Feted shaper now part-owner of Sydney's version of The Hamptons…

Many years ago, I wrote a story called The Most Beautiful Shaper in the World.

I commented, “He is still the most fantastic looking man I have ever seen and what sleepless nights he caused me!”

Back then, there was no delicacy to his exceptionally virile merchandise. He was as blood ripe as they come.

The women, including my girlfriend, maybe my girlfriend most of all, had to be treated for spells of dizziness. Worse, his surfboards were addictive and try as I did, I couldn’t be indifferent to his skills

These days, however, the crown of Most Beautiful Shaper in the World, held for thirty years in Coolangatta, Queensland, now resides in one of two houses in Palm Beach, Sydney’s version of New York’s The Hamptons.

Hayden Cox, who is thirty-eight, and married to the marketing whiz Danielle Cox, née Foote, has rolled his biz HaydenShapes into one of the most popular surfboard brands in the world.

He is a wonderful story of a driven kid who shucks the expectations of his family (accountancy!) to learn to shape, build a surfboard company, create a unique method of surfboard construction and, eventually, be feted by icons as diverse as Audi and Alexander Wang.

And success buys pretty things.

Four years ago, Hayden and Danielle bought an old waterfront house with 180 degree views of the estuary called Pittwater for $1.8 mill and which they sold after a gorgeous renovation earlier this year for $3.6 million.

Since that sale, the pair have bought a waterfront house at nearby Clareville for $3,337,500, currently available to rent at $2200 a week, ten gees a month, roughly, and a 1950s three-level, four-bedder “beach shack” on monied Pacific Drive, with panoramic views, for a little under three-mill.

Examine here. 

(And walk through the world’s slickest surfboard shop here.)

Battle of the heavyweights.

A three-ton elephant seal has been filmed chasing a Great White shark away from the easy kill of baby seals on Robberg Peninsula in Plettenberg Bay, South Africa. 

The elephant seal, named Solo, is a popular attraction for tourist operators in Plett, looking adorable as he sleeps on the mountain or frolicking in the Cape’s cold water, his snout fixed into a permanent grin. 

Here, the White gets real close to seizing a bebe before daddy swings in.

Two things you’ll take away from the vision, below. 

One, that the Great White is, mostly, an opportunistic predator and is averse to anything that might give it hell (buy Biteback stainless steel spikes here, designed to stab apex predators where it hurts) and, two, clear water, Plettenberg Bay, mmmm, that name and that colour water sure do ring a bell. 

Yeah, four months ago, the same drone pilot that snatched this footage, fourteen-year-old  Luka Oosthuizen, generated a thousand headlines when he filmed a twelve-foot White swimming through a group of surfers during a clear-water middle of the day sesh fifty feet or so from the beach.

Even crazier thing was, the day after “a whirlwind of interviews from all over the world”, the kid took his bird up in the sky and filmed another White swimming through surfers.

Good times.

"A brave, brave soul."

For Jan Golebiowski the surfer who tried to save his buddy Andrew Sharpe from a “monster” Great White at Kelpies, in Esperance, on Friday morning, it was a dreadful feeling of déjà vu.

In 2006, his kid brother Zac, fifteen at the time, was surfing a knee-deep sandbank at Wharton Beach, a sheltered joint between Cape Le Grand and Cape Arid National Parks, when he was hit by a ten-foot White, the animal taking his entire right leg.

“It came from the side and it felt like what’d you’d imagine a big king hit to be like,” Zac told The Guardian. “A very big strike. It was a full-on horizontal attack in water that was only just head height. When I take my friends to where the attack happened they are always amazed that a shark attack could have happened there. The shark bit [off] my leg and the force of the bite took me down, pulled me under. There was no fighting for air. It was too shallow for that. It took me under and let go. I came straight back up and called for help. The [2.5-metre to three-metre) shark was probably a juvenile, curious, experimenting maybe. If it had been bigger it would have bitten me in half. A big shark in full hunting mode, it would have been carnage. [My brother] said it circled a couple of times. It could have attacked two more people but didn’t. Any higher up my leg and it would have got [major] arteries.”

Ten years later, Zac, who sank into a years-long depression, became a bodyboarder and moved to South Australia, returned to Esperance for a camping vacay to mark a decade since the attack. He was swinging back to town after surfing Whartons and passed the turn-off to Kelpies at the same time a Great White was attacking, and killing, teenage surfer Laticia Brouwers.

“It felt like returning to the scene of a crime,” said Zac.

On Friday, big bro Jan was among a group of fifteen-to-twenty surfers enjoying what another local Ross Tamlin describes as “perfection conditions” when the shark hit.

“Obviously everything panics at the time when they realise what’s happening. The guy who was closest to him, Jany, tried to render help but I think it was all too much for him and he paddled in. Jan’s a very brave man, he’s a hero,” Tamlin told The Sunday Times. “And he was great mates with Sharpey, so for him to obviously try and render assistance – brave, brave soul…your initial thoughts are obviously with the surfer and you want to render assistance as much as possible. That’s what we all wanted to try and do, whether you can actually achieve that and do anything is another story.”

Tamlin said the dorsal fin and tail fin of the White were so big his initial thought was there were two sharks.

“I’ve never seen a dorsal fin that big before, not even in media footage,” he said.

The Western Australia premier Mark McGowan has ruled out drum lines (“We’re not putting in drum lines because there are people in the water”) and, instead, said his government will increase its Great White tagging program.

"How do you co-op a Black woman’s work just like that? Proof that they take EVERYTHING from us."

The World Surf League’s CEO Erik “Elo” Logan has had his and his company’s woke bona fides socked by the founder of Black Girls Surf, Rhonda “Rokki” Harper, in a powerful screed posted to Facebook.

(Black Girls Surf was established in 2014 “for young girls/women surfers of the African diaspora. BGS is training and coaching the next gen of surfers ages 5-17.”)

“Part of ‘fighting systemic racism’ includes honoring the labor of Black women, not taking credit for it or using it as inspo for brand activations,” writes Harper. “Listen to this part of the Action Sports + Culture conference I sat and watched in absolute horror. Proof that they take EVERYTHING from us. According to Erik Logan, WSL is responsible for their BLM response and it started with Tyler Wright. I told you the Encinitas George Floyd paddle out was a performance more than a social justice moment. He invokes Harpo…Oprah’s company during this same interview. How do you co-op a Black woman’s work just like that?”

Watch the Elo interview here.

It isn’t the first time Elo’s woke bona fides have been questioned.

Earlier the year, we asked, Is the WSL festishising people of colour and is it this patronising approach masquerading as progressive values that has its potential audience staying away in droves?

And it ain’t the first time Rhonda’s bitten hard on mainstream surf.

Four months ago, Harper called surf identity Sal Masekela an “Uncle Tom” and accused the popular commentator and musician of “bringing negativity and dividing black people.”

“He hasn’t done nothing for black people in surfing!” said Harper, after Sal spoke at a George Floyd paddle-out in Encinitas, a speech described by Stab “as so powerful that it reverberates deep in our core.”

Harper said, “I can’t believe your daddy is Hugh Masekela who was down there with apartheid and you act like this!”