Oh what might have been.

The sun rose over Santa Monica, this morning, shrouded in mist and despondency, as it was officially revealed that flavored alcohol beverage White Claw will be releasing its new flavor line, titled “surf,” without first securing a partnership deal with the World Surf League.

Forbes is reporting, “White Claw Surf is being rolled out nationwide in a mixed twelve pack format backed by a wide-ranging advertising campaign to introduce the line extension quickly to drinkers. It is the company’s first attempt as a premium line. As one of the pioneers and leaders in the ever-expanding and ever-popular hard seltzer category, the brand is betting that consumers are looking for products that offer more flavors while still toeing the line at 5% ABV and only 100 calories. The Surf line will be a standalone entity inside their portfolio of brands and follows on the heels of last year’s successful launches of their Iced Tea and Surge lines.”

Flavors include citrus yuzu smash, tropical pomelo smash, watermelon lime smash and wildberry açaí smash.

The World Surf League has never met a 5% ABV canned drink that it did not love and is ruing what might have been though extreme sadness is quickly turning into blame with various departments pointing the finger at various other departments.

While the buck usually stops with the most powerful person in an organization, confusion reigns after the recent suspension of longboard champion Joel Tudor as to who, exactly, that is.

Jessi Miley-Dyer?

More as the story develops.

"Danny robbed 19 banks in six weeks before he was caught and sent to prison; when he was released almost eight years later, he picked up the habit again."

America’s favourite left-wing organ, The New York Times, has greeted Chas Smith’s fourth book in the same way a boy in the furnace of adolescence might examine a woman in a state of considerable undress, with a detailed and dreamy inspection and a more than ordinary enthusiasm.

Blessed are the Bank Robbers is reviewed alongside others in the true crime genre including Hell’s Half-Acre, “a serial killer family on the American frontier” and The Far Land, “a bizarre mash-up of an 18th-century adventure novel and the darkest episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit imaginable”.

Armed robbery, serial killing, uncontrolled pedophilia.

A decent fit.

Read a little.

Equal parts true crime, memoir and bank-heist how-to, (Blessed are the Bank Robbers) is the story of Smith’s cousin Danny, the Floppy Hat Bandit who, Smith says, ‘has to be within spitting distance of the U.S. record for bank robberies.

Danny, drowning in gambling debts, held up his first bank in 2006. Soon he hit another, then another. The endorphin high of gambling was quickly supplanted by the endorphin high of committing crimes. “Who would dare step away from the table in the middle of a hot streak?” Smith writes. “Who would dare leave potential millions behind when the odds had crumbled, when fate had chosen a victor?” Danny robbed 19 banks in six weeks before he was caught and sent to prison; when he was released almost eight years later, he picked up the habit again.

Most interesting is the way Smith plumbs their shared history looking for clues to Danny’s life. At one point, he remembers how their families would gather to watch swashbuckling missionary slide shows that featured their fathers’ experiences in places like the jungles of Nicaragua and Honduras. “The seed of Cousin Danny’s bank robbing,” he believes, was likely planted during those long evenings watching the “bigger-than-life Courson adventure we were all living.

Blessed are the Bank Robbers, 256 pages in width, is released worldwide, Tuesday, March 15 (US).

Buy here! 

"Whatever you decide to do with this message is totally cool—ignore it, call the cops, call your lawyer—I completely understand..."

Every one of us, here, learned the surfing game from someone. An older sister, uncle, father, pal. For me, it was my Cousin Danny. I grew up, you see, on Oregon’s frigid central coast where waves lash and bash but there was no “surf culture,” or at least none of which I was aware or at least none which matched my childhood imagination of what “surf culture” should be.

My Cousins Danny and Mikey, though, grew up in Carlsbad where surf felt like it belonged. We drove south and visited them, most summers, when I was growing up and I couldn’t get enough, staring at the Surfing and Surfer magazines in their rooms. Wandering into wax scented surf shops with breath caught in my lungs. Paddling Warm Water Jetty and surfing.

Really surfing.

Cousin Danny gave me my first board, a rainbow twin fin, and I would gaze at it in my Oregon room, cold rain falling on roof, and dream.

The years rolled on, one after another, I became a surf journalist and Cousin Danny? Well he became one of the most prolific bank robbers in U.S. history. We were both raised as good Christian boys in a good Christian extended family with each of the uncles involved in the ministry, megachurch pastors and famous missionaries. It was a sort of evangelical Camelot so when I heard of Cousin Danny’s escapades I was shocked and amazed.

How?

How had he veered off the straight and narrow so… dramatically?

As fate would have it, he reached out to me via encrypted Swiss email whilst running from the FBI after hearing of my first dust up with Ashton Goggans, as it were, ending that first missive thusly:

Whatever you decide to do with this message is totally cool—ignore it, call the cops, call your lawyer—I completely understand and wouldn’t be upset in the slightest. The last thing I’d ever want to do is get you in trouble. I do know the cops are trying to find someone to email me with an embedded photo in the email, which would have metadata in the pixels, and as soon as I downloaded it, my location would be revealed, so I won’t open anything with photos, just FYI. And, you just don’t seem like the type who would turn me in. That may be due partly to your amazingly awesome podcast incident, fighting with that Inertia dude, defending your family’s honor, and disgust with his decision to file a police report. What a douche! That is podcast gold, my friend.

The result of our correspondence, plunging into family and family secrets, prying bank robbery tips from my Cousin Danny, turned into a book, Blessed are the Bank Robbers, out March 15 (buy here, here or at your local bookstore).

I will be chatting about it all live at Warwick’s in La Jolla on March 16 at 7:30 pm with David Lee Scales, midwife to the whole adventure from the get. If you are in town please come. I’d love to say hello.

David Lee and I also discussed Joel Parkinson’s mud adventures and the Facebook threats I received via Coolangatta. Not essential but also funny.

Let equality ring!

Yesterday, the sun set on a different Australia than the one it rose over hours earlier. A better Australia. A brighter Australia. An Australia where gender-based assumptions lay on red ground in a smoldering heap. Where equality, true equality, rang.

For yesterday a woman, Sierra Lerback from Maui, beat all-comers in the most prestigious Old Mal division of the Noosa Festival of Surfing to hoist the cup and change history.

“All-comers” referring to a who’s who of ridiculously talented males including Jared Mell, Jack Norton, Byron Chadwick and Harrison Roach.

The aforementioned Roach took to Instagram immediately, penning, “@sierralerback is the first woman in history to win the most prestigious division of the @noosa_festival_of_surfing, the Old Mal, and she’s my mate.”

Praise was universal from luminaries such as Alex Knost, Joel Tudor, Devon Howard, Robert “Wingnut” Weaver etc.

Now, students of surf journalism will be aware that I have been calling for mixed longboarding for years or maybe months. Women dance the plank as beautifully as men, even more beautifully, and so why not cast them into the same field and allow them to Battle of the Sexes regularly? I pepper World Surf League Longboard Commissioner Devon Howard with such thoughts as well anyone else who will listen.

That same World Surf League has set itself up as the most equal of governing bodies, what with equal prize money and equal-ish venues, but true equality is singular. It is one. The World Surf League Shortboard Commissioner, Jessi Miley-Dyer, has been a rumored hater of longboarders and longboarding, recently threatening to cut that tour down to one event and casting its champion into outer darkness. Will the Noosa Festival of Surfing change her mind? Help her to see the light? Miley-Dyer’s congratulatory missives were notably missing from Lerback’s accomplishment.

More as that story develops but, in the meantime, great congratulations to Sierra Lerback. May it be the first of many.

Usually existing in peaceful co-existence with the local people and the tourists, these simian range wars have been due to the disastrous effects of the global pandemic lockdown

A rare and sacred white monkey was discovered covered in wounds last month in Pecatu Village, South Kuta.

That’s Uluwatu, by the way.

Most people in the area consider this rare white monkey as the sacred manifestation of Hanuman, the clever hero of their religious folklore.

And the death or even minor injuries to this primate forebode disaster for the village.

And it seems they were right about the disaster part.

The white monkey suffered these injuries in clashes between the seven separate troupes of monkeys that inhabit the area surrounding Uluwatu. Usually existing in peaceful co-existence with the local people and the tourists, these simian range wars have been due to the disastrous effects of the global pandemic lockdown

The ever-present monkeys are usually both the delight and the bane of travelers with their clever thieving ways (The monkeys, not the tourists). But during the Covid era the marauding primates have had to rely on means other than the easy pickin’s from the tourists and the temple caretakers who feed them.

Emboldened by the lack of the usual human presence, the troupes have been forced to organize territorial raids on each others resources and on private villas in the area. Clearing the fruit off the trees of properties and anything else they could make off with. Outdoor picnics became primary targets in many neighborhoods.

Home invasions have been reported by a number of cliffside residents who have open plan villas or have left their dwelling windows and doors open.

One Aussie surfer returned to his rental villa and found “that they had opened my fridge and were having a hell of good time. Thank God they left the beer”.

To surfers, these wild monkeys have been an integral part of the Uluwatu experience. From the time of Morning of the Earth to our current days, the kinship surfers share with these animals is easy to see.

It was surfers who created the tourist industry of the Bukit Peninsula, changing the wild, natural monkey culture forever. And the ever-present monkeys, seemingly as carefree and as focused on simple pleasures as the surfers themselves, have always lent an exotic vibe to the cosmic tropical freedom that all surfers seek in Bali.

The good news is that extremely rare, and badly wounded white monkey has been captured and treated and is healing from his last campaign.

With tourist numbers rising as fast as a fever, a ceasefire agreement has apparently been established between the monkey troupes and new territorial boundaries have been agreed upon.

It seems it is time for all the monkeys of the Uluwatu area to heal from the wages of war.

And look to a brighter future as surfers pour back in and contribute to the balance that is so vital to the island’s culture.

Peace has fallen once again upon Uluwatu and the harmonious, if unspoken, agreements between man and beast are once again moving in greased grooves.

Says one village leader “I know the recovery of the white monkey is a positive sign. I hope we can all rise up together, the surfers, the monkey’s, the waves and us, and that the economy will come back and that all of us can recover from the disastrous conditions we have suffered”.