"There were multiple attempts at online purchases with credit cards in Australia, adding to over ten thousand dollars!"

There’s been reports of a “huge rift” between European and Australian surfers following a wild post-contest celebration and alleged theft at Lei Lei’s Bar and Grill on Oahu’s North Shore. 

According to our source, the wallet of a leading European surfer went missing at a dinner at the Turtle Bay eatery and bar following the conclusion of the Haleiwa Challenger, the final qualifying event of the season. 

Accusations flew and fingers were pointed causing much consternation and bad blood between the European and Australian camps, the colonisers versus the colonised y’might say.

The wallet was handed back by the alleged thief the following afternoon with the explanation, “Sorry I was drunk.” 

“But,” said our source, “here’s the kicker. There were multiple attempts at online purchases with credit cards (yes more than one) in Australia, adding to over ten thousand $$ that were made morning after the incident, like 9am the next day!” 

Various sporting bodies connected to surfing are reportedly trying to keep a lid on the incident. 

More as the curtain is pulled back.

“No other place on earth is so falsly mytho-poetically rhapsodized…Byron has the highest rates of violent and sexual assault outside of inner Sydney."

Shortly before his disappearance, BeachGrit’s tour correspondent and Russian-lit heavy “Longtom” wrote movingly of the collapse of Byron Bay from surf-hippy utopia into “malignant nightmare.” 

“No other place on earth is so falsly mytho-poetically rhapsodized…I see a different side of the Bay. Byron has the highest rates of violent and sexual assault outside of inner Sydney. This ain’t a peaceful place when drunk and drugged fuckers are wandering around outside closing time.

“It’s a monument to greed wearing a spiritual cloak. A glittering dream metastasized into a malignant nightmare. The bastard spawn of unhinged neoliberalism and grinning hippy capitalists running riot in an orgy of aimless consumption in the spiritual supermarket. Ayn Rand on a mid-length.”

Collisions in the surf as leashless logs and VALS with dreams of being the next Jamie O career through lineups are frequent, as the mother of a disabled kid and aged care worker found out on Sunday when she got belted by an out-of-control surf pilot.

Ayumi Noha, a forty-two-year-old surf vet of twenty summers, was paddling out at Main Beach when she was run over, ripping her stilt open. 

She was reportedly called a “whore” and criticised for damaging the man’s craft with her bone and tissue. 

Noha’s partner, Nharyan Feldmann, said the unknown surfer then left his gal on the beach to bleed out. 

“We have two kids, one with a disability. She won’t be able to walk or work for two weeks at least,” Feldmann wrote on Facebook. “This poor excuse for a human being abused her for the damage to his board and walked away.”

Feldmann says a couple of bystanders drove crippled Noha to hozzy. Byron Hospital said it was too messy to stitch so she was driven one-hour north to Tweed Heads where surgeons put her under a general anaesthetic for the procedure.

Cops said, “Police are not responsible for collisions during leisure sporting activities, whether that be in the ocean, at skate parks or on dirt tracks. However, police are responsible for investigating offences such as intimidation with intent to cause physical fear and threats of physical violence.”

"You're the f**king leader of the free world!"

Sometime last summer, an email appeared in my inbox.

Would you like to write a profile of Matt Warshaw for Emocean magazine?

It took me exactly five seconds to reply. Yes, of course, I would like to write a profile of Matt.

The story is available now in Devotion, Emocean’s fourth issue.

 

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It has been a joy to work with the crew at Emocean, who love surfing and making print media as much as anyone I’ve ever met.

I’d love to see the magazine thrive. If you’d like to buy a copy, and I feel like you most definitely do, you can buy it here.

I feel like Matt does not need much of an introduction to you.

He is surfing’s devoted historian and spends his days in Seattle sifting through the ruins of our strange and beautiful past time. He says he’s motivated by an effort to assign meaning to his own story and to understand why he’s spent so many hours of life obsessed with riding waves.

How did he arrive here?

Matt’s life has intersected so many interesting characters and places in surfing. Matt learned to surf in Venice Beach with Jay Adams, competed in the first Katin Pro/Am, edited Surfer Magazine — and that was just the beginning.

Here’s a short excerpt from the longer profile.

When Warshaw went to work for Surfer in 1985, he arrived during a surf media golden age. “It was a really wild and fun period,” says Jamie Brisick, who was a pro surfer at the time. “This was the period of Tom Curren, Tom Carroll, and Mark Occhilupo — the surfers were still characters.”

Advertising money flowed, and the magazine was fat with the work of writers such as Derek Hynd and Dave Parmenter and photographers such as Jeff Divine and Art Brewer. “Had he been the editor at a different time, he might have come out of it a different person,” says Brisick.

Shelved in publisher Steve Pezman’s office were bound copies of the entire run of the magazine. Warshaw read them all from start to finish. “I wanted to absorb it completely. I wanted it to come through my eyes, my skin, and my blood, and my hands,” he says. “I’m not a fast learner, but I never don’t get better.” Soon Warshaw was managing editor at Surfer.

When he made editor-in-chief, Warshaw’s future in the surf media looked assured. He was less certain. His younger brother Chris had traveled widely and gone to the University of Chicago.

All Warshaw had ever done was surf.

“There is a real risk of intellectual suffocation in surfing,” says Lewis Samuels, who wrote the widely read blog PostSurf and was a senior writer at Surfer. “I think you’re more likely to suffer some form of intellectual suffocation than to die from drowning.”

In a long-shot move, Warshaw applied to UC Berkeley. To his surprise, they agreed to admit him as a junior after adding up the miscellaneous credits he’d accumulated.

Walking up the trail at Trestles one evening, Warshaw encountered Sam George, who wrote for Surfing and had somehow learned of Warshaw’s disaffection.

He tried to change Warsaw’s mind.

“You’re the fucking leader of the free world! You’re the editor of Surfer Magazine,” George recalls saying. “What is wrong with you? Revel in this!” But George was too late.

In many ways, Warshaw had already left.

Not long after that conversation, Warshaw sold the house he had bought near T- Street and packed his bags. He had been editor of Surfer for just five months.

In January 1991 at age 30, he arrived in Berkeley to pouring rain.