The joint is “liveable” and “lacking most modern amenities.”

What would you give to live within a short trot of a couple of big-wave reefs, one a real son of a bitch, the other a little more user friendly.

Fairy Bower and Deadman’s, you heard of ‘em?

Here’s a taste of Deadies.

And the Bower.

The joint below, backing onto Bower Street reserve in Manly on 10,000 square feet of land owned by the Catholic Church and leased back to owners for twenty or thirty years, last sold for four-and-a-half mill in 2016.

It’s a four-bedroom brick house, built in the nineteen-fifties, and virtually untouched since, a little paint, carpets ripped up and so on, described as “surprisingly unremarkable”, “liveable” and “lacking most modern amenities.”

The wild increase in price is partly due to the Church easing rules on the leasehold, increasing the usual seventeen-year leases to twenty and thirty, but mostly ‘cause Australians have lost their minds when it comes to property.

In Manly alone, houses have gone up almost fifty percent in the past year.

Boom, boom, crash etc.

If a professional surfer hand jams in the woods but nobody sees it, does it make a sound?

News has trickled out from behind the World Surf League’s Positive Wall of Noise, over recent days, suggesting gloom and doom reign in Santa Monica. Wails and much gnashing of teeth. You will certainly recall one month ago when, overnight and without warning, the League detonated its much ballyhooed WSL Studios, axing tens of employees and abandoning the ambitious vision of ex-Oprah Winfrey executive Erik Logan to turn professional surfing into a media titan.

Films, television programs, viral YouTube hits.

The film Billy materialized. It was about Billy Kemper and maybe not very well-received. The television program Kelly Slater’s Ultimate Surfer also came to life. It was accepted with frowns and almost complete lack of audience.

And so the WSL Studios became no more but sources claim the bloodletting did not stop there as the League is cancelling any content initiatives whatsoever, sending freelance writers, filmmakers, editors to the same breadlines swollen by Studios employees and other hard-luck Harrys.

“Work has dried up,” one jettisoned writer told me while gnawing a moldy crust.

At time of writing, the World Surf League’s website appears to be functional though no telling how long Chief Strategy and Brand Officer Dave Prodan will be able to shoulder the entire load by interviewing Griffin Colapinto.

If, indeed, the WSL is out of the content game altogether, how will legions of would-be fans discover that it is their favorite thing to watch?

If a professional surfer hand jams in the woods but nobody sees it, does it make a sound?

More questions than answers.

Ring that thing.

Tea leaves are tea leaves, difficult to read, open to interpretation, necessitate an old Chinese woman etc. Difficult to say, for certain, what the future holds by looking at the bottom of a demitasse. The World Surf League’s Fantasy Surfer app, on the other hand, is the World Surf League’s Fantasy Surfer app and tells, clearly and definitively, which professional surfers will be surfing the upcoming contest.

The next one on the calendar happens to be the Rip Curl Pro Bells Beach there rimming Torquay, Australia.

The sitting WSL champion and Brazilian stud Gabriel Medina is available for choosing.

Medina, who declared that he was going to take some me time following his dominant 2021 season, made good on that promise by not coming to Hawaii, staying in his home country while his personal life seemed to unravel somewhat. Messy tabloid divorce, bizarre sex tape claims etc.

He was not available to fantasizers for either the Billabong Pipeline Pro nor the Hurley Pro Sunset.

Available, again though, for the Rip Curl Pro Bells Beach.

Do you think he is done with self care and ready to report for duty once more?

Has scanned the horizon and seen Kanoa Igarashi, Kelly Slater and Barron Mamiya as one, two and three?

Is there a “performance bonus” as part of his Rip Curl contract too juicy to pass up?

An expensive boat he has in his sights that would be absolutely perfect for evening floats with best friend Neymar Jr.?

More questions than answers.