the slogan on signs and putting them Kamehameha adjacent.

Number two, though, seems to have fallen through the cracks and let us not tarry. Let us fly to South Africa where a tagged ten-foot Great White named Helen “very strategically” drowned a thirty-five foot humpback while negligent humans watched via drone (watch here).

According to Ryan Johnson, a marine biologist reached for comment, Helen knew exactly what she was doing in heading for the tail, finding an artery then letting the poor humpback bleed for thirty minutes before attacking the sweet creature’s face.

“There was no hesitation. It’s as if she knew exactly how to go about it. Even though she was a fraction of his weight, she was attempting to roll him over, pulling him down to get his blow hole under the water, apparently in an effort to drown him. She managed to weigh him down under the water and he just didn’t come up again.”

Do you think there are any tagged sharks out there named Karen?

Are they depressed?

Are you depressed for not saving the whales?

You should be. Just this past year a humpback saved a diver named Karen from death by shark.

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Rumor: “Major” World Surf League announcement regarding 2020-21 season “coming soon”; Pipeline start and champion to possibly be crowned at Trestles in fabulous one day event!

Kolohe Andino for 2020-21 champ. Caroline Marks on the women's side.

Tease me once, shame on me. Tease me twice, shame on me. Tease me three times, shame on me. Tease me four times… wait. No shame at all. We live in the future where predilections and kinks of every make and model are not only acceptable but to be celebrated.

Tease me, World Surf League, one more time!

And apparently my predilections and kinks are all being sated for a new, hot rumor floating out of Santa Monica on tickly feathered wings.

You well know that Erik Logan and team have titillated us much since the Coronavirus descended and cancelled our culture.

No professional surfing. Only Lawn Patrol.

And yet announcements announced. Announcements coming soon. “Major” announcement at the beginning of June. “Major” announcement at the beginning of July. But no “major” announcement forthcoming. The League not even explaining where the “major” announcements went.

Sad.

And we’ve been left to our own devices, as Erik Logan and team have silently retrenched, to monger in rumor. But substantiated rumor from inside the belly of Santa Monica’a beast. True rumor or true-ish.

Another?

Certainly.

A source “close to the levers of power but also very much involved in franchising Subway sandwich restaurants” has floated that a “major” announcement is coming on Tuesday and will cement the already rumored rumor that the 2020-21 season will be mashed together, beginning this December at the Banzai Pipeline.

Where will it end?

According to the source, ending the whole shootin’ match “…at Trestles in September with a one day surf-off between the top four men and women” is being heavily discussed.

Imagine, Trestles there in North County, San Diego once tossed onto the scrapheap of modernity, replaced by a giant blue plow in a long Lemoore lake now back and the crowner of champions.

Do you like?

Love?

I do. It’s a wonderful parable for hanging in there, not giving up, not losing heart when the chips are down.

Kolohe Andino for 2020-21 champ. Caroline Marks on the women’s side.

Tell me I’m wrong.

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A ten-foot White caught, tagged, released off Angourie on Australia's east coast by the Department of Primary Industry's Shark Smart program. | Photo: @nsw_ sharksmart

Australia’s Great White Shark Crisis: “How do you protect your kids from shark attack when the evidence is stacking up that it could happen at any time, in any conditions?”

"The ocean, always a place of transformative powers with the ability to wash away sadness and depression, now feels foreboding and dark."

I’m lost.

I’ve got two weeks off in the middle of prime surf time on the NSW North Coast: offshore winds, pulsing southerly swells, nominally smaller crowds.

This should be peak surf pig time.

Up early, twice or thrice daily surfs, road trips.

This is accentuated by the fact I’ve now got two surf stoked teens, both on winter school vacay, in tow. Daughter and son both surf bug-bitten.

You remember what it’s like to be a grom. You’ll surf anything, anywhere, anytime.

So week one of the holidays, we had been doing a whole heap of surfing.

Now, this binge of surf piggery has been brought to a shuddering halt by the death of 15-year-old Mani Hart-Deville in a shark attack in a neighboring surf community.

The other end of the stretch of national park that I usually surf.

A student at the school I used to teach at.

Too close to home.

I got the full rundown of the whole harrowing event from a first responder. The scariest, most traumatic shit you can imagine. Made all too real by the similarity in age to my own sprogs and the recounted experience of what the young man’s parents had to endure.

From full throttle to flatlining in the space of a day.

The ocean, always a place of transformative powers with the ability to wash away sadness, anger, frustration, depression and tension with nothing more than a quick dip, now feels foreboding and dark.

I’ve already modified my own surf behaviour, due to the spate of attacks to the north of me in the Ballina/Byron area in years previous. I was on a surf alone at sunrise, out of the water before 7.30 am rotation when that shit all went down. No longer.

When I was a kid, there seemed to be concrete rules for avoiding becoming prey for something built for ocean predation: don’t surf at sunrise or sunset, don’t surf alone, don’t surf in murky water, avoid deep water, avoid reefs and rivermouths.

Now all the old paradigms are out the window.

The weekend attack happened at two pm on a sunny winter’s day. Small beachbreak peaks not fifty metres off the shore.

The same with the majority of the Ballina “cluster” attacks in years previous.

Middle of the day, sunny, fun swells, very inviting.

I’m flummoxed as to how to modify my behaviour any more to avoid an attack. When I say my behaviour, I’m thinking primarily of how I’m going to manage my kids.

If I get hit, I get hit.

I don’t know how I could face the idea of knowing that I put my kids in harm’s way through my example and guidance. A parent’s primary responsibility is to teach and nurture.

To dispense advice and information to help their offspring navigate situations safely.

But how do you protect your kids and yourself from attack, when the evidence is stacking up that it could happen at any time, in any conditions?

While I know it has probably always been this way, it just feels that the dial on the likelihood of a shark interaction here on the North Coast has moved from implausible to distinctly possible.

Two days after the attack I’m at a loss with what to do.

Normally I’d get up, we’d pack the car and go find a wave. Now I don’t want to. Well, I do want to, but I’m hesitant to.

This is the rhythm and rhyme of my life, but now it’s out of sync.

I lag.

I do the washing, tidy the house.

But.

It’s sunny, it’s offshore, a classic winters day. So we pack the car with boards, wetsuits, and towels. Just in case.

We arrive to be greeted with groomed little two-foot peaks under a light offshore. God, it looks tempting.

I bump into an old local. He’s a member of the bite club. Took a hit from a bull shark at the local back beach after a flood, surfing in murky water in 2001. Used a leg rope to tourniquet his thigh, climbed the headland, drove himself fifteen minutes to the local hospital and passed out laying into the horn as he rolled into the emergency bay.

The kids look, wait for me to give them the cue.

Are we going out?

Nope.

Not today.

We walk the beach, climb the headland, continually scan the waves, kick a football on the beach, try to resist temptation.

I bump into an old local, now in his late sixties, still as surf stoked as ever. The number of days he has left to surf are winding down he knows, got to get as many go-outs in as he can before he can’t go out no more.

He’s a member of the bite club. Took a hit from a bull shark at the local back beach after a flood, surfing in murky water in 2001. Used a leg rope to tourniquet his thigh, climbed the headland, drove himself fifteen minutes to the local hospital and passed out laying into the horn as he rolled into the emergency bay.

“You’ll be right to go out” I joke. “What are the odds of getting hit twice?”

“Not today,” he says. “Best to leave it for a bit.”

The rational part of both of us knows that the chances of anyone getting hit today are the same as any other day. But it just doesn’t feel right. It just doesn’t feel responsible for me to allow my kids into that environment, barely twenty-five kilometres and under forty-eight hours from where a kid basically the same age died a traumatic death simply enjoying what my kids want to enjoy right now.

I know all the arguments.

I’ve subscribed and parroted them myself. You’ve got more chance of dying on the way to the beach, you enter their environment at your own risk, a life lived in fear is a life half lived. But today I look at the ocean, and I look at my son and daughter and I just can’t bring myself to allow them to enter the water. Not today.

I know it can’t last.

The lure of surf is now as much a part of their lives as it is mine.

And a small part of me now curses that.

Curses the fact that my kids are now infatuated and enamored with this lifestyle and environmental interaction we call surfing.

Mani Hart-Deville, there for the grace of God go I, could have been my son or daughter in the great game of chance that now seems to be the act of surfing on the NSW North Coast.

One day soon, we’ll go surfing again.

We’ll be wary at first, tentative and skittish.

And if we’re lucky, with time things will again begin to feel, well, normal.

The ocean will hopefully become a place again of feeling joy and exhilaration, rather than of trepidation.

I want my kids to still love surfing, to still feel alive in the ocean.

But I don’t want to lose my kids in the ocean, don’t want to see them pulled clinging to life from the sea.

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