Wright (left) dreaming of canned stew.
Wright (left) dreaming of canned stew.

Inspirational surf champion Owen Wright, coldly decapitated by World Surf League months ago, shares intimate secret of how he recovered from earlier head injury!

Thoreauean.

The 2022 World Surf League Championship Tour season is now well and truly in the rearview mirror but, from this vantage, we can appreciate the highs, mourn the lows much cleaner. The world’s greatest surfer, Kelly Slater, taking the first win of the season at the famed Pipeline, the same Slater sharing large Teahupo’o waves with his employee Nathan Hedge while the preternaturally talented Filipe Toledo sat and watched in awe, the same Toledo going to Lower Trestles, winning the crown and ushering in eight million (and counting) new viewers, all highs.

The low? Australian mainstay and Olympic bronze medal winner Owen Wright becoming ruthlessly decapitated by the WSL’s cold mid-season cut.

Wright, as you know, has as inspirational a story as any, suffering a traumatic brain injury at Pipeline in 2015 that seemed to have completely derailed any professional surfing hope then coming all the way back to tour, or at least until he was told to leave again.

Well, in a revealing new interview, the Irukandji shares a secret to his recovery.

Per News Corp.

“I was really full on, on trying to recover from the head injury that I had and it got to a stage where everything was just revolving around like physio or different movements and different brain exercises and I just didn’t have that pure joy and like ‘living’ back … I was just so caught up in recovery. So that’s where [camping] came into play.”

Wright went on to discuss how he loves being outdoors, eating stew out of a can, sleeping in a canvas tent that gets very hot in the day, poking the fire with sticks and pretending they’re cigars afterward, burning marshmallows to ash and insisting they taste better that way… or maybe that is just my childhood camping experience.

Maybe Wright’s is different. He takes his own child, anyhow, whenever he can and continues:

“If we are down by a river … where there’s rocks and stuff he’s just like ‘look at this rock, it looks like a dinosaur!’ I don’t hear that creativity when I’m at home … and then when we’re outside he’ll just play and play and play. I end up mucking around too and tapping into my child side and going along with his imagination. There’s nature, and there’s us, and you just get a better connection.”

Beautiful and continued shame on the World Surf League.

Big shame.

Real quick, though, did you ever read Walden Pond? What are your thoughts? I never have, in its entirety, but find the passages I stumble across dumb.


A stunning respite from Puerto's dirty twenty-foot closeouts. | Photo: Hotel Casa To

World’s most spectacular surf resort catering to celeb-surfers including Jonah Hill, Barack Obama and Kendall Jenner opens at Puerto Escondido, “For contemporary nomads who seek surfing… and even helping to release turtles in the local sanctuaries!”

Worth every shekel just to play in its steamy Mayan communal baths!

Yeah, well, I’m guessing this joint is catering to celeb VALS like Jonah, Bay and Kenny, ‘cause it ain’t unwashed devils, you, me, coughing up a thousand bucks a night for one of its gorgeous, all-concrete rooms. 

Hotel Casa To, at the southern most point of Puerto Escondido, which is home to the biggest closeouts on the planet and dominated most recently by “the world’s smartest surfer” Nathan Florence, is a newly opened brutalist hotel which, to quote Vogue, “stands as an ode to the interplay between the functional and the surreal.”

Banana and passion fruit vines encircle the steel, concrete and clay construction, giving the joint the look of a fabulous Mayan temple.

Wander down the stairs to the pool and it has high-end gay bathhouse vibes, shadowy corners, private nooks, steamy! Who knows who you might meet in its warm water! Those not ready to play or just a little shy can sit in stadium style seating while the action goes down.

The hotel “defines itself as a manifesto of hospitality for introspection, sited opposite the Zicatela Ecological Community, a key destination for contemporary nomads from every latitude, who seek to find themselves among wide beaches ideal for surfing and watersports, walking, meditating, and even helping to release turtles in the local sanctuaries.”

Sexy! 

Book one of its nine suites here. 

And buy your Puerto gun here! 


Surf fans thrown into consternation, wonder if Tom Brady and Kelly Slater actually better platonic fit than either with Gisele Bündchen after quarterback vows to never retire!

Here's to forever.

The demise of Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen’s marriage has been captivating surf fans for weeks now. As soon as news of trouble percolated to the surface, the aforementioned have dreamed of a magical reunion between the Brazilian supermodel and her one-time beau, the world’s greatest surfer Kelly Slater.

The two, as you know, famously dated during 2005 through 2006, those years marking absolute peak surf.

Candles have been lit by the pallet-load, windowsills so wax coated as to become fire dangers themselves.

But, hours ago, these same surf fans have been thrown into consternation as Brady, who is 45, just held a scintillating press conference in which he telegraphed that he would never stop playing professional football even though it is rumored that his playing may have led to Bündchen heading for the door.

When asked about his plans he firmly declared “No retirement in my future.”

Just exactly like Kelly Slater who only hints of his own leaving the surf game to steal thunder from Joel Parkinson.

But imagine the best potential best friendship of Brady and Slater, the two plying their respective crafts into 50s, 60s, 70s. Encouraging each other to never give up.

Is this what our candles have manifested?

Two forever athletes?


First-ever surf themed rollercoaster set to open in Florida promising riders “the rush of cutting through waves as they race up to heights of 110 feet in the air” without even getting wet!

Will Filipe Toledo make the drop?

We have arrived, officially, in the future but have you not seen the prophetic film WALL-E wherein a plucky robot left behind on earth is reunited with mankind, in space? The people, who had fled the planet due pollution etc., seem to very much enjoy their circumstances, getting extremely fat whilst sitting in floating chairs that do everything for them include feed, clothe, entertain.

The good life.

And that good life is soon set to replace actually surfing in the ocean for SeaWorld Orlando has just announced its new surf-themed rollercoaster called “Pipeline.”

Per Attractions Magazine:

The innovative design elements that make this a first-of-its-kind roller coaster are the surfing launch and wave jumping motions that riders will experience. The unique surfboard-shaped ride vehicle will give riders an all-new experience from the moment it starts. Riders will be secured on the roller coaster in a standing position and will be launched at top speeds of 60 miles per hour, while feeling as if they are catching a wave. Riders will then feel like they are hanging loose when their seats rise and fall to mimic the sensation of riding on a wave while sending them through several twists and turns.

Each rider will get the rush of cutting through waves as they race up to heights of 110 feet in the air and go upside down on a wave curl along the 2,950-feet of track. Pipeline will send riders on a journey reaching max speeds of 60 miles per hour, with five different airtime moments during the one minute and 50 second experience.

Thrilling.

Only a few questions remain. Will the World Surf League attempt to hold the Billabong Pro Pipeline in Orlando, on the rollercoaster, in an attempt to broaden surfing’s appeal?

Will Filipe Toledo ride?


Surfer-turned-citizen-cop’s iPhone video of “Zanny Nanny” driving highway crazy in a three-wheeled SUV goes viral, “She was so incoherent, nothing was connecting with her. It was like she was in a blackout.”

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.)