Influencer flirts with Oahu danger. Photo: Instagram
Influencer flirts with Oahu danger. Photo: Instagram

Influencers lured into dangerous Oahu surf with false advertising!

"They don’t see the danger, they just see it as some place beautiful and they want to jump in."

There are many dumb things to do on/for Instagram. Do a gender reveal party. Dress up the family up like Super Mario characters for Halloween. Create sandals from the moon and turtle shells. Delete all comments after being publicly accused of deception by an Academy Award-winning ex-girlfriend. Go somewhere in Oahu, take a selfie jumping off a cliff into the water and get swept out to sea.

China Walls, in the shadow of Diamond Head, is an ideal place for the latter. There is a beautiful park on the blue Pacific only thirty minutes from downtown Honolulu. The sun puts on a wonderful show when it sets though the wave, below, is one of the most dangerous on the island of Oahu. It is a left races along a lava shoal that turns into a scintillating cliff.

All very desirable and peak Instagram fire emoji-getter.

Except, as mentioned, disaster lurks.

On Thursday, a tourist from New York went to Oahu’s China Walls and jumped into the water. He hit his head on the lava ledge. The surf grabbed his body then attempted to take him down to Davey Jones’ Locker though thankfully, surfer Brian Lauro was there to save the day.

“I’ve seen bodies dragged all the way to the finger before and it was a big enough wave,” he told the local ABC news affiliate. “I was able to spot him in the water and he was face down right off the point of the finger. Right near where there were some surfers, but he was face down and unconscious in the water.”

Lauro brought the unconscious man to shore where paramedics intervened.

Blame Oahu tourist maps

Lauro blamed tourist maps that make Oahu’s China Walls look user-friendly.

TripAdvisor, a go-to resource for barneys, calls China Walls “breathtaking” and insists tourists go and jump and enjoy.

Hawaii Vacation Fun adds, “If you’re interested in geology or if you just want a nice backdrop for your family Hawaii vacation photo, make a quick stop at China Walls during your scenic Hawaii sightseeing adventure. Don’t worry… it’s not as boring as I just made it sound.”

Lauro shook his head. He said, “(The tourists) just don’t know the water, they don’t know the waves. They didn’t see the five signs entering the park that said the waves break on the ledges and it’s dangerous surf. It’s one of the most dangerous places in the state. They don’t see it that way, they just see it as some place beautiful and they want to jump in.”

Tourists, man.

Especially on Oahu.

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Nicolas Cage and Taj Burrow's Nautilus House

See inside Taj Burrow’s multi-million dollar Nautilus House, temporary home to Nicolas Cage!

“The master bathtub was positioned to have a commanding view of the client's favourite surf break."

The Western Australian surf great Taj Burrow is one of the few high-profile shredders from the nineties who didn’t invest his formidable bankroll, at least entirely, in hookers, Balinese bars and coke. 

Instead, Burrow, who is forty-five, has built a fine property portfolio, which includes an acreage out the back of Yallingup, Western Australia, where he grew up, and at one time a Tuscan-inspired villa overlooking Sydney’s most fickle left barrel. 

But nothing comes close to Burrow’s principal residence, The Nautilus House, in Wardanup Crescent, Yalls, aka “millionaire’s row”.

It was designed by architect Dane Richardson and is currently the temporary digs of Hollywood superstar Nicolas Cage, in the south-west to shoot a movie called The Surfer, and which we referenced earlier today. 

The property was bought for two-milll in 2004 and the new place was built in 2011, winning the overall Design Excellence Award at the 2012 Building Designers Australia WA.

“I pushed through with many questions but the owner travels most of the year and was young without family so it was hard to pin down exactly what was required. The brief then developed to include a small pool, a lot of storage space, small home office, games room large enough for pool table and a large open fire place for ambiance,” Richardson told Architect and Design.  

“The master bathtub was positioned to have a commanding view of the clients favourite surf break. This was managed by loading our 3D model into Google Earth and tweaking the alignment of this particular window to the surf break. Another nice touch was to include a roof top deck; this is a small space sitting high on the concrete roof deck, fully exposed but an incredibly dramatic space for the old glass of wine.”

It ain’t hard to see why Cage was attracted to the joint.

Neighbours still recall, fondly, the demolition of the old place.

“He had a pretty nice place before, but he knocked that one down. He had a demolition party and everyone came around with sledgehammers and knocked the walls down,” neighbour Candice McKiernan said.

Nicolas Cage, meanwhile, has been thrilling locals, hither and yon.

Food of Asia owner Annie Liban said Cage was shopping in her store when he attempted to buy oranges.

Perth Now reports,

“I said to him, ‘I’m so sorry, we only accept cash (for those)’,” Liban said, to which the actor replied, “I’m so sorry, I only have US dollars with me”.

“I thought, ‘That’s him, that’s him’,” an excited Ms Liban said before reassuring him: “It’s OK, it’s OK — you don’t have to pay.”

Heady days!

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Nicolas Cage as homicidal daddy in 2018's Mom and Dad.
Nicolas Cage as a homicidal daddy in 2018's madcap adventure Mom and Dad.

The Surfer star Nicolas Cage donates thousands to save lives of dying Western Australian children!

Hollywood superstar makes “a very special phone call."

If you’ve ever lived in Western Australia, which I did for nineteen uneventful years, you’ll know what a big deal the annual Telethon is for locals. 

For twenty-six hours, various celebrities, mostly of the D-grade sort, with an international celeb dragged in if they happened to be in Perth, perform vaudeville acts and read out donations sent in by the public. 

Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder a few A-pluses in its fifty-five-year history.

If you stayed up long enough, usually midnight, a hollow-eyed stripper would come on and do a wild bumping dance, grinding to an apparently creaming frenzy. 

An old pal of mine, a TV star at one point who flew back for Telethon in a sort of look-who-made-it-big play, was told he’d babied up his girlfriend sixteen years previous.

Like I said, a Perth institution. 

Anyway, this year Nicolas Cage, who is a few months shy of turning sixty, is in town, or town-ish, he’s three hours south staying in one of the wings of Taj Burrow’s famed Nautilus Shell house along with his twenty-eight-year-old wife, shooting for the straight-to-YouTube film The Surfer. 

Storyline: “When a man returns to his beach side hometown in Australia, he is humiliated in front of his teenage son by a local gang of surfers who claim strict ownership over the secluded beach of his childhood.”

(Note to Nicolas Cage fans: three killer Dobermans lurk behind the Burrows’ ten-foot high steel gate.)

And, although Nicolas Cage couldn’t make it to Perth for Telethon despite one newsreader’s pledge to make the six-hour round drive to get him on the show, Cage made a “very special phone call.” 

To wit, a five thousand dollar donation. 

“I’d love to be with you right now but I am filming down south,” Nicolas Cage said in a recording, which was aired on the show. “I’d like to ask you to please donate to Telethon and help some children, maybe save some children’s lives.”

Cue rapturous applause etc although for Nicolas Cage fans, they’ll know the donation was served with a hefty serving of irony.

For who can forget his 2018 turn as a “child murdering lunatic” in the film Mom and Dad “which begins with an act of infanticide-via-speeding train, and only gets wilder from there.”

Their homicidal urges, as well as those of other parents, are presented as a manifestation of their misery at having negated their own sense of selves for an unrewarding existence spent caring for narcissistic brats with little common decency and no respect for their elders.

Madcap!

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El Porto and barney. Photo: Instagram/Surfline
El Porto and barney. Photo: Instagram/Surfline

El Porto officially designated “worst wave in Southern California!”

"Nearly every wave is a closeout. Everyone who surfs here is an absolute barney."

Southern California’s El Porto received the dubious honor of being dubbed region’s “worst wave.” Salty Beards, purveyor of organic body washes and beard oils, took to Instagram in order to share:

Guys, we are at the shittiest wave in Southern California for the hundredth day in a row. This is fucking El Porto. It is by far the worst wave in Southern California. Nearly every wave is a closeout. Everyone who surfs here is an absolute barney. It looks like it is going to be good but just never breaks… I swear it sucks.

El Porto is just off the coast of Manhattan Beach which has a population of 32,000. It is a “laid-back South Bay community popular with families and outdoor enthusiasts,” according to its Google Review.

El Porto is near the World Surf League’s new veterinary/animal trauma offices in El Segundo. It was recently site of a violent incident where a feisty woman stabbed Pauley Shore’s nephew’s surfboard with a small knife.

El Porto is former World Surf League CEO Erik Logan’s favorite place to surf.

Current World Surf League Chief of Sport Jessi Miley-Dyer hates it, though. She commented, “This is amazing and yes,” underneath Salty Beard’s damnation. Her honesty and negative opinion flew directly in the face of everything she has built in the “global home of professional surfing” during her climb to the top-adjacent.

Do you think the gasps of dying animals is clouding her otherwise spotless mind?

Will the muffled meows of suffering kittens finally bring down the Wall of Positive Noise?

More as the story develops.

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Oahu free for all. Photo: Blue Hawaii
Oahu free for all. Photo: Blue Hawaii

Identity politics bomb rocks Oahu as city council proposes surf contest permit changes based on age, gender and ability!

Culture war Oahu.

An social bomb rocked Oahu, overnight. The culture wars finally arriving at the outermost reaches of the American empire. For it was at the Kapolei Hale, a stone’s throw from Disney’s Aulani Resort and Spa, that the public met to argue . At issue, the very future of surf contests and swim events on the island.

Honolulu’s Department of Parks and Recreation rolled out potential changes to the application process for holding contests on both the north and south shores. The new business would include a ranking system that would award points based upon age, gender and ability.

Classic identity politics

Rather than organizing solely around ripping, identity political formations typically aim to secure the right to surf anywhere for a specific constituency marginalized within its larger context. Members of that constituency assert or reclaim ways of understanding their distinctiveness that challenge dominant characterizations, with the goal of greater self-determination.

Pipeline for all.

Hawaiian surfers are mad.

Mahina Chillingworth of Hui O Hee Nalu declared, “Queens and Pipe are different having same rules across board shouldn’t be allowed.”

David Stant Jr., also of Da Hui, added, “If we have 8 year-olds at 20 foot pipe but trying to meet requirements at pipeline at most dangerous spots in the world.”

Those who represent the South Shore are simply furious about the amount of contests run at places like the aforementioned Queens.

Tim Garry of Queens Surf Club said, “Queens is being abused. 36 days in the summer, families go to beach and there’s a contest every weekend. This is not right it excludes local people and we reject proposal by parks.”

The World Surf League did not send representation. Do you recall, though, six years ago, when the “global home of surfing” really put its foot in it and lost its preferred Pipeline window?

At the time, Honolulu’s mayor Kirk Caldwell told then-CEO Sophie Goldschmidt, “Please know the city fully appreciates the economic spending the WSL brings to the islands. As I’ve stated, this is an issue about fairness, not about money. You have stated that the changes are minor. If this is truly the case, we are perplexed that you would jeopardize your relationship to Hawaii on a minor change. I sincerely hope the WSL will continue to hold events in Hawaii, the birthplace of the sport of surfing.”

World Surf League, man.

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