Tavi, powered by gorgeous Fijian sunshine!

World’s most exclusive surf resort reopens to public after two years of COVID-enforced closure; pulls back curtain on Tesla batteries in pivot to clean energy!

Derek Rielly

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Dreamiest joint on earth establishes environmental bona fides.

The ultra-exclusive American owned surf resort Tavarua has re-opened to the public after two years bolted down by government decree and has revealed a pivot to clean energy. 

Tavarua, a heart-shaped island in the Fiji’s Mamanuca archipelago, is about the dreamiest joint on earth, a pool and bar staring into a sizzling, fall-off-and-you’re-bloodied lefthander called Restaurants and but a ten-minute boat ride to Cloudbreak, one of the world’s most iconic waves. 

In 1982, Californians Dave Clark and Scott Funk secured exclusive surfing rights to Cloudbreak, setting up Tavarua as a then wildly expensive hundred bucks a night surf resort. 

Surf Ranch before Surf Ranch. 

In 2010, those rights were dissolved and Cloudbreak became a free-for-all, good for some, poor shredders and travellers, bad for rich surfers whose domain was finally trampled by rampaging peasants.

Anyway, joint has been closed down for two years and has just reopened, and has revealed a pivot to clean energy, installing 483 solar panels and Tesla batteries to power most of the island. There’s still backup generators, ain’t always sunny and rains more than you’d think in Fiji, but a very good move, don’t wanna keep drilling for oil etc. 

Current rates for Tavarua are four gees a week in peak season, five gees for a couple (March through October) and three gees in the off-season. It’s a mostly all-inclusive deal, three meals, water and juice, and boats, but y’gotta pay for your booze which can easily add five hundred or so a week depending on your thirst. 

Beers fourteen bucks, wine, cocktails more.

Worth it at the time etc.

Ariel and Kelly.

Kelly Slater announces imminent retirement, back-pedals from earlier claim friends “have literally died” from COVID vaccines and reveals godson to be “best fifteen-year-old surfer” on earth!

Derek Rielly

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The champ, candid with MMA broadcaster Ariel Helwani… 

The peerless MMA journalist and broadcaster Ariel Helwani, born of excellent Jewish stock and a thorn in the side of the UFC’s famously prickly Dana White, has just completed a superb interview with the eleven-time world surfing champion Kelly Slater.

From the opening gambit where Kelly explains why MMA is his favourite sport to watch, to his blood feud with UFC star Paulo Costa to his likely retirement in 2022 and the TV series that’ll be made around it (also admits might be sorta hard given his no-vax stance), to pivoting the Ultimate Surfer away from tour wannabes and focusing on kids, fourteen to seventeen, to the wild ability of his godson Jackie Doz and a slight back-pedalling on pals dying from COVID vaccines (now it’s just “horrible reactions”), Slater, and Helwani are in terrific form.

Essential.

Rumor: A “full on Covid outbreak” has ripped through the North Shore’s famed Billabong House weeks ahead of Pipeline Masters!

Chas Smith

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Troublesome.

Billabong is as fine a surf brand as there is featuring an iconic lineage, many great products and a professional surf team that might just be the best in the business. Italo Ferreira, Laura Enever, Griffin Colapinto, Alessa Quizon, Ryan Callinan, Jack Freestone, Seth Moniz to name but a few.

It also has a famed house on Oahu’s fabled North Shore where many notable incidents have occurred (buy here), much fun had, serious moments of preparation and fine celebrations too. Unfortunate rumor, from a source planted in that seven miles of miracle, suggests that a “full on covid outbreak” has ripped through the selfsame house just weeks ahead of the Pipe Masters, which just so happens to be presented by Billabong.

There is no word as to who might be sick, quarantine measures etc. but if a full on covid outbreak spreads beyond those chartreuse walls into the rest of the North Shore do you imagine that the Pipe Masters would be clipped?

I imagine so.

The World Surf League has made “an abundance of caution” its new tagline having jettisoned the recently adopted “It Takes a Day to Make a Title.”

Troublesome.

John John Florence casts his all-powerful shadow over Pipeline. | Photo: WSL

Two-time world surfing champ John John Florence wins fifth Pipeline crown as little brother Ivan steals show with perfect ten-point ride and podium finish!

Derek Rielly

By

Flo-bros dominate The Pipe!

Earlier today, John John Florence took his iron hard-on and blew the achey pressure in his balls into his fifth Pipeline crown.

The almost thirty-year-old two-time world champion with the impervious reputation adds the HIC Pipe Pro to last year’s Billabong Pipe Masters, and his three Volcom Pipe Pros, 2012, 2013 and 2015.

Florence took the last-minute win against fellow Hawaiian Barron Mamiya, little bro Ivan and Kainehe Hunt.

It was Ivan, twenty-five, who stunned the world, however, with a ten-point ride in the quarters.

If anyone’s surprised that Ivan, who is twenty-five and who looks like a roughed up Mason Ho, can shred, they shouldn’t be.

As middle-bro Nathan told BeachGrit a few years back, “Ivan has the sickest style. His style is way sicker me or John’s. He’s so smooth, like, Tom Curren.”

Real shame this happy lil house is gonna be bulldozed.

Dilapidated beach shack in down-at-heel Gold Coast suburb known as “meth alley” sells for almost five-and-a-half million dollars!

Derek Rielly

By

The last of the great bullish sales!

A decrepit beach shack in a Gold Coast beach suburb famous for its distinctive rows of run-down houses made in the nineteen-fifties, curtains drawn even in the middle of a bright winter day, fronts for the hydroponic and meth units deftly hidden inside, has sold for $A5.4 million.

The original three-bedder at 233 Jefferson Lane, made from the fibro cement sheeting popular in that post-war period, occupies four-thousand square feet of absolute beachfront land and sits amid various trophy homes and apartment towers, including Kelly Slater’s joint a few hundred yards down the road at Joy on Jefferson. 

The real estate sell was compelling,

“Is it your time to make a statement on the beachfront landscape with a luxury masterpiece, where you can create everlasting memories for your loved ones? Would you like to feel the sand between your toes daily and rinse off with a therapeutic salt water cleanse after your morning beach walk?”

The joint harks back to a much simpler time of surf and TV.

On a recent forum where readers were invited to detail what suburbs to avoid on the Gold Coast, Palm Beach was regularly noted.

Full of deadbeat bogans people who dont work and live on the dole and think its cool. Not all of them of course but alot of people around those areas are

Palmy, druggies.

All I can say is avoid Palm Beach. Full of druggies and bogans and has a very high crime rate. Last time I was down there, there was a chap on his balcony with guns to two people’s heads screaming and yelling. The SERT team came out and ushered us all into random people’s garages and stormed the unit complex. From what I heard afterwards the ended up shooting the dude from the road. It was like something off TV! Time before that the local video shop was broken into. It’s getting worse.

Really beautiful beach though 🙂

The sale was, likely, one of the last bullish hits of the great Australian real estate bubble (six months back a block of Palm Beach land, not beachfront that had sold for $1.4 mill in March, went for $2.4 mill in June) which is screeching to a halt under a combo of expected interest rate rises and an oversupply of vendors wanting to cash in their joints for outrageous sums.

Photo: Jack English
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