And you won’t believe the twist!

The surfer-turned-citizen cop Chad Towersey has become the toast of mainstream American media following a recent video on his Instagram page that follows the travails off a gal gone wild in a three-wheeled SUV.

The handsome Costa Mesa-based Towersey aka Unkle Tito, who is forty-three, snatched the footage of the woman he dubbed “Zanny Nanny” on the 405 freeway headed north to Irvine as he was driving to his job as a solar panel salesman.

“I’m seeing this car in front of me with the tailgate open and I think, that’s kinda weird,” he says. “I start getting up a little closer, and she’s going eighty miles an hour, and something is off. Sparks are flying from the side, I look closer and she’s riding on three wheels!”

Unkle Tito pulled up alongside, starts honking, waving.

The gal “looks over, gives me a blank wave, looked forward and kept driving like nothing was wrong.”

Tito and another driver use hand signals to conspire to sorta box her in, to slow her down. It’s effective. Gets her wild three-wheeled SUV down to thirty miles an hour.

“Finally, she gets off at the same exit I have to get off, goes around a roundabout and then slams into a guy parked at a red light.”

Tito tells her to get out of the car.

“She was so incoherent, literally nothing was connecting with her. She didn’t know what was going on. It was like she was in a blackout.”

Gal asks, “What’s going on?”

Tito, “You’re driving down the freeway on three wheels with your tailgate open!”

“She was disconnected from reality,” he says. “She then starts using this story that she was having a bad day, tells me she’d just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I told her, ‘I’m sorry and I’ll pray for your but you can beat cancer; you can’t beat running into a bunch of people on the freeway.”

Anyway, Tito takes off and ten gets a call from his wife who tells him there’s a “hostage situation” in their neighbourhood.

(It’s America! Yes!)

“Some guy had carjacked someone and was holding the family hostage,” says Tito. “There was SWAT, police, everywhere was taped off and I’m documenting everything when this guy comes up to me and says, randomly, ‘Hey, my girlfriend follows your page and saw your video on the lady on the freeway.’”

And, here’s the twist!

The man, a marine from Camp Pendleton down there at Oceanside, tells Tito, “I helped her right before you caught up with her. She was in Costa Mesa and she had crashed into the curb (damaging tyre). I got out, helped her out, got her car up on a jack, and put the wheel in the back. And, while I was doing that she jumped into her car and took off while her car was on the jack!”

The vid has “gone bananas,” says Tito. “CBS, Fox, ABC, I have five on-camera interviews on the day and the video got circulated from meme page to viral page to everywhere.”

How much he make from his lil time in the sun?

Zero!

“I gave it to everyone for free.”

(Police are investigating the wild piece of driving.)

“Surfing saved me from the dark side of the night."

The Portuguese big-wave surfer Joana Andrade, a tiny five-two in Havs, but relentless hunter and slayer of Nazaré rhinos, is the star of a documentary set for cinema release called Big vs Small. 

It’s a wild story in a sport that has its fair share of ’em.

Andrade was the first woman to tow Naz’s lethal jack-in-the-box peaks, pre-Maya Gabeira etc, and came to surfing after being drugged, groomed and sexually abused by a family pal when she was twelve.

“Surfing saved me from the dark side of the night,” she says. “We hold many fears inside us from which we cannot free ourselves.”

The film detours into Andrade’s breath-holding training with Finnish freediver Johanna Nordblad.

You might’ve already seen Nordblad in the Netflix documentary “Hold Your Breath, The Ice Dive”where she tries to hit a world record for distance travelled under the ice-pack with one breath.

Two epic women sucking air and disappearing into the inky black, under a ceiling of ice.

A helluva long way from the Ments or the Pacific splendour of Tahiti.

“Do whatever you like to me,” Andrade say. “I surrender. Maybe I will die.”