Four hundred pound Powerfish, inset, and drowning VAL. | Photo: Powerfish

Instagram Influencer slammed by fans for filming drowning vulnerable adult learner surfer blames his inaction on obesity, “I’m 180kg and very unfit, we both would’ve drowned!”

“No way I’m putting my life on the line!”

You’ll remember the great Australian influencer and philanthropist Willem “Powerfish” Ungermann from his brave attempts to smash surfing’s “entrenched homophobia and patriarchal power structures” via beach theatre and Jackass-style pranks.

Two years ago, Willem terrorised a D-Bah line-up on his bodyboard, at one point accepting a beach fight only to drop to his knees and tell his surprised fellow duellist, “I’ll suck you dry, mate.”

Between waves, he said to one surfer, “I fucked a bloke like you once”, another, “You’re lucky my dad Rex isn’t here, he’d smash your pelvis”, another, “Heard of the Bra Boys? We’re the Flatty Boys. Instead of going around bashing cunts, we fuck ’em”, another, “You know why I like surfing? When guys wear wetties and I can see their dick”, another he asks if he’s seen Ross Clarke-Jones’ cock and says, “I’ve fucking sucked it dry.”

Terrific fun and many important messages.

Now, Willem has come under fire for failing to help a surfer after the man’s legrope became entangled around the pylon of a pier. 

“Take your legroom off you idiot…moron!” he barks from behind the camera. 

Almost a minute into the affair, a swimmer jumps into the ocean and rescues the VAL.

“Fuck, lucky that guy went out,” Willem says. “I wasn’t going to get him, no way I’m putting my life on the line.” 

Commenters on the post went one of two ways. 

“Typical Aussie attitude, sit on your ass and watch.”’

“There is plenty of things you can do to help a human in distress or a life threatening situation than filming it!! Put yourself into action in any way you can help build a community quickly not content!!”

“You post all these lame excuses, after the fact of why you can’t go help, however it’s easy to see through your mouth full of crap. If you truly cared (as you are playing it off) then why are you calling him an “idiot” and a “Moron” “shouldn’t be there anyway” “that’ll teach you to surf a sunami” You are probably the VERY DEFFINITION of what is wrong with the world right now!! A HUMAN BEING WAS DROWNING RIGHT INFRONT OF YOUR EYES AND YOU DID NOTHING BUT CRITICIZE, BELITTLE AND JUDGE ALL WHILE HOLDING A PHONE TO VIDEO WHAT? THE POOR MAN DYING..GOING UNDER AND NOT COMMING BACK UP? I BET….THAT YOU WERE THINKING THE WHOLE TIME…”THIS GONNA GO VIRAL” I’M TAKING THIS VERY PERSONALLY BECAUSE PEOPLE LIKE YOU ARE THE PROBLEM. PEOPLE LIKE YOU ARE WHY SOCIETY IS AS DEGRADED AS IT IS. BTW BEFORE YOU GO REPLYING THAT YOU WERE GENUINELY CONCERNED, WHY DID YOU NOT EVER ONCE SAY “I’M SO GLAD HE OK” WHY MAN, WHY? FINAL THOUGHT…WHAT IF YOU, YOUR WIFE, KIDS,DOG WERE IN A SIMILAR SITUATION AND YOU OR THEY HAD TO WATCH A GUY FILMING AND YELLING SHIT AT THEM WHILE THEY DROWN. I REALLY HOPE YOU GET YOUR DUELY DESERVED KARMA AND SOON.”

Willem had responded with the very prosaic, “I’m about 100m up the beach zoomed in and besides that I’m 180kg (four hundred pounds) and very unfit, we both would of drowned. I’m trying to lose weight at the moment just in case something like this happens again and I can help.”

Others supported his decision to stay dry.

“Good on ya dog, is no use two of yahs in the flatly hole.”
“Absolutely right there bro ya got to be fit and have experience in the sea to pull something like that off one lucky dude.”

“Smart move knowing your abilities and not going in mate. Too many blokes end up dead trying to help a situation above their capability.”

“Some people don’t realise how difficult it is to swim in the ocean. Add on the fact of trying to save another person who is in distress. Well done to the guy who jumped in.”

Your response?

VAL wrapped around a pylon, he ain’t too far out.

Stay or go?

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Open Thread: Comment Live on Finals Day of the World Junior Championships as children are marched in to California’s menacing “bomb swell!”

The future is now.

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Blacks. Photo: @petertaras
Blacks. Photo: @petertaras

Exhausted California surfers re-wax rhino chasers with noodle arms, prepare to paddle out, yet again, into “the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea!”

Big Friday (again).

Any surfer on any shore, either hemisphere, is certainly aware of the run of nearly unprecedented swell that California has been served over the past few weeks. An unrelenting, never ceasing stream of Surfline 10 – 12 feets+. Monster waves that necessitate a steeled spine, girded loins and step-up boards preferably in the “rhino chaser” range.

Exhausted.

California surfers are exhausted but what can they do? Where can we turn? Oh, there is no sympathy from any coast, neither east nor south. North nor northwest. An embarrassment of riches is what it is but how best to indulge?

David Lee Scales and I discussed, in depth, during out weekly chat. He was of the mind that there is no requirement to paddle for the middle-aged. Nothing left to prove. I was of the opinion that there is simply no choice. When surf hammers the shore, the surfer must pull on wetsuit and take a beating even if there are only straight-handers, even if arms have turned to noodle.

But what is your opinion on the matter? Do you thrill when blobs of extreme color show up on your preferred forecasting website, what James Joyce calls “the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea” or do you pull a blanky up to your chin and shudder?

Tell true.

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Cultural appropriation (pictured). Photo: The Brady Bunch
Cultural appropriation (pictured). Photo: The Brady Bunch

Axe finally falls on use of word ‘aloha’ by non-native Hawaiians: “It’s about time that culturally appropriating haoles kept our word out of their pasty white mouths!”

Othering and microaggression.

It was only a matter of time and, honestly, a pure miracle that we have all gotten to enjoy the word “aloha” for so long. Gotten away wearing it on trucker hats, plastering it to the back of Teslas in sticker form, saying it to each other when landing at Honolulu’s Daniel K. Inouye International Airport smiles spreading across pasty faces in anticipation of that first Mai Tai.

A surprisingly long run but, alas, now officially over.

Into the cultural appropriation bin where it probably belonged all along.

Maile Arvin, director of Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Utah, explained to USA Today, “‘Aloha’ doesn’t just mean hello or goodbye. It’s a greeting or a farewell, but the meaning is deeper. One of my Hawaiian language teachers taught it to me as ‘Aloha means recognizing yourself in everyone and everything you meet.” And when non-natives use, it comes off as mockery.

Aloha isn’t the only word that we should keep out of our lily mouths, of course. The piece continues:

“We live in a multilingual world where we’re always influencing one another’s language practices hand where we might come into contact with a variety of terms or language practices that we have not grown up in,” says Nikki Lane, cultural and linguistic Anthropologist.

Intention matters most. Dropping an “hola” or “shalom” to someone you know who speaks Spanish or Hebrew, for example, isn’t something to worry about. Actively don a fake, exaggerated accent and say those words? Therein lies the problem.

Like saying “ni hao” to someone Asian-American who isn’t Chinese; this could be both othering and a microaggression.

So there you have it, amigos, I mean friends.

Nyet on dropping foreign words into bland English sentences.

Khalas.

Also, are you now considering applying to the School of Pacific Island Studies at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City?

Maybe you should.

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The former model Jon Pyzel and letter home to Daddy in 1993.

John John Florence’s transcendentally sexy shaper Jon Pyzel reveals humble pre-stardom beginnings in letter home to daddy from 1993, “I love surfboards so it’s not even like really going to work! I really feel like surfboards might be my thing!”

"Shaping boards might be the thing I've been looking for as far as work goes and I may give it a try to see if I've a natural talent for it."

Jon Pyzel, as you know, has been making boards for John John Florence, who is thirty and six-foot two, since the kid was five, since his mama Alex brought the boys to see him at his old bay at Sunset Beach in 1996 and gave him two-hundred dollars for materials to build John a board.

The yellow four-six with  halo of orange rails is “hideous to look at” but now exists as a memorial to a boy destined for greatness.

Fifty-something Jon is also one of the most accessible shapers in the world.

Walk into his factory in Waialua on the North Shore or hit him up on his Instagram account, which he operates, and you’re going to talk, message, with Jon himself.

He’s like Gabriel’s shaper Johnny Cabianca. The pair are in the game to make beautiful surfboards, not to wind up sitting behind a desk commanding an apparel and hardware biz.

Now, in a post to his legion of follows, some drawn by his shaping wizardry, others by what has been described as his “diabolical and transcendental sexiness”, Pyzel has revealed a letter he wrote to his daddy back home in California in 1993, three years before the intervention of Mama Florence. 

Jon was twenty-four and earning two hundred bucks a week patching busted shooters but even at this early stage he exhibits the perseverance and optimism of a man who would eventually become the master and overseer of a multi-million dollar surfboard empire.

“Hi Dad! How are you!,” writes Pyzel. “I’pm working at  Coffee Gallery, waiting tables and also working at Country Surfboards, fixing broke and bashed-up surfboards. 

“I can work there whenever I want, and get paid by what I do not by the hour, and I am learning more about glassing, polishing, putting on fins etc.

“I really love surfboards, so it’s not even really like going to work (except for the itch). I really feel like shaping boards might be the thing I have been looking for as far as work goes, and I may give it a try, to see if I have any natural talent for it!

“I love you so much, Dad. I always will. Jon.”

My letters home, from Bali, the Gold Coast and so on, at a similar age were less floral, and more anxious, “have got a girl pregnant”, “need money”, “am in hospital again”, “hate work and love living on the dole” etc.

 

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