Life would never be the same again, he knew that.

What a rich history the German city of Munich has. If we swing back to November 1923, we would find a very young Adolf Hitler, a baby-ish thirty-four, and thousands of his fellow national socialists raising hell, killing cops etc.

All the gang was there. Göring. Hess. And so on.

Hitler was found guilty of treason and sent to the can for five years where he would write the best-seller Mein Kampf, Chas Smith’s inspiration, ninety years later, for an issue of Stab.

Five years after Hitler’s release, the nat socialists then embarked on an ambitious program to rule the world while ceding the Pacific, including Australia and the USA, to the Japanese Empire.

It ended with a bang etc.

In this short clip, taken from the Eisbach’s Rapid Jam held on July 28, a naked man attempts to dance down a rail into the water, and into considerable glory, but a horrible slip, suggesting terrific damage to gonads, ensures a wild response from spectators and competitors. 

 

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Did you know the joint is crowded? That localism is a thing? That Kelly Slater got told to go home by an arch local known as the House Meister? And so on?

And have you ever wondered what it be like to have your balls sliced off by a medical pro? Here’s a short story in the style of Ernest Hemingway about a man, a doctor and a knife.

He stood there in the stark white room, the cold linoleum floor beneath his bare feet. The light was harsh, unforgiving, casting sharp shadows on the walls. There was no need for words; the doctor’s eyes said it all. This was it. This was the moment he had dreaded, the moment he had fought against in his mind, but now it was real, and there was no turning back.

He thought back to the days before, to the days of youth and virility, when life was a dance of endless possibilities. He had felt invincible then, with dreams of conquest and glory in his heart. But life had a way of humbling a man, of bringing him to his knees, and now he stood there, stripped of his former self, ready to face the blade.

The doctor moved closer, his face expressionless, his hands steady. He had performed this procedure countless times before, and to him, it was just another day at the office. But to the man standing there, it was everything. It was a loss of identity, of purpose, of what it meant to be a man.

He closed his eyes, trying to summon the courage to go through with it. He thought of his loved ones, of the woman he had left behind, of the children he had never had. Would they understand? Would they still love him, accept him, with this part of him taken away?

The room seemed to close in on him, the walls pressing against his chest. He took a deep breath, trying to calm the tremor in his hands. This was a choice he had made, he reminded himself. A choice to live, to survive, to escape the clutches of a disease that threatened to consume him.

The doctor’s voice cut through the silence, his words crisp and matter-of-fact. There was no room for sentimentality here, no time for second-guessing. It was time to face the truth, to confront the reality of his situation. He nodded, his throat dry, his heart pounding like a war drum in his chest.

And then it was done. The blade had done its work, and he was forever changed. He felt a strange mix of relief and emptiness, as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders but had been replaced by an unfillable void.

He dressed silently, the doctor already moving on to the next patient, the next life to be altered. As he stepped out into the world, he felt a strange detachment from it all. The people on the streets seemed like ghosts, their voices distant and indistinct.

He walked, not knowing where he was going, not caring. The sun was setting, casting long shadows across the pavement. He thought of all the other men who had faced the same choice, the same fate, and he felt a kinship with them, a brotherhood of sacrifice.

Life would never be the same again, he knew that. But as he walked into the fading light, he felt a glimmer of hope, a spark of something new. He was still a man, still a human being, and though a part of him was gone, he was still alive, still breathing, still fighting. And in the end, that was all that mattered.

“It was getting into my board and holding it up in the air…one of its pectoral fins hit me in the groin.”

You’ll remember last week’s Great White hit on a surfer at a joint called Boat Ramps, one of the better waves down there in Margaret River. 

Jack Frost, yeah real name, who’s twenty-four, was hit from below as per the White’s modus operandi, survived the blast and paddled to shore where he limped to a nearby cafe and an off-duty nurse stemmed the bleeding while he was driven to Margs hospital. His eight-one Gunther Rohn was belted to hell.

Ain’t no surprise, of course.

The Margaret River region is notorious for its booming Great White population although when world champion Brazilian surfers Italo Ferreira and Gabriel Medina refused to surf a CT even there in 2018 after two nearby attacks in one day, they were described as “weak and conniving” by the celebrated Western Australia author Tim Winton. 

“As someone who’s surfed all over the world and with the machismo and bravado of Brazilians in particular, I thought it was amazing how cowardly those guys were,” he said. “Look, not everybody wants to be in the water the day after two guys have failed the taste test around the corner, but I thought it was a really low act on behalf of those two guys…I just think  if you want to go swimming in a dead ocean, go to a pool, go to a wave pool. If you want to be part of something that’s alive, and that’s what surfing is to most of us, then you’ve gotta be prepared, you’re doing that in a living ecosystem. If you want to kill all the sharks you’re just going to kill the oceans. It’s one of the few places in the world where there are actually real waves.”

It’s since been revealed that SharkSmart’s tagged shark notifications had been offline since the previous Wednesday ‘cause of a tech fault, which is the achilles heel of the whole there’s-gotta-be-better-ways-to-keep-shark-attacks-down-than-culling-the-beasts. All it takes is one outage, no one knows what the hell is out there and boom.

Anyway, Swellnet’s Stu Nettle interviewed Frost, who’s originally from Great White HQ Ballina ironically, about the hit and found a man pretty nonplussed by the event, although his account of his existential battle to survive will raise the hairs.

“It’s hit me and I’ve done a kind of back flip off my board. Landed in the water and as I’ve surfaced, I’m thinking, ‘What the fuck was that?’ It was getting into my board and holding it up in the air. The shark was kind of across me, one of its pectoral fins hit me in the groin area… And then I ended up sort of spinning backwards. Kind of…what’s the word? Not manhandled, but shouldered by it. But I just figured I’m not going to roll over for it, so I moved onto its back and started punching its head a few times. That doesn’t really do much; it didn’t even flinch. But then I started punching it in the side towards the gills and I must have got one punch in where it’s touch sensitive and it just fucking shot down into the depths. It went quiet and then I got back on my board. Thank fuck my legrope wasn’t in its mouth.”

It’s a longer form Q and A but very much worth peeling a little time off for, as is the grainy video from Swellnet’s own cam.