Orange County surfer describes terrifying moment he was almost killed in front of his son by a pod of dolphins trying to outrace oil spill!

This is the end, beautiful friend.

Friday happened to find me in Huntington Beach, California with two great friends and our young charges. We had gone to the shore, after a morning of school, to watch the Pacific Airshow. It was hot, apocalyptic hot, and as the Canadian Snowbirds flew in formation overhead it felt generally apocalyptic too.

There was a fine swell in the sheet glass though not one surfer out. It seemed disallowed, maybe in case one of the Snowbirds fell out of formation and into the lineup. One jet skier patrolled back and forth making sure it all stayed empty and would have opportunity to chase the odd hopeful who had trundled to water’s edge half wetsuited clutching yellowed funboard.

He would have to trundle back, legs very sweaty and observing the grimace became more enjoyable than fighter jets doing cutbacks.

Pleasure craft turned the area north of the pier all the way to 9th street into a Waterworld-esque parking lot. Freighters, waiting in line to unload cargo at Los Angeles’s overworked port stretched across the entire horizon.

A dystopia straight out of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s fevered dreams.

Little did I know oil had begun to seep from an offshore pipeline and would eventually dump more than 144,000 gallons into the brine. Little did I know the following morning a pod of dolphins fleeing that black death would almost kill a surfer in front of his son.

Joe Mozingo described his encounter in The Los Angeles Times, writing:

I had waited until midmorning for the tide to go down and the small waves to show a bit more strength. By 10:30 I had caught a few crumblers at the south end of Bolsa Chica State Beach and was paddling back out, when about 10 dolphins tore through the heavy crowd of surfers. One broke through the surface just a few feet ahead of me. “Whoa!” I said. They were racing north as fast as I’d ever seen.

Dolphins are a common sight in Huntington. But they usually saunter around, and swim fast only when they’re riding waves. When they do dart like that, it can be unnerving because they come alarmingly close, and at more than 300 pounds, they could cause a disastrous collision.

But I’ve never seen them make a mistake, so I just sat there and marveled for a minute. You could track them by watching the startled reaction of surfers as they moved up the coast.

“I’d never seen them do that,” I muttered to the surfer next to me, who looked gobsmacked.

When the boat wake had all but destroyed the surf, I went in. My son was already on the beach. “Dad, that dolphin almost killed you,” he said.

“Did you see that?” I asked, surprised he could see it from the beach. “That was insane.”

“It was like they were running from something,” he said.

Running from the end of the world.

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Beloved Australian pro surfer cried for three days after receiving “heavy” death threats in Hawaii following lighthearted criticism of World Surf League! “I’ve never been back to the North Shore, it scarred me so f#$king bad!”

"Then I get a call from this girl at Globe and she’s gone to meet up with Sunny (Garcia). Then, a text, that reads, ‘Lock the doors!’"

Five years ago at the 2016 Surfer Poll awards in Hawaii, and during a group acceptance speech by Globe teamriders for best movie, the Australian surfer Noa Deane leaned into the microphone and said, “Fuck the WSL!” 

The throwaway line caused much distress and Noa issued an apology shortly after. 

”I would like to apologise for my actions 2 nights ago at the surfer poll awards, it was incredibly stupid, what i said was not targeted at any of the surfers on tour and they are on there because they are the best surfers in the world. I truly respect them and above all I’d like to apologise to the people of Hawaii and any kids watching. I’m meant to be a role model in surfing and my actions on the night were not appropriate and that was not the time or place to voice that opinion.

“My only goal was to raise the point of surfing not becoming a corporate sport like football but I can see and acknowledge how I came across and I am sorry… I’m truly humbled to receive the AI award someone who I looked up to as a kid and loved his surfing, and can’t believe that I over shadowed the honour with my actions later in the evening.

“Apologies to any one I have offended.”

Ugh. 

As Longtom wrote six months ago, 

“The original comment by Noa Deane, who was a mere four months into his post-teen life, was ridiculed and moralised by the usual suspects but has assumed a quiet staying power and historical significance.

“The immediate blowback for Deane was swift, but the usual evangalizing nonsense missed the mark big time.

“Fuck the WSL has endured, the blowback is long forgotten.”

Now, and as revealed on the wildly popular surfing podcast Ain’t That Swell, the repercussions on the ground were serious. 

Guests Creed McTaggart and “Baby” Dion Agius, who were on stage when the immortal line was issued, say Noa didn’t leave his room at the Turtle Bay Hotel for three days and that he cried for most of it. 

Creed,

 “Noa was getting fucking death threats! He cried for three days!… When he said it, everyone went…ohhhhhh…crickets… no one clapped. Next day, shit went down, shit hit the fan, fucking, all the heavies came around. I went over there, me and Toby (Cregan) just to make him feel better. He was so fucking rattled. But, now, it’s so fucking good, the best fucking quote ever. He nailed it! We go on trips and, randomly, at a bar or whatever, someone will see Noa and say, Fuck the WSL! And he’s like… aaaaaaaay! It’s his catchphrase!”

Dion,

“It was absolutely fucked. The North Shore is already scary as fuck, heavies everywhere. And I’m so fucking freaked out. I’ve heard all these rumours about people coming to bash us and shit. My buddy said, buy some whisky, have some sips, calm down. Then I get a call from this girl at Globe and she’s gone to meet up with Sunny (Garcia). Then, a text, that reads, ‘Lock the doors!’ Are you fucking kidding me? What? I’m texting back, what context? What do you fucking mean? I grabbed everyone’s passports and laptops ‘cause I thought people would come and bash me and trash the house. I grabbed everyone’s shit and hit it in a tiny cupboard and walked down the beach. 

“I didn’t know what to do. I’m about to get fucking lit by a bunch of massive Hawaiians so I started walking down the beach with a towel over my head. And I’m walking down the beach and I hear, ‘Dion! Dion!’ I’m fucking dead. I’m about to die. And it’s fucking Julian Wilson pulling up on his golf cart and he goes, ‘How are you, mate?’ And I go, ‘I’m about to fucking die!’ And I went and laid on the beach for five hours shaking. 

“My buddy Dylan who saw how rattled I was said, ‘We’re going to Honolulu’, booked a big hotel room, the big fucking pink one, then I left Hawaii and I’ve never been back it scarred me so fucking bad. It was fucked. It was honestly fucked!” 

Creed, 

“Then Parko came and lit up  Deany, ‘What the fuck was that!’ Parko was going Gold Coast heavy on him. Deany was, ‘I know, I’m sorry!’ and wrote this huge apology or whatever. 

Good times! Listen here, thirty-nine minutes in… 

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UFC hall-of-famer and survivor of horror near-death episode in wavepool, Baby Jay “BJ” Penn, to run for governor of Hawaii! “We will get rid of all vaccine passports. Hawaii will be vaccinated with Aloha!”

"I am not here to fit in with the other politicians, I am here to get our freedoms back!"

One of MMA’s greatest, the Hawaiian who took the spotlight off the UFC heavyweights and turned it onto the little guys, has announced his candidacy for governor of Hawaii. 

Hawaiian-born Jay Dee Penn, who is forty-two and of Irish-American and Korean-Hawaiian descent, posted a clip from the movie Sparta with the following call to arms, 

I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life but I would never run from a fight or sell out my people. As soon as I step into Hawaii’s Governor office I will remove All new federal and state mandates that have been hurting our economy, residents, and ‘ohana. We will get the best doctors, medicines, therapies, and health care the world has to offer to fight this pandemic and always keep Hawaii among the safest and healthiest states in the union. We will get rid of all vaccine passports. Hawaii will be a vaccinated with Aloha and Unvaccinated with Aloha policy for everyone. Same with the masks 😷. We will follow the constitution to the tee 👌. I am not here to fit in with the other politicians, I am here to get our freedoms back!

The election takes place on November 8, 2022, with the incumbent, democrat David Ige, ineligible to run due to govs being allowed only two terms. 

BJ was in the news two months ago when he was recounted his near-death episode at a wave pool. 

Last year when I got sucked into a wave pool engine room and thought I was going to die… I kept thinking “don’t die for your kids” I was surfing for a about an hour and the line started getting longer to catch the wave. I was sitting next to the owner of the wave pool by the “wall” where the waves come from. The first wave it shoots out is a dud to get everyone ready for the next wave. The dud wave came back and because I was so close to the wall the wave swallowed me and pushed me and my surfboard underneath a huge cement wall. I remember feeling like I was getting sucked in a pipe and at that moment I got scared. It ended up pushing me into a big dark cement room that fills up with water to push the next wave for the wave pool. It felt like I was in the movie SAW or Final destination. The room would fill up with water to the top and I would hold my breath and then it would push the water out to make the wave and it was really rough inside there. Everything I bumped up against in the room that hurt me got infected. I got a bad sinus infection and a couple facial fractures from getting knocked around the cement walls and from the fractures the dirty water got in my face and infected my whole sinus. I was on antibiotics for three weeks for my face. While I was in the wave pool engine room I knew that one of my friends outside from big island is a legendary surfer and I knew he would come in there to rescue me so I stayed calm. A lot of other people might have panicked and maybe gave up but I just stayed strong for my kids. Anyway to make a long story short I survived that mother fucker 😛😛😛 !! The name of the people and water park have been left out. I not the kine guy shows up to your house to play and gets hurt and tries to sue you so all love ❤️ to everyone who helped me get there and helped me survive 🤙 Maybe I was the first guy in history to get sucked into a wave pool engine room while it is in operation but no matter what happens in life and no matter how scary it is if I can offer you any advice I would just say to “stay calm”. If I didn’t fight tough cunts my whole life I might have panicked, but it was just another day in the office

Shane Dorian, who was the legendary Big Island surfer who saved BJ, replied,

“Happy you kept it together down there. That was really terrifying. Live to shred another day!”

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Kauai colonist, electric surf-adjacent foil enthusiast Mark Zuckerberg has “worst day ever” as Facebook, Instagram crash after damning insights from whistleblower!

Black coal, white face.

Oh but to be the world’s 5th richest man today, of all dang days. To feel his pain, to bear his pressure, to have the winsome joy of e-foiling off the coast of Kauai, a hefty percentage of which you own, not able to salve the pain of hammers.

Oh not hammers by Kauai locals looking to choke (Whoop here) but the hammers, first of a whistleblower who absolutely damned Zuckerberg’s Facebook empire on 60 Minutes, then of an internet meltdown.

(FYI I’m happy that the spellchecks don’t force me to capitalize “Internet” anymore and feel my force re-spelling “internet” is a small part of that. Fuck the Internet.)

Today, Zuckerberg’s Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp crashed heaping black coals on a whiteface.

Per the Associate Press:

The massive global outage that plunged Facebook, its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms and many people who rely heavily on these services — including Facebook’s own workforce — into chaos Monday is gradually dissipating.

Facebook said late Monday that it’s been working to restore access to its services and is “happy to report they are coming back online now.” The company apologized and thanked its users for bearing with it. But fixing it wasn’t as simple as flipping a proverbial switch. For some users, WhatsApp was working for a time, then not. For others, Instagram was working but not Facebook, and so on.

Facebook did not say what might have caused the outage, which began around 11:40 a.m. ET and was still not fixed more than six hours later.

“This is epic,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for Kentik Inc, a network monitoring and intelligence company. The last major internet outage, which knocked many of the world’s top websites offline in June, lasted less than an hour. The stricken content-delivery company in that case, Fastly, blamed it on a software bug triggered by a customer who changed a setting.

Oh but to be the Cesar cut aficionado, out e-foiling with this on plate.

Not a chill sesh.

Much stress.

More as the story develops.

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Witness Jared Davis describes the attack…

Witness describes banal horror of Great White attack on northern Californian surfer, “I saw the dorsal fin and the tail fin of the shark go down in the water… It definitely wasn’t a quick attack. It was nice and slow.”

"It looked like he had a red stripe on his wetsuit… that was actually blood."

A witness to yesterday’s Great White attack on a surfer at Salmon Creek, a pretty wild sorta beach north of San Francisco, has described it as “nice and slow.” 

Jared Davis was paddling into the crowded lineup with a pal around nine when a swell rose and revealed a man floating in the water. 

“When he was back into view, I saw the dorsal fin of the shark and then I saw the tail fin of the shark kind of going down into the water,” Davis told KPIX. “It definitely wasn’t a quick attack. It was nice and slow.”

The surfer screamed “shark” and “help”; Davis paddled alongside him to the beach.  

“He had kind of caught up to me and I saw his leg. It looked like he had a red stripe on his wetsuit, which is pretty common but that was actually blood,” said Davis. 

Paramedic Jonathon Bauer asked the victim, a man in his thirties, if he saw the shark. 

“And he did get a chance to see it and it was a pretty large shark that did bite him,” Bauer told KPIX. “He actually said he had a struggle with it, as well.”

The man’s surfboard, a Libtech Ringer, was marked by a ring of bloody teeth marks. 

It ain’t the first time Whites have hit surfers at Salmon Creek, although the name would suggest there might be a reason why. 

Two years ago, a local surfer, Katie Wilson, was a hundred yards offshore when a White bit her leash and started to yank it and thrash around. It broke and she got outta there. 

In 2005, another surfer Megan Halavais, was hit by an almost twenty-foot White, the shark’s bite just missing the femoral artery in her leg.

I had thought about being attacked, but never really pictured it in my head. I didn’t think the shark would be that big and yes it was very very powerful,” said Megan in an interview with Surfer. “I thought I was going to die. I screamed, but everyone said that it wasn’t a high-pitched loud scream, but a blood-curdling yell for help. I just remember thinking I was gonna die, then the desire to survive.”

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