Egan and fam to relocate to Sydney's exclusive Burraneer penninsula after swinging 3.5 mill at almost waterfront compound… 

Back in December, the “powerful, basso-voiced” former world number two Luke Egan, described as the “the best all-around surfer in the world after Kelly Slater” offloaded his redundant beachside bunker in Cronulla for almost six million dollars despite a housing market that was teetering on its glitzy high-heels. 

Egan, who is fifty-four and his Fox Sports presenter wife Jess Yates, had commissioned the build of that five-bed cubist joint four hundred metres from the sand at Wanda after buying the dirt for a little under one-and-a-half mill in 2014.

Now, the pair have spent $3.5 million on a mid-century shack on a sprawling quarter-acre hunk of wildly fertile dirt wrapped in a downy luminous green grass. The Morris House, as its called, was offered for the first time in sixty-four years.

“Create a luxury family estate or land bank for the future,” said its selling realtor.

Even in its slightly run-down form, it’s a house with a gorgeous skeleton that requires little more than a quick blow and go, as they say, to make it spectacularly liveable for Egan and his little family.

Egan retired from the world tour prematurely, it was felt, in 2005 to become a marketing manager for Billabong, leaving eight years later.

Although rarely putting a foot wrong, his real estate chips are the stuff of legend, Egan’s one misstep was his foray into “adventure wear” with the brand Depactus, “a technical outfitter for surfing’s modern youth”.

"It’s incredible what the mind and spirit can do when you know you’re fucked."

One week back, as big-wave daddies shucked responsibilities to chase and wrangle a wild Teahupoo swell, British surfer Tom Lowe very nearly never saw his soon-to-be-born kid after he was pitched on the takeoff, busting six ribs and puncturing a lung in the collision with the notorious reef.

How bad was it?

Jamie Mitchell, an Australian big-wave surfer who ain’t scared of a few catastrophic wipeouts himself, see here, and here, here, and yeah here, asked the twenty-nine-year-old Brit what it’s like to feel the fist of God on your head.

 

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“I went and sat on the shoulder to wait for my wave,” says Tom. “One of the bigger waves of the day popped up, the channel went all blue. By no means do I have much experience out there, but I turned and went late. I jumped [from the lip], but I wouldn’t even say it was an awkward jump. I’ve jumped like that a million times. When I hit the water, I put my hands over my head, and was ready to get sucked over. I was on autopilot. I’ve done that a million times in a million waves.

“But as soon as I went up and over, I knew I was gonna hit [the reef]. It hit so hard on my side, that I knew it was gonna be bad. When I came up, I couldn’t breathe. I had this big cut going on. My shoulder, elbow, ribs…I was all broke up. I couldn’t shout or wave. My shoulder was broken, too. All I could do was use my other arm to keep my head above water.

“In my mind, I was like ‘I will make it; I will make it to the beach. I need medical help.’ It was the most pain I’ve ever felt. It’s incredible what the mind and spirit can do when you know you’re fucked.

“This was the heaviest situation I’ve ever been in by far. I’ve never nearly died like that, not to that level. This was as real as it’s ever been.”

Shortly after Lowe’s hospitalisation it was revealed his travel insurance policy didn’t cover his medical costs and Tahitian authorities subsequently wouldn’t let him leave French Polynesia until all his bills, totalling fifty gees, were paid.

Lowe, who earns one thousand dollars a month at Vans and hence broke as hell after slinging ten gees at chasing this swell, was stuck until friends and fans, although not his multi-billion dollar sponsor Vans, raised the required cash to get him out.

"No one wants to be homeless or without a job, without a place to go every day, without a future, that's not paradise."

Who needs a homeless haole, am I right?

The Hawaiian state gov, pragmatists who know the fabled island chain is a magnet for the destitute ‘cause if you’re poor y’might as well be warm instead of freezing to death back home on the mainland, plans to ramp up its program of shipping mainlanders back to where the hell they came from.

“It saves the state millions of dollars in the finite amount of resources we have for our local homeless,” Rep. John Mizuno told Local 8. “We’re getting them back to their family, their support group where the homeless can get back on their feet.”

The program was launched in 2015 to tamp down on Waikiki’s growing homeless problem, with out-of-state JOJ’s swelling numbers. So far 599 out-of-staters have been given seats home on Southwest airline jets.

In a piece for KITV4, two Boston men, Michael McCann and Michael French, spoke of living on the Honolulu streets.

“No one wants to be homeless or without a job, without a place to go every day, without a future,” McCann said. “I mean, that’s not paradise. That’s torture. Everybody needs to have help, absolutely. If you could help anybody here get back home. People are suffering here.”

His pal Michael French, howevs, ain’t going nowhere, free airfare home or not.

“This is going to be my home. I’m going to stay in Hawaii. I have no wants to go back to Boston. I don’t like the cold weather there, can’t push a wheelchair around in the snow too good. I’ll be here until the day I die.”

Dunno about you, but I  get a shiver whenever I pass a homeless man, roughly my age, ’cause I know I’m maybe six bad months away from joining him on his cardboard carpet, old paw extended to grasp your offered coins.

I remember, once, a prominent surf magazine photo editor telling me he was living in his car.

Like Orwell said in Down and Out in Paris and London, “the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.”

Anyone done it or doing it tough?