"He was pleading, like, I don’t know why I’m here and you’re not the answer but someone should help me."

The filmmaker Paul Taublieb, two-time Emmy winner, inventor of X Games etc, has told a harrowing story of his flight from Manila to Los Angeles yesterday.

Flight PR112 split Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International airport for its thirteen-hour trans-Pacific flight to LA at eleven am on Monday morn.

Taublieb, returning from an epic two-week surf trip to the Telo Islands just south of Nias there, was seated next to a man whose life force, he says, “was flickering.”

“This guy looks at me with these plaintive eyes. And that look freaked me out. Y’know, I spent a year in Africa, crossed the Sahara Desert, I’ve done a lot of travelling so I’m experienced and his look struck me in some caveman way, like, get away from this dude.”

Figuring he needed medical help urgently, and also not wanting to sit next to this coughing, gravely ill man, Taublieb approached the flight attendants who eventually checked his temperature.

In the middle of the night, Taublieb says he was in the classic Ambient haze when he heard the call for a doctor.

When the flight landed, passengers were told to wait while the body was removed.

The man’s look has haunted the filmmaker since.

“He was pleading, like, I don’t know why I’m here and you’re not the answer but someone should help me. There was no fight left. It was as if he’d given in to something, like one of those animals getting eaten by a lion. And, I had a visceral, instinctual reaction and that was, do not be near this guy. You could tell he had a sense of death. It was ominous. The fame of life was flickering and you could see it. And, I’m a liberal, I’m a compassionate person but there was nothing I could do. I just felt, don’t be here.”

Anyone else out there and seen death close?

Looked into a dying man’s eyes?

"The S1-C water bike gives people of all ages and athletic abilities an exhilarating bike ride on the open water for fun, fitness, and exploration."

Surfers at Burleigh Heads, not always the most welcoming when it comes to anything that might disrupt the iconic lineup’s hierarchy or calm, were forced to flee for their lives on Wednesday when a “pedal catamaran” careened through the crowd.

In a short video posted to Instagram by local Cameron Burke, a thrill seeker on a nine-thousand dollar Schiller Water Bike which has been designed “to take your breath away” attempts to catch a wave before nose-diving and losing the craft on the famous rocks.

Surfers dive for their lives as the contraption is loosed from its master.

“The craft smashed into pieces everywhere. Not many people were happy with him when he made it back in to shore. It could have done some serious damage,” Burke told the Gold Coast Bulletin.

The newspaper’s readers, surprisingly, were more pro-bike than pro-surfer.

They said the same to me on Surfers beach when i ventured out in my new LONG BOARD many moons ago, ha ha get over it.

Too many whingers in the ocean.

The way I see it this crazy contraption went well over a single surfer, who duck dived appropriately under it, and it was well away from tne general public, so settle down, nothing to see here…except what might have been happening to his belongings or his car for “tresspassing” on the local boardriders ocean.

The Burleigh locals can take it – Harden up and stop crying to the media. 

Surfers are soft.

The Karens of the ocean.

My son got caught in a rip out there when we were surfing one day at the point – The older locals just laughed and yelled out ‘ya might get eaten by a shark boy”   So stop crying about you might have nearly gotten runover by a bloke having fun. You don’t own the break Karen.

Advertising material for the bike presents a compelling case for its use promising “majestic rides, trailblazing voyages and incredible sunset spins across the water.”

Watch video here.