Don Hearn's cabins
This is a different kind of place – it suits some people and definitely does not suit others. We provide a place where you can reconnect with yourself, your partner, family, friends, your dog (yes your pet is welcome) and nature itself. How long is it since you lit a campfire, sat around it to share tall tales and gazed awestruck at the Milky Way?

Surfers rally behind one of Australia’s last affordable beach escapes as bureaucrats ready the bulldozers

"There are no clocks or TVs and mobile phone won’t work. The point of Don Hearn’s Cabins is to provide a space where you can just stop."

A little over sixty years back, a World War II vet who’d fought the Nazis in Africa and the imperialist Japanese in New Guinea came back to Australia and built half-a-dozen cabins on pristine almost-beachfront land on NSW’s South Coast.

After years of being soaked in the blood of other men in the desert and the jungle, Don Hearns returned an avowed pacifist, what would be called, in the American sense, a liberal. He used whatever materials he could find to build the modest cabins on four acres of crown land at Cunjurong Point.

Australian surfers who wanted to avoid the Vietnam draft hid away at Don Hearn’s cabins and ol Donny showed his pacifist colours when he sent a dead Blue-Ringed octopus to the prime minister in protest at Australia’s involvement in the war.

Over the ensuing years, Don Hearn’s cabins became a popular holiday destination not just for surfers, but families who didn’t want to be slugged five hundred or a thousand bucks a night for some dressed-up, characterless house down a back street.

Don Hearn’s cabins has a compelling sell.

This is a different kind of place – it suits some people and definitely does not suit others. We provide a place where you can reconnect with yourself, your partner, family, friends, your dog (yes your pet is welcome) and nature itself.

How long is it since you lit a campfire, sat around it to share tall tales and gazed awestruck at the Milky Way?

There are only six cabins on four acres so there are plenty of quiet places to stretch out your hammock between the trees.

The cabins are not self contained but when you get the key to your cabin, it also opens your own bathroom in the amenities block so you are not sharing with everyone else – you just need to bring a torch so you can get there at night.

There are no clocks, radios or TVs and most mobile phone won’t work. The whole point of Don Hearn’s Cabins is to provide a space where you can just stop; jump off that rat-wheel of daily distractions.

 

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Of course, in a country where speculative real estate, snitching and rule following are national pastimes, Don Hearn’s cabins drives the bureaucrats nuts.

And, so, shortly, Don Hearn’s cabins are gonna be closed after “issues” were identified with the site.

“Detailed assessments identified issues including the poor condition of the buildings, bushfire risk at the site, sewerage infrastructure problems and presence of endangered ecological communities,” a government spokesperson said.

Lexie Myer, who became caretaker in 1991 after Don Hearn’s death, says the government has kept her on a thirty-day lease for almost a quarter of a century.

“It will be 22 years trying to run an accommodation business where people want to book next year but I don’t have more than 30 days’ certainty at any time,” she told ABC, saying that during the hysteria of COVID she was forced to go to charities for food, “I didn’t qualify for any assistance…so I had no income for almost 18 months.”

Close the joint and, says Myer, and “I’ll be homeless, unemployed, with a three-legged dog and 70 years old… I thought I’d be here for the whole rest of my life and be carried out in a box.”

Click here for petition etc.

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World Dog Surfing Championship in danger.
World Dog Surfing Championship in danger.

In ominous warning to World Surf League, World Dog Surfing Championship becomes too expensive to run

"This is due to the over 100%+ cost increases the event has experienced over the last three years..."

Surf fans around the globe were elated, yesterday, when the greatest to ever do it, Robert Kelly Slater, came out of retirement for the 27th time. The 2024 Championship Tour would certainly not feel the same without the 11x cup winner failing to give a real effort in the lineup and the aforementioned fans became buoyed that life beyond the cut might be glorious.

Dark clouds, however, are forming.

In an ominous warning to the “global home of surfing,” the much-loved World Dog Surfing Championship, conducted yearly in Pacifica, California, has become too expensive to run.

Maybe.

Organizers have hustled to the health insurer GoFundMe in a valiant attempt to raise funds. Per the posting:

This popular event brings thousands of people to the beaches of Pacifica, garners millions of dollars in national and worldwide pres s coverage to hundreds of millions of viewers and readers, helps local and regional businesses, brings awareness to our rescue dog charity partners, and the event even helps local schools in Pacifica (one school last year raised over $4,500 just from their parking fundraiser during the Championships).

The event is tentatively scheduled to take place on:
Saturday August 3, 2024
Linda Mar Beach
Pacifica, CA

However, at this time the event is not officially scheduled to take place, and all of those benefits may not be enjoyed by anyone. This is due to the over 100%+ cost increases the event has experienced over the last three years as far as permits, fees, and other event requirements that the local government has requested. The last two years we absorbed the financial losses that these incurred, but we cannot do so again for a third year.

Hope springs etc. but in the meantime, World Surf League officials are certainly taking note, perhaps imagining that if the foretold Saudis don’t appear with wads of riyals beneath pristine white thobes, it can make the rounds, Bailey Ladders hard hat in hand, in order to plug holes.

How much would you donate to keep professional surfing live?

I feel you can do better than that.

Dig deep, please.

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Kelly Slater retires for one week.
Kelly Slater, in tears one week ago, now back on tour! | Photo: WSL

Breaking: Kelly Slater, 52, to come out of retirement and surf majors in Tahiti and Fiji!

And opens door to requalifying for 2025 tour!

After Kelly Slater’s twenty-seventh retirement announcement aired one week ago following his second-last finish at Margaret River, opening a geyser of teary tributes, Kelly Slater will now compete in tour majors in Fiji and Tahiti, as well as the Championship Series Gold Coast Pro, which runs from April 27 through to May 4.

Despite a horror season where he finished equal dead last, alongside beleaguered Brazilian non-Stormer Deivid Silva and Hawaiian Eli Hanneman, Kelly Slater was given wildcards by the WSL into the Pacific leg of the tour.

It ain’t for nothing, of course.

Kelly Slater has won Tahiti five times and Fiji, four, his surfing breathtaking, a savage, arrogant dance, taunting his opponents in his warlike way.

Watch Kelly Slater at Cloudbreak, a wave he’s surfed for almost forty years and which he knows as well as Pipeline. The way he balances his hindquarters, looking fierce and confident, those ears pulled back, purring like a kettle on the boil.

In a remarkable turn, with wins in both events Kelly Slater can now requalify for the 2025 tour.

Tour observers will remember the first time Kelly Slater retired iin 1998, the then six-time world champ having just-turned twenty-six. He competed sporadically over the next few years, winning Pipe in 1999 and the Eddie in 2002, before re-joining the tour to take on Andy Irons head-on, hinting at retirement every year thereafter.

In 2018, and piggybacking Joel Parkinson’s retirement announcement at J-Bay, he said he’d officially quit by the end of the following year at age forty-seven. 

Other retirement announcements can be found here, here, here and here. 

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San Diego Lifeguard Todd Rice in hospital. Photo: Fox 5 News
San Diego Lifeguard Todd Rice in hospital. Photo: Fox 5 News

San Diego lifeguard hit by boat while surfing in “freak accident”

“Right now I’m fighting for my leg, to keep it. It’s not just me, it’s the whole tribe, it’s a whole group."

A San Diego lifeguard is back home after nearly losing his life while surfing Nicaragua. Todd Rice, 23, was in the Central American country enjoying a fine pulse of swell when a panga ran him over deeply cutting his leg. The hit nearly caused Rice to lose consciousness but he mustered the internal fortitude to fashion a tourniquet from his leash and control the bleeding until help arrived.

“I came to terms that for one, at that point, I might die. So I said my goodbyes to the gentleman that was holding my head and told him to say certain things to my family. And then secondary, if I live, I’ve already come to terms that I might lose my leg,” Rice told Fox 5 news.

When his fellow lifeguards heard about the accident, they immediately sprang into action, coordinating with U.S. Embassy in Managua. “Seeing it bring together the service, and we’re there to facilitate and remind everyone within the service and the community that we are a family,” Hailey Westwood, president of the San Diego Lifeguard Association, declared.

Of course, being home presents its own challenges, what with the United States’ prohibitively expensive health care costs. The lifeguards are helping their comrade there too, though, setting up a GoFundMe which opens thusly:

Todd Rice is a staple in the community. Through his dedication to lifeguarding, he has made an impact from Ocean Beach to the shores of Blacks. He also has a great presence in the fishing and surfing communities, just a few of his many passions. The San Diego Lifesaving Association is happy to support one of our own lifeguards through this difficult time.

$43,279 of a $100,000 goal has already been raised.

“Right now I’m fighting for my leg, to keep it. It’s not just me, it’s the whole tribe, it’s a whole group. I feel like it’s the whole city that’s helping me out in this process,” Rice stated.

Friendship is a wonderful thing.

Donate here if moved.

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German Sebastian Steudnter (insert) rubbing his claim in Brazil's face.
German Sebastian Steudnter (insert) rubbing his claim in Brazil's face.

Brazil in mourning after German Sebastian Steudtner drops biggest claim in surfing history!

Pride and the fall.

The rise of Brazilian surfing, over the past two decades, has brought much joy and excitement to this sometimes staid Pastime of Kings. Flash, pizzazz, paroxysms of raw emotion. In a word, passion. One of the greatest displays of this bossa nova heartbeat is, undoubtedly, the claim.

What was once an awkward physical spasm after satisfactory completion of a wave professionally surfed transformed to art in the manicured fingers of our handsome Portuguese adjacent brothers. Classic fist pumps, finger snaps, full-bodied yells punctuating 4.6s and 5.4s.

The claim became so essentially Brazilian that non-Brazilians who attempt appear to be haltingly speaking a foreign language.

Awkward.

Awkward, that is, until the German mega-wave rider Sebastian Steudnter just dropped the biggest claim in history thereby shattering  Brazil’s hold on the craft.

Surfing an unsurfable wave.

But you certainly read about the 93.7 foot Nazare bomb Steudnter bagged two months ago. The historic slide is considered to be the biggest wave ever, though the World Surf League with all its engineering and science experts must ratify the exact height. In any case, biggest ever but the unsurfable bit was a surprising hammer.

Per the Daily Mail:

‘Mission Wave Alpha’ has seen (Sebastian Steudnter) train for the perfect wave for years, and the extreme athlete decided that the time was right to surf the biggest waves of his life when Nazaré saw ‘historic’ conditions back in February.

“It was the biggest storm and the biggest waves in the past three or four years. We were, for the first time, surfing the biggest waves in stormy conditions which were considered unsurfable,” he said.

And there we have it.

But have you ever surfed an unsurfable wave?

How did it feel beneath your pioneering feet?

Most importantly, though, how did you claim?

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