"There is definitely no shortage of Great Whites."

A foil-boarder has been hit by a shark at the site of last weekend’s Tweed Heads Pro, the animal leaving behind a tooth in the foil’s resilient carbon fibres. 

If you remember, competitors in the event which was held at a B-grade point called Cabarita half-an-hour south of the Superbank where a surfer was killed by a Great White less than two weeks ago, were cleared when an eight-foot shark swam through the contest area.

Photos and video of the foil-boarder flew around Instagram, the man, a local surfer Christian, surrounded by onlookers as he describes the event. 

https://www.instagram.com/p/CFMGVxvDLE2/

Dorsal Watch reported a fifteen-to-eighteen-foot Great White, as big as they get, “a tank”, swimming through the lineup around the same time.

At Broken Head, same day, a twelve-foot Great White swam through a crowd of fifty surfers, bumping one surfer on its way through. 

At Kirra, a few hundred metres down the beach from the Superbank, surfers were cleared when a shark swam though the lineup. 

Meanwhile, a Gold Coast fisherman says shark numbers are “out of control” and that there is “definitely no shortage of Great Whites. We see them all the time and we never saw them before.

Joel Merchant, thirty-nine and from Tweed Heads, says he’s been fishing for twenty years off the same stretch of coast where there’s been two fatal hits on surfers in the past two months, Rob Pedretti at Kingscliff, Nick Slater at the Superbank. 

“People say they are hungry due to overfishing but you never seen a skinny one, they are all healthy and there is plenty of food for them, they have been left alone and bred up so well and thriving. The chance of interacting with a shark is more and more because there is so many of them.” 

Commercial fisherman, Adrian Cottee, who is based in Yamba two-and-a-half hours south of the Gold Coast, said he he had to “leave the Tweed area two years ago because the sharks were eating the net and everything would fall out. There’s certainly big numbers of sharks out there.” 

Buy your crank-shaft tourniquets here. 

Environmental warrior and billionaire Yvon Chouinard describes Trump administration as "evil".

If you buy a pair of Patagonia’s regenerative, organic stand-up shorts, ninety-nine-ninety-five, you’ll find, embroidered on an inside label, the message, Vote The Assholes Out.

It’s billionaire climber Yvon Chouinard’s hit on any politician that “denies” the climate crisis, not ‘cause they don’t see it happening, but because they’re in the in the pockets of oil and gas companies.

The slogan previously appeared on a t-shirt (buy here) and Chouinard also included the pithy slogan as a postscript to an open letter to 1% for the Planet supporters, a movement created to convince companies to give one percent of sales to environmental tax groups.

“Remember, vote the assholes out — all of those politicians who don’t believe we should do anything about climate change,” Chouinard wrote. “Vote for the planet and against those who would do nothing. We have the power and now is the time to use it.”

(Read here.)

Chouinard, who is eighty-two and founded Patagonia in 1973, has form when it comes to putting his considerable fortune where his mouth is.

Patagonia donates 10 percent of profits to various charities, they do this thing on Black Friday where they donate total profits to grassroots environmental organisations (in 2016 it was ten million dollars), used Patagonia gear can be traded-in via their Worn Wear website and, true to its central coast roots, has its office and flagship store in Ventura.

Chouinard describes the current Trump administration as “evil”.

Patagonia, I’ll admit, doesn’t do a hell of a lot for me. The ritual use of dull browns, the lingering smell of piety, the full silhouettes suited to the fashionably retarded.

And, yet, I’ve always found Yvon Chouinard, the climber and surfer who founded Patagonia, deeply interesting.

One of those men whom you would’ve loved as a childhood mentor.

Teach me to make tools, teach me to scale mountains, teach me to live in the wild.

Read his divine life story as told by The New  Yorker here.