Korean car giant Kia creates “every surfer’s dream machine” with custom roof racks that hold “a pair of 7’6 Tahe Bic Malibu surfboards!”

Very cool.

Surfing and automobiles have gone together like peanut butter and chocolate since Californians culturally appropriated the Sport of Kings from Hawaiians just over a century ago. From the 1950s Plymouth Woodie to the 1996 Toyota Landcruiser to the 2018 Porsche Panamera, cars and surfing, surfing and cars.

The possible best ever, though, a surprise out of Korea where Kia has just released what is being described as “every surfer’s dream machine.”

Kia’s Soul EV Boardmasters Edition, not currently available in the United States, was produced in collaboration with the United Kingdom’s Boardmasters Surfing and Music Festival and promises, “a 64.0-kWh battery feeding a 201-horsepower electric motor powering the front wheels, new 16-inch white steel wheels shod in 265/75 R16 Maxxis Bighorn tires, which required redesigned wheel arches.”

What’s more, according to Car and Driver, “There is also steel roof rack that holds a pair of 7’6 Tahe Bic Malibu surfboards and raises the Soul’s height to 76.8 inches. The rack includes a pair of LED spotlights and a solar panel to help recharge the battery pack while you’re out riding the waves.”

Though, watch out as, “Kia acknowledged that these changes would negatively impact the Soul EV’s 280-mile range (on Europe’s WLTP testing cycle).”

Sold yet?

I don’t know why not but, while you’re here, what is the greatest surf car you’ve ever owned?

Mine was a 2018 Porsche Panamera.

I’m wearing BeachGrit trunks in this Porsche ad campaign, in case you were wondering. The trunk (boot) had ample room and with one seat pushed down, children’s faces smashed into windows, could easily fit two 5’11 Channel Islands Twin Pins (buy here).

Very cool.


A recreation of wild scene near Byron Bay.

Wild scenes near Byron Bay as axe-wielding man screaming “I’ll kill you” chases surfer for “hitting” on his mammy; surfboard destroyed in melee!

As the surfer ran for the hills, Berghofer attacked the man’s surfboard “with such force the axe went through the fibreglass”. 

A man has fronted Tweed Heads local court and pleaded guilty to chasing a surfer with an axe, destroying his surfboard and causing relatively minor damage to the taillight of his whip. 

Or, in legal terms, two counts of destroying or damaging property, going armed with intent to commit an indictable offence and common assault.

Michael Todd Berghofer, who is thirty-three, confronted the surfer at a joint called Norries Headland at the backside of Cabarita there, around nine-ten am.

First, he took out the surfer’s tail light with his axe and as the surfer was cleaning a barbecue, yelled, “Trying to hit on my mum, come to my unit block arguing with (mutual friend), I’ll kill you”, and advanced towards victim with axe raised.

As the surfer ran for the hills, Berghofer attacked the man’s surfboard “with such force the axe went through the fibreglass”. 

Court documents reveal the damage was “near impossible” to be repaired. 

In an interview with police, who seized two axes from his property, Berghofer conceded his behaviour wasn’t the best and maybe he was wrong to attack the man for hitting on his mammy. 

His lawyer said, yeah, “completely inappropriate” etc.

The surfer asked the court for six-fifty in damages, one-fifty for his busted tail-light and five hundred for the board. 

The magistrate sentenced Berghofer to an 18-month community corrections order and a 12-month intensive corrections order.

Sadly, cruelly given its the hub around which the entire case revolved, no pictures of hot mama. 


ISA chief Fernando Aguerre rues missed opportunity to show world what surfing is really about at just-wrapped Olympics: “Yoga, environmentalism, classes on how to be environmentally sound as a person. It was a surf initiation.”

Wait, what?

Surfing’s grand Olympic debut is now, officially, one for the record books what with the Tokyo Olympics turning out the lights after two-weeks of heady excitement. The man responsible for getting our favorite pastime into the Games, International Surfing Association chief Fernando Aguerre, was drunk, as we all were, on the hope, the promise, the glory of global acceptance but now comes the hangover.

In a lightly depressing interview to the Associated Press, Aguerre reveals oh what might have been as “an eight-day Olympic Surfing Festival was supposed to ‘revolutionize the Olympic experience” because “it was designed to be an initiation to both the beloved niche sport and its famous laid-back lifestyle.”

And we all know that the surfing lifestyle is as essential to the overall experience as the surfing itself. Cocaine (buy here), talking to strangers about solutions to very challenging problems in beach-adjacent bars at surf movie premiers, riots when inland hordes invade with flat brimmed caps driven crazy by suggestive messages written on underaged bodies etc.

Alas what might have been.

“It was a view of the lifestyle and the culture of surfing,” Aguerre told the AP, “So there was yoga, there was environmentalism, classes on how to be environmentally sound as a person. It was a surf initiation. For me, it’s very sad because this was a very, very new idea. This is not something that happens at Olympic events.”

Yoga, environmentalism and classes on how to be environmentally sound as a person?

Wait, what?


Vaccine sceptic Kelly Slater quotes former VP of Pfizer in social media post to three million fans, “You don’t vaccinate millions of fit and healthy people with a vaccine that hasn’t been extensively tested”

"I'm no epidemiologist," writes Slater.

The eleven-time world surfing champion, the greatest surfer who’s ever lived etc, Kelly Slater, is leveraging his formidable social media platforms to create what he hopes, naively I would suggest, a non-politicised debate around the use of vaccines to fight COVID-19 and its sequels.

The British pharmacologist Michael Yeadon, a former VP of Pfizer, the makers of a popular COVID-19 vaccine, has become the poster-boy of anti-vaxxers for his belief that there’s gonna be a few side effects we don’t know about yet. 

On Instagram, Slater posted an excerpt from an article Yeadon wrote for Daily Sceptic last October,

“There is absolutely no need for vaccines to extinguish the pandemic. I’ve never heard such nonsense talked about vaccines. You do not vaccinate people who aren’t at risk from a disease. You also don’t set about planing to vaccinate millions of fit and healthy people with a vaccine that hasn’t been extensively tested on human subjects.” 

Adding an addendum Slater writes,

“Something to ponder. But I’m no epidemiologist.” 

In a story from March, news agency Reuters tore hell out of Yeadon and his claims etc.

Read that here. 


The Associated Press reports that surfing has been re-appropriated by Hawaii after Carissa Moore’s dynamic Olympic gold medal!

A "come home" moment!

Surfing’s grand Olympic debut is now very much behind us but the impact of the historic day is still reverberating through hearts and minds. Italo Ferreira, plucky Brazilian all-star, won gold in the men’s division and Carissa Moore, Hawaiian-American, won gold in the women’s.

The Associated Press had made news ahead of the games by laying bare to our Sport of Kings, declaring it was culturally appropriated by California whites and deeply unchill. Bill Maher, days later, blasted the AP for pushing its “woke Olympics,” while singling the surfing coverage out as deeply unsettling, going so far as to doubt that it had been appropriated from Hawaiians because Hawaiians likely did not even invent surfing, saying, “How do we know that they were the first to stand on a board on water? It seems like its something that any person near any ocean would eventually do.”

Rude, no?

The AP, undaunted, is now reporting that surfing has officially been re-appropriated from the appropriators by Hawaii, due Moore’s win.

Moore has now become a realization of Kahanamoku’s dream, at once the symbol of the sport’s very best and a validating force for an Indigenous community that still struggles with its complex history.

“It’s a reclaiming of that sport for our native community,” said Kūhiō Lewis, president of the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, which convenes the largest annual gathering of Native Hawaiians.

Lewis said all the locals he knew were texting each other during the competition, glued to the TV and elated, even relieved, by Moore’s “surreal” win. He called it a “come to home moment” for a community that may never reconcile its dispossession.

After centuries of colonization by various European settlers, Hawaii was annexed by the United States in 1898 after the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy by U.S.-backed forces in 1893.

“At times, we’re an invisible people. We’re lumped in to other ethnic groups. Our sport is being defined by other groups. This puts it into perspective,” Lewis said. “It feels like an emerging of a people, of a native community that has been invisible to many.”

Beautiful, no?

Is cranky ol’ Bill Maher going to take another swing?

Moore as the story develops.