Half of the apartments sold in the first weekend, a wild seventy-one mill in sales.

The three-time world surfing champion Mick Fanning and Rip Curl founder Doug Warbrick have pooled their considerable fortunes to bankroll along with a few others, a wild looking tower with yoga and steam rooms, gymnasiums, a rooftop slide and hanging gardens in Rainbow Bay, where you’ll find Snapper, Greenmount etc. 

Mick and Doug, who both own hunks of dirt in Rainbow, although not on the beachfront side, combined their landholdings into one monster block. 

Doug, y’might recall, came into his cash after selling his slice of Rip Curl to Kathmandu after fifty years of continuous ownership in a total sale worth $350 mill; Mick, who won world titles in 2007, 2009 and 2013 before retiring in 2018 after seventeen years on tour, has long been into real estate as well as various business plays, including Balter Beer which sold one year ago for a rumoured two-hundred mill.

The approval for the tower, which is called Esprit, wasn’t a fait accompli despite Fanning’s god-like status around Coolangatta, with the Gold Coast Council stinging ‘em for a $2.084 million infrastructure charge. 

Council also wanted to green up the joint, getting the “celebrity moguls” to increase the size of planter boxes on the apartments. 

Whatever you think of towers, of development, of the rich getting richer and so on, y’gotta admit, oowee, ain’t she a peach.

Lap pool, ice bath, yoga and steam rooms, infrared sauna, rooftop slide, outdoor cinema and so on. 

Popular? Yeah, you could say that. 

Half of the 93-apartments were bought in the first weekend, a wild seventy-one mill in sales.

A little under two-mill gets a three-bedder, around a mill, and all Australian shekels, gets two beds.

The developer of Esprit is Paul Gedoun who is building the exclusive Flow residences overlooking the Supa Bank at Rainbow Bay.

As I wrote at the time, “Flow’s got all the usual markers of wealth, heated pool, daybeds, steam room, gymnasium, personal surfboard locker rooms, fire pit, even a ‘surfboard preparation room’ where, perhaps, locals might be employed to fix their masters’ surfboards and where lucky children with whisky breath will be free to roam and little dogs sourced from Mexico will be trained to walk on their hind legs.”

V exciting.

Buy Esprit here.

Very Sea of Darkness.

Released, just now, is the Kolohe Andino-funded film, Reckless Isolation, which was filmed during a three-week Coke binge through the Mentawai Islands.

Accompanying the release of the movie is a hard-cover book, which includes a story, written by me,  on one of the movie’s participants, the wanna-be Ultimate Surfer Luke Davis.

Below is one of the story’s duller passages but it does reveal a little about the trip.

Luke describes it as the best trip he’s ever been on, and says the waves were as good as you can get out on this ribbon of seventy islands stretching over a hundred miles just off the Sumatran coast. 

A planned twelve day-charter on the seventy-foot supercat Sibon Jaya turned into twenty three as one swell followed another. Luke surfed for the first sixteen of the twenty-three days, but was benched for the final week after a series of wipeouts. 

“Fuck, we got every wave you wanna get out there. Started out at Lances, firing, three days in a  row, then we had Maccas, we had Thunderbox, that right slab, then we got Rags, we got Greenbush psycho for one day and we ended at Bank Vaults. It was overhead to, like, fifteen-foot faces on the biggest day. Big, big Mentawais. As big as you can get, some of the spots.” 

Luke says Greenbush was a terrifying ride. 

“I hit the reef there so it was fucked. Fuck, it was worse than I’ve had in years. Both hands on the reef, the first time, then had to get a couple of stitches in my hand then I went back out and got a couple of waves then on my third wave I hit my side on the reef and my knees and the top of my feet. I hit my whole body and I was done. That was my last session on that trip. I was kinda fucked.”

As the wave didn’t improve after day sixteen, Luke healed in the air-conditioned saloon, “a solid week of chilling.”

Do you drink, Luke? 

“No, I don’t.” 

It would’ve been much more fun if you drank. 

“No one was drinking. Maybe Crane had a beer at some point. We were downing Coca-Colas and eating candy bars hard core. My teeth started hurting so much.”