Come walk the halls of a clifftop and beachfront paradise… 

Bruce Raymond, do you know?

He’s the brutal looking stud with the open jacket and open container of beer in hand from the famous Quikilsver ad, reproduced below.

To know the great Bruce Raymond, superstar businessman, former world number sixteen, therefore, is to love him. 

Surfing’s original surf journalist Phil Jarratt knows. 

In 1977, he wrote, 

“(Bruce) has that dark-eyed sinister air about him that appeals to women and makes men wonder. He would have made a good con man, hustler or gigolo.”

If Bruce’s achievements in the water, North Shore and tour shredder, and out, co-creator of the Quiksilver Pro at G-Land, The Crossing, keeping Kelly Slater, Tom Carroll and Lisa Andersen on Quik during their careers, aren’t enough, Bruce has collected various houses along Sydney’s northern beaches, cleverly buying low and selling high. 

His latest sale is his joint at 65 The Serpentine, Bilgola Beach, which recently went under the hammer two weeks ago for well over five mill (the agent was guiding $5,375 mill-plus), roughly two mill more than he bought it for in 2017.

The four-bedroom house on nearly eight k square feet features a self-contained guest suite which Kelly Slater utilised on visits to Sydney, a heated mineral water pool (a delicious mixer for guests’ wee-wees), pizza oven out the back and, best of all, it squats on the northside of Bilgola Head which means y’don’t get licked by the southerlies that tear the hair off everyone else’s heads whenever fronts pass through the city.

No word yet on Bruce’s next move.

He says he’s gonna stay in the area but downsize a little.

In the meantime, get a little taste of the Bilgola place.

The handsome face of the ultra-vibrant former world champ Italo Ferreira has been brutally rearranged following wipeout.

The stubby, handsome, friendly face of the Brazilian surfer Italo Ferreira has been re-arranged after a collision with his surfboard following an aerial gone awry at Margaret River. 

The pint-sized 2019 world champ and Olympic gold medallist whose Bells campaign was marred by a wild storming of the judging tower amid accusations they were “ruining the sport” took to Instagram to announce the injury. 

 

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The ultra-vibrant Ferreira, who enjoys dressing in zoo-animal prints that are the hallmark of ebullient resort wear and who is two rungs outside the cut-off for the September final, will still compete at Margaret River.

Retribution nigh?

Power, man. It is said to corrupt and absolute power is said to corrupt absolutely but what can be said of the world’s current wealthiest man, Elon Musk, completing his stunning purchase of popular messaging application Twitter as just announced hours ago?

For you and me, things are likely not to change much. A little tweak here, there, rich getting richer etc.

But how will the earth shift under surfing great Kelly Slater’s tanned feet?

You must certainly remember that the 11x champion, and cryptocurrency visionary took to Instagram, his preferred platform, just under a year ago and absolutely savaged the South African after deciding to pull back from allowing Teslas to be purchased using bits and bytes.

Slater, flashing teeth, wrote:

Elon Musk and Tesla Motors proudly bought $1.5B worth of Bitcoin for around $34K in Feb. Elon comes out this week and says BTC mining is bad for the environment and they dump their bitcoin for an estimated $804M in profits (but he’s still pushing dogecoin, a useless shit coin).

So a guy who owns an energy company doesn’t understand this stuff before he buys it? Has no problem taking the profits. Does he have an issue with kids mining cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo to build batteries? He could probably address and potentially help solve the real energy issues (68 per cent of the energy produced in the US, for instance, is wasted … seems like a bigger issue to me which would solve any BTC problem).

I think Elon’s board and backers hate crypto and what it’s doing for the average investor and pressured him to put out a statement which they knew would inevitably tank bitcoin. I hope the SEC is taking a good look at this (and all of them who might be buying the dip today and this week in their private accounts). Interesting times. But Elon is bad for crypto.

Zingers everywhere though now that Musk is ultra-ultra-powerful, is Slater is ruing his choice of words? Maybe thinking he hopped in bed with the wrong billionaire?

That would certainly be my opinion but who cares about that?

Time for managed retreat?

If Bob Dylan sang it once, he sang it 1000 times and those times are certainly a-changin. Emmanuel Macron has just been elected president of France, professional surfer Kelly Slater is 4th in the world and the environment is threatening to eat people alive.

But what to do when the ocean’s waters rise and rise and rise and disappear whole properties? Well, Kauai County, part of the island state of Hawaii, is considering offering inland turf swaps for those who currently dwell in beachside homes.

According to Honolulu Civil Beat:

“Every beachfront house will eventually fall into the ocean,” said Chip Fletcher, associate dean for academic affairs at the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at UH Manoa. “People just don’t realize that they’re doomed.”

Homeowners in this newly designated danger zone did not ask the county to bail them out, and several of those interviewed for this story said they’re against it. But property swapping is a concept that county planners are exploring as they consider the costs of doing nothing — namely, the loss of beaches that are a public trust asset and the displacement of local families.

“The plan would be to clear these properties and structures out of the way so that the natural erosion process can happen and we can have a beach there in perpetuity,” said Kauai County Planning Director Kaaina Hull. “If the houses are collapsing in the water, then it’s another big question of who’s going to clean this up?”

As the surf eats away at the island’s contours, one way of adapting involves demolishing oceanfront homes, businesses, hotels and roads and rebuilding them inland.

But managed retreat, as it’s called, is logistically complicated. It would require tremendous amounts of political will, community buy-in and money. And there’s no blueprint in Hawaii for implementing it on a large scale.

If you happened to live beachfront in Kauai would you trade out for a nice valley home?

Maybe a Honolulu penthouse?

Or would you do what the world’s 4th best surfer does and lay illegal tacos out front in order to stop nature in its ugly tracks?