Greatest of All-Time: Princess Ingrid Alexandra of Norway, second in line for the throne, wins country’s National Junior Championship in surfing!

Your new favorite professional surfer.

Kelly Slater who? On Saturday, Princess Ingrid Alexandra of Norway scored a heat total of 12.83 in grey 1 ft surf to win her country’s National Junior Championship in surfing on Borestranden Beach in Jæren. Her father, Crown Prince Haakon and mother, Crown Princess Mette-Marit and Prince Sverre Magnus, were there, on the rocky shore, to watch.

The princess, it is said, has always been fascinated with our surfing life and, when confirmed in 2019, was given a gift certificate for a surfing course where it is assumed she had very much fun.

She is the eldest child in her family and expected to succeed her grandfather King Harald V and become the country’s second female monarch.

Princess Ingrid is now, by far and away, my favorite professional surfer and I would like, very much, for her to appoint BeachGrit as the Royal Anti-Depressive Surf Website of the Norwegian Crown. We will have Karl Ove Knausgård come and write for us and show that hack William Finnegan how memoir is really done.

We will also take over the World Surf League, by royal decree, and make it a proper show with winners getting chaired up the beach in thrones and losers being locked in the dungeon plus all the other stuff we used to talk about like cutting the field in half, running events in one swell window, etc.

Very exciting times ahead.

Long live the princess.


Sam Hall, on a happy vacay in Nicaragua, left, and molested surfboard, right.

Breaking: Sydney surfer fights off shark at Manly Beach, “The mouth came up at me…I threw the board at it!”

"My hands were on the tail of the board and I didn't have a leggie on so then I threw the board at it and then squirmed my way in as fast as I could."

Sydney surfer Sam Hall has described a pretty wild hit by a suspected Bronze Whaler shark last Wednesday at Manly on Sydney’s northside.

Sam, a twenty-nine-year-old who works in energy renewables and is pals with shredder/artist Billy Bain, was surfing a hundred or so yards offshore at a bank between Queenscliff and North Steyne.

Sunset.

Murky water.

Had the bank to himself; another two surfers batted away a little further north.

“Then it just emerged in front of me, one metre away. I didn’t even see a fin,” he says. “The mouth came up at me and I was lying on the board so I was able to push the nose of my board in front of me. It took a bite off the side. My hands were on the tail of the board and I didn’t have a leggie on so then I threw the board at it and then squirmed my way in as fast as I could. The tide was slow so I was trying to find where the sandbank was and stand up. Not knowing at the time if it might come back. It was a frantic moment.”

On the beach, another surfer said he saw the shark circling Sam.

“I was lucky that I was facing it,” says Sam. “It would’ve taken a good chunk out of me based on the depth of the teeth in my board. They’re not thick but they’re fucking sharp.”

Standing on the beach, shaken and very stirred, Sam describes the moment as “surreal… coming to the beach and trying to explain it and not having the validation from other people.”

Later, Sam called the government’s Fisheries department and spoke to a senior biologist who surmised that it was probably a Whaler shark and that it was a hit out of aggression not hunger.

How rattled was he?

Sam says he’s still processing the event, he got on the booze a couple of days later so “everything’s put on hold”, but says he was “frazzled” and that he’s having night thoughts of the “different scenarios of what could’ve gone down.”

Still, could’ve been worse.

“There’s been a big White cruising around (Fairy) Bower and Deadies (Deadman’s), heaps of activity in the water.”

Sam laughs.

“It’s all happening.”

(Check out this White at Manly, from last week.)

 


Loyson, pictured, on the last wave he will ever catch.
Loyson, pictured, on the last wave he will ever catch.

Belgian pervert arrested in Australia funding lavish surf vacation by selling child pornography: “A vile and disgusting crime perpetrated by the very worst sort of human being.”

A truly bad man.

Dante Alighieri, the 13th century Italian poet, is best known to us moderns for his sweeping Divine Comedy. Penned over a twelve-year span and finished a year before his death, the masterwork imagines the afterlife and includes stops in hell, purgatory and heaven.

Hell, or inferno, has nine circles with limbo being the most chill, lusty men and women getting blown by an unpleasant wind, gluttons getting rotted away by an icy wind, the greedy having to perpetually carry heavy weights and so on and so forth until we arrive at the ninth circle where those who have treacherously betrayed others are stuck in a frozen lake of ice near Satan.

It can be certain, when he dies, the Belgian pervert Bryan Loyson, 26, will end in the ninth but until then he will be forced to endure Australian prison for a too-short portion of his wretched life.

Loyson had traveled to the Lucky Country to surf, skydive and sit in claw foot bathtubs while drinking red wine in luxury hotels. He paid for his lifestyle by selling child pornography online.

The Australian Federal Police was tipped off by the United States Center for Missing and Exploited Children that a man in Australia was using the social media platform Snapchat to advertise his ugly wares and, after a three-month investigation, Loyson was arrested in Sydney.

Police officers confiscated everything he had and had him dead to rights.

AFP Assistant Commissioner Justine Gough said. “Every image being shared and bought on this website was of a child being abused. Bringing these offenders from online anonymity to jail is what drives the AFP to keep children safe.”

Early last week, Loyson pleaded guilty to supplying child pornography through a carriage service, using a carriage service to access, transmit, make available, publish, distribute, advertising or promote child abuse material and received a four-year prison sentence with possibility of parole after two-and-a-half years.

Much too short a portion of his wretched life but, as surfers, we can see to it that he never catches another wave. If you see this face bobbing in your lineup drop in, punch out his fins then punch out whichever teeth he has remaining in his head.


Listen: Surfing hall-of-famer Barton Lynch talks anarchy, his brutal rivalry and friendship with Martin Potter and the hostility of the pro tour: “It wasn’t a loving organism at all. I was drowning, I was dying in there!”

One in a million… 

Today’s guest is the former world champion surfer Barton Lynch famous, now, for his oratorical gymkhanas on WSL broadcasts and for his annual, week-long junior events, less so for his former careers as a butterfly collector and anarchist.

Although warmed slightly by age, for he is fifty-seven years old, Barton will occasionally open up a front if he feels his electrons shuddering.

In this hour or so of chatter, Barton at his house at Sunset Beach, Hawaii, me performing badly by wandering away from the microphone, talk hits life, death, animism and the joy of existence.

A man who is truly one in a million.


Al Hunt, left, and Kelly Slater. | Photo: Steve Sherman/@tsherms/

World tour’s legendary number cruncher Al Hunt is selling every single surfing magazine ever made for $US150,000…

Free shipping!

Al Hunt, the legendary former administrator and head judge for the former pro surfing body called ASP, is selling his collection of every single surfing magazine ever made* for the not entirely unreasonable price of $US150,000, including shipping to anywhere in the world and an accompanying website.

Hunt, who is seventy and whose titanic girth rewarded him with the nickname Fatty Al, asks the prospective buyer to, “think about it that’s only just $8 per mag and with shipping these days it costs that much for one Ebay mag. Some obviously worth hundreds of dollars some over a thousand.

“Complete sets of nearly every major magazine worldwide plus all the highly collectible 60’s and 70’s ones. More than half of the mags have never been read or even flicked through so are in perfect new condition. In the high time of surf mags I was receiving over 70 per month so no time to look at them. These days not so many in production and only two titles are now monthly.

“Reason for selling is I am retiring the end of this year and right now my garage is full of mags and other surf items and I will be downsizing the family home so no where to keep them.

“Along with the mags there are thousands of surf event posters, mostly multiples of each, including Triple Crown and Eddie Aikau ones, stickers (Eddies) and magazine double ups around 3000-5000 (not sure). Everything ready to be put on Ebay and make some money.”

Want it?

Email Al at [email protected]

*Except, maybe, first issue of Stab. I burnt most of ’em in a (failed) bid to make ’em collectable.