Fifties-fab and pregnant with the fingerprints of the Gold Coast's most successful surfer ever… 

The world surfing champion turned property tycoon Mick Fanning has listed his “retro beach pad” at 2/219 Boundary Street, Rainbow Bay to rent for a very affordable four hundred dollars per week, with a sixteen-hundred dollar surety, refundable if you don’t destroy the joint. 

The apartment, one of two in the duplex, features two bedrooms, one bathroom, and is, even at the slowest canter, or with legs heavy from much surfing, ten minutes walk from the Snapper Rocks jump rock (if you dare). 

Mick, who is forty, bought the duplex in 2005 and two years before his first world title, for $1.39 million. 

The following year he bought another joint for $1.2 mill and in 2007 swiped his card on an apartment block in the same street, number 213, for $3.1 million before selling it in February, this year, for $2.86 mill.

The shock loss, close to a mill after a fancy reno and buying and selling costs and maintenance, was a lesson in the caprices of the Australian property market. 

Rent Mick’s apartment here, move in date May 7. 

Carson joins titans of the creative game including directors Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee on Masterclass… 

The surfer David Carson is the world’s most imitated graphic designer, at least among magazines that do “hip” and “edge” and who like to break every typographic rule there is while straight-jacketing themselves to another set of strictures.

Carson, who is sixty-five, re-tooled Surfer magazine in 1991, Matt Warshaw calling his work “jarring but innovative”, and added “a majority felt, as one Pasadena subscriber put it, that the new look was “jumbled, ugly, chaotic and hard to read.”

The prestigious Harvard Graduate School of Design asked Carson to create publicity and posters. Apple called him one of the 30 most Influential Mac users ever. London Creative Review magazine named him the most famous graphic designer on the planet.

A big name, therefore, in the design game.

Now, thanks to online education platform Masterclass, you can sign up for thirteen lessons in graphic design from the little master whose surfer bona fides are proved by the fact he was once invited to the prestigious Smirnoff Pro Am in Hawaii.

Lessons include, An intuitive approach to design, send a message with typography, using photography in design, developing a logo, life as a working designer, tapping into the power of colour, collage art for designers, working with clients, designing impactful magazines , designing your future and making it happen.

A hundred and eighty, US, buys a yearly sub to Masterclass, which includes skateboarding with Tony Hawke, shooting threes with Steph Curry, how to make grits with Gordon Ramsey, self-expression and authenticity with Ru Paul and so on.

Regular readers will recall Carson’s brush on the island of Tortola, where he keeps a fine spread overlooking the blue-water right-hander Cane Garden Bay, at the height of COVID mania.

As the island bunkered down to fight the spread of Coz-vid number nineteen, Carson flouted its six-day long twenty-four hour lockdown law to ride empty three-to-four-foot CGB, posting the event on his Instagram page.

Six years ago, Carson designed, at BeachGrit‘s behest, 151 new logos for the WSL.

The existing logo, he said, “has no soul. The logo just doesn’t represent the sport very well. It’s pedestrian, unoriginal, forgettable,  safe, gentrified and corporate. All things surfing is NOT, at least to me.”

Readers were divided. 

A surfer to the bone but also with a few things to say about making pretty pictures.

“We do everything we can to protect our way of life.”

Western Australia’s ultra-cautious and as a recent election proved, ultra-popular, left-wing premier Mark McGowan has thrown Perth and a stretch of coast hundred clicks south into an immediate three-day lockdown after a mammy, her kid and a man got poz for COV in their quarantine hotel.

A little under two-and-a-half mill souls are now stuck inside their hovels over the Anzac Day long weekend, one hour a day for exercise, bars, gyms, cinemas, libraries all closed, masks everywhere etc. 

“We have gone more than 12 months of no community transmission and our lives in Western Australia have been normal compared to what we have seen around the world,” McGowan said. “We do everything we can to protect our way of life.”

Checkpoints are being assembled on roads leading out of Perth, cops ready to wrangle any escapees.

The decision has put the WSL’s two-contest Western Australian leg, an event at Margaret River, starting in a little over a week, followed by Rottnest, starting May 16, on a knife’s edge with other states declaring WA a “red zone”, meaning when you swing back from West Oz, depending on what state you’re entering, you might be stuck doin’ two more weeks in a quarantine hotel. 

And while Margaret River has been excluded from this lockdown, Rottnest Island, eleven miles west of Perth, falls under the same rules as Perth. 

And,

Even though the lockdown is slated to end on midnight on Monday, the state has shown it ain’t afraid to bring down the shutters real fast if even one case of the disease the premier describes as “insidious” appears.

The WSL is expected to release a presser shortly, detailing contingency plans and so on.

"I don't like Jake Paul but I respect him."

A week back, superstar YouTuber-turned occasional pro boxer Jake Paul wiped the floor, as they say, with the almost-forty-year-old Olympic wrestler and retired MMA fighter, Ben Askren. 

Paul, twenty-four, knocked out Askren, whose boxing skills were as paltry as his grappling skills are mighty, two minutes into the first round, the fight stopped by the ref. 

Still, Askren got a guaranteed half-mill for the fight plus, likely, bonuses from the pay-per-view; Paul got 690k plus bonuses. 

One man watching the debacle, “Why was the public so interested in two guys who weren’t very good at boxing, boxing?” asked ESPN,” was the Hawaiian surfer Eli Olson.

Eli, a twenty-eighty-year-old jiujitsu black belt who grew up shredding alongside the Florence bro’s, was moved enough by the cash being thrown around and the absurdity of the event to issue his own challenge. 

Would Jake Paul, six-two, a couple hundred pounds, and with twenty million subscribers, have the balls to take on a slim Hawaiian surfer, five-ten, one-sixty, with 18.7k subs? 

“I don’t like Jake Paul, but I respect him,” says Eli, “People say he sucks but he’s actually got talent.”

About the Askren bout he says, “I thought it would last a little longer. I’m actually a fan of Ben, he’s one of the best wrestlers in the world but he never ever trained boxing and it showed.” 

Eli says the reasons for his post was the, likely, two-mill total Jake Paul made.

“That’s life-changing money. It started as a joke. Then when so many people, including Slater, started reposting my post and it got momentum, I thought, people actually wanna watch this.”

I ask about strategy. Eli ain’t a dud with the ten ounce gloves like Askren but he ain’t pro, either.

“Even though people are calling him the YouTube guy, he’s had more time in the ring than me. He’s had three fights, I have zero. I’d try and rely on footwork and speed. He’s bigger and has more power so I’d rely on footwork and speed. I’d be a hard target, tag him as much as I could. Either land a flurry to rock him or drag him into deeper water and rely on cardio, him getting slower and slower as each round goes. He’s never gone longer than three rounds.”

Say it did happen, and Eli did walk away with a couple of mill, he says he’d throw it down on a swinging crib on the North Shore, although it’d have to be Backyards, Rockies or Log Cabins. 

“Everything at Pipe and Off the Wall is five million or more,” says Eli. 

Eli’s also realistic enough to know it ain’t the best idea for Paul to take on the relatively unknown and smaller Hawaiian. 

“It doesn’t really make sense to him if he’s a lot bigger, and I’m not some superstar, and if he had the risk of possibly losing it’d be more negative than positive.”