Head-butts surfer, knocks out two front teeth… 

Only eight days after a free-diver filmed a fifteen-foot Great White swimming towards him off the coast of Hawaii’s Big Island, a surfer has reportedly had been hit by a White while surfing Banyans, one of the most popular breaks in the Kailua-Kona area.

Details are scant at the mo but we’re told the surfer has identified the shark as a Great White and said it came at him with its mouth open and hit him so hard in the head it knocked out two of his teeth.

The White dragged the surfer under and, for whatever reason, let him go.

Another surfer paddled the man in.

He is reportedly “deeply traumatised.”

Although Great Whites in Hawaii are rare-ish enough, mostly its Tigers doing the damage (see: Bethany Hamilton), free-diver Deron Verbeck shot some pretty wild vision of a fifteen-foot White swimming up at him from a hundred feet below while driving off Kona on November 26.

“It just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and I was like, ‘that is for sure 100% a Great White,” Verbeck told KHON2.

In an IG post, the president of the Marine Conservation Science Institute Michael Domeier said “this beautiful female is from the Central California Tribe or Pt. Conception Tribe” of Great Whites, adding, “This shark was spotted literally right in front of my house! This is the stuff that gets me out of bed in the morning with a smile!”

 

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More on the attack as it comes etc.

Brazil beware.

The men’s portion of the Michelob ULTRA Pure Gold Haleiwa Challenger has just wrapped and John John Florence, returning from knee injury to the World Surf League stage, smashed the field.

Kanoa Igarashi was in the final, along with a just-qualified Sammy Pupo. Neither Jack Robinson nor The Ultimate Surfer Zeke Lau were.

Florence looked like a proper Championship Tour threat in wonky scary-adjacent Haleiwa, scoring a ten during his domination.

Joe Turpel called the action alongside Makua Rothman, who very much threatened to overshadow the Silk Soy Milk.

Turpel, possibly, worried.

More as the story develops.

Tis the season.

Days ago, I was very surprised to discover a flyer for Kelly Slater’s sustainable outerwear brand Outerknown hiding in my mailbox. It was full color, on a heavy card stock, and featured pictures of cozy St. Bernards and warm smiles beaming from underneath “Reimagine Cashmere” hats.

All very cute though it did make me think that mass mailing full color, heavy card stock “wish list” brochures to people was probably not the most environmentally friendly move as I dropped it into the trash can.

Well, I soon forgot about Kelly Slater and his unique brand of ecology altogether until our wonderful New Jersey friend messaged me, hours ago, with a picture featuring the very same Outerknown flyer that had been inside my mailbox, writing, “Look what arrived in my mailbox today over here in New Jersey! I’ve never ever bought a thing from Outerknown nor have I even ever gone on the website or its social media platforms… never ever got anything in the mail ’til this. He must be tracking who’s commenting on BeachGrit and the recent story ‘sustainable gift guides.’ Maybe I’ll DM him and ask if BeachGrit readers/commenters get a discount.”

What pure joy.

BeachGrit made an unwilling, though jolly, participant in trimming the rainforests with festive holiday cheer.

Trimming, mulching, repurposing into heavy card stock, coloring, flying, stuffing into mailboxes, getting dropped into trash cans, gracing landfills.

It’s like when someone donates money to Save the Whales in lieu of a gift for you.

Thoughtful.

Tis the season.

"I bet John John Florence and Jack Robinson wanted to go back out!"

If you know surfing, you’ll know the name Ian “Kanga” Cairns, a man with the physique of a comic-book hero who ruled big waves, who was pivotal in the creation of a world tour, who would launch the ASP after tearing the game off the IPS’s Fred Hemmings and whose thin-eyed stare could give a man stomach cramps.

Cairns, sixty-nine, came out swinging today after the first event in the Triple  Crown, the Michelob ULTRA Pure Gold Haleiwa Challenger, was put on hold before the quarter-finals, which included John John Florence and Jack Robinson, because of a building swell. 

“The @wsl Haleiwa contest was on today and they called off the Quarter Finals because the swell was coming up. @fredhemmings never called it off. I won the World Cup twice at Haleiwa in way bigger surf,” wrote Kanga. “There would have been a lot of squawking but I bet @john_john_florence and @jackrobinson72 wanted to go back out. In fact, I bet they went out after the contest ended. If you want extraordinary surfers to be extraordinary, you put them in extraordinary waves.”

 

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Response from fans was unanimous in favour of Kanga’s position, 

“(Three clap emojis) yep! Why did they all it all? Strange,” wrote women’s tour pioneer Lynne Boyer, famous for riding big Sunset etc.

From the legendary surf photographer Tom Servais, “Great point, and great photo of you showing your power and why you were such an important surfer in surfing’s history!”

Hawaiian power surfer Pancho Sullivan noted his approval by posting four muscle arm emojis and two flames. 

Terry Terukina added, “FYI: I surfed in close-out Hale’iwa back in the late 70s early 80s during our Annual Mabo Royal AMATEUR contest. Ten years later and for about a ten year period…as the Director of that same contest (renamed the current Hale’iwa International Open), more times than not we had the AMATEUR contest in the same monstrous conditions. That’s why the North Shore crew has always bred “riders of the storm”…contest or no contest! And Ian was my and many Hale’iwa OGs inspiration!!”

Kanga, of course, ain’t afraid of holding an unpopular opinion.

“Everyone in some sense is concerned about what people think of them,” he told me a while back. “But I wake up in the morning and I think, what am I going to today?” says Cairns. “How can I do all these things that are crazy and cool and how can it benefit my family, my friends and all of this? The moment you start to think about these things you move forward and all those criticisms, which are about what you did yesterday, don’t matter. If you’re thinking about the future, you’re already one step ahead of the critics. Do I want to be disliked? No! Do I want to be focussed on coming up with some awesome idea tomorrow?  That’s what I want to do.”