Following disastrous trans pivot, Rip Curl's masterful PR campaign continues with pie in the face of old enemy Quiksilver!

It’s been a helluva ordinary six months for the once-iconic wetsuit company Rip Curl.

Its hard-core surf bona fides were rapidly whittled away following its sale to a discount camping company, the disappearing of its high profile Chief Brand and Marketing Officer and former Tracks editor Neil Ridgway and a decision to pivot to the trans and queer market backfired spectacularly.

Of course you remember when Rip Curl made a post celebrating the trans-surfer Sasha Jane Lowerson (neé Western Australian longboard champ Ryan Egan) not long after splitting with Bethany Hamilton over her anti-trans women in sports views. 

The post was subsequently deleted making enemies of both sides of the cultural divide.

Surf Equity described the “so-called” apology as “divisive, anti-trans, and discriminatory. The LGBTQIA+ community is appalled. Aligning with bigots harms your brand identity and fails to support your LGBTQIA+ employees.”

That pivot, which almost cost new Rip Curl CEO Brooke Farris her job, was soon forgotten with a series of masterful plays that quickly cemented Farris as a master of the game.

The first, getting the world’s most popular surfer, eight-time champ Stephanie Gilmore to sign for eight years at a relatively paltry, given her wild profile, three-hundred gees a year.

The second, announced today, is their headline sponsorship of The Eddie Aikau Invitational, which used to be called The Quiksilver: in memory of Eddie Aikau and which ran, sponsorless last year, as The Eddie Aikau Big-Wave Invitational.

(Last year’s event was epic, blue collar local Luke Shepardson won in twenty-five-foot surf, the North Shore came to a standstill and its live broadcast went through the roof.)

A little background on The Eddie.

The first event was held in six-to-eight-foot waves at Sunset Beach back in 1984, and only went big wave when Quiksilver execs along with Fast Eddie Rothman turned it into the speciality event we all know, love etc, at Waimea Bay. 

When the fifty-k prize money was announced, it also became the richest surf contest in the world. 

In 2016, it felt like the event couldn’t get any better when John John Florence, the just-crowned world surfing champion, cemented his claim to best in biz when he won the still-sponsored-by-Quiksilver, although barely, Eddie in wild 25-foot conditions. 

So how did such a fruitful relationship, which included the lucrative sale of Eddie Aikau-Quiksilver merchandise, wind up in the gravel?

Here’s how that went down: the previous ten-year contract was expiring in the spring of 2016 and Quiksilver and the Aikau family began negotiating a new deal. 

The Aikau family were advised that a potentially better deal might be out there if they shopped it around a little. Red Bull was in the mix, initially, but apparently, Red Bull and the WSL couldn’t couldn’t find a way to play nice so they pulled out at the last minute, leaving the Aikaus with no deal.

A source told BeachGrit multiple offers were submitted to the Aikaus by Quiksilver, all with increased revenue sharing opportunities but all were rejected. 

But here was the rub, as they say.

Quiksilver owned the permits for the 2015-16 contest and even canvassed the idea of calling it a different name to circumvent the need to involve the famous Hawaiian family. 

Quiksilver played around with The Quiksilver: In Memory of Jose Angel, The Quiksilver: In Memory of Todd Chesser, The Quiksilver: In Memory of Brock Little.

Anyway, it worked out for 2016 but was terminated shortly after.

Did Quiksilver decide that the chances of The Eddie ever being as good as 2016 were so slim any subsequent money poured into it would be wasted?

The question I asked at the time was, would you, if gifted the keys to the clothing giant that was once famously six hundred million dollars in debt, continue to run with The Eddie?

Or would you pour the surplus money into your number one team rider Matt Banting?

Quiksilver chose Banting.

Congrats Rip Curl.

Pick at the bones of long-time Surfers Journal editor Scott Hulet’s dazzling collection of south-of-the-border stories…

The former editor of The Surfers Journal, Scott Hulet, whom you’d swear with his high brilliantined hair, husky voice and sucky mouth was hot silver daddy Gianluca Vacchi, has just released a compendium of south-of-the-border stories accumulated over a thirty-year career called Flow Violento.

Flow Violento is a handsome, expensively produced volume with a linen cover that only costs thirty-five dollars or twenty-eight if you subscribe to the Journal and you could, and should, buy it. 

To get you warm, here’s a story contained within called Two Dog Circus, “surrealism in central Baja.”

**************

San Quintín sprawls along the highway, debauched and sour, merging with the neighboring colonias in a megastrip of roadside sprawl. Migrants pour in from Central America and the mainland with high hopes but nowhere to go but down. A lot of glue gets huffed here, and when travelers are robbed or gang-stomped, the area between Camalú and Punta Baja is where it happens. 

In the past, the region was a laid-back zone of year-round overcast, empty reefs, and rich brant hunting and yellowtail fish- ing. Today, San Q can seem a desperate place. 

Three years ago, hundreds of laborers and their fami- lies were denied payment by their patrónes, and the looting commenced. When the military regained control they found the rabble in local markets and restaurants, gorging on raw meat and fish offal, clicking in their mountain dialects. The town has had a dark vibration ever since. 

Jorge and I blow through the city with the windows up against a nimbus of insecticide and farmed-out dust. I can’t help but think of the town as some dreadful indicator of Alta California’s two-class future. 

The situation improves as we drop into the Valle El Rosario, seeing the sphinx-like mountain formation that marks the central plateau. The first boojum and cardon are spotted, and suddenly we’re in the true desert. Past the buried-tire corral of Tres Enriques, we drive across the spring-fed vado fringed with blue palms at Cataviña and down still farther to the winter hunting grounds. 

My companion has been weathering a teeth-gnashing divorce, and his monologue chews through nine hours of driving. If his tales weren’t salted with humor and ribald speculation on his bachelor future, they would be intolerable in their lack of topical range. Regardless, we’re both ready for some peace as he turns off the motor, perched on the dune overlooking the small bay. The engine diesels, choking up the stepped-on gas bought out of a drum at Santa Ynez. 

The view into the cove is a letdown. Swimming Pool Point is pretty much gone. The sand hasn’t recovered from the hurri- cane that came aground several years ago. Fat waves drag their way to shore, shapeless and slow. An osprey spirals up an invisible thermal stalking corvina, looking vigilant and bored all at once. 

Inshore, the evening glow marquees the shanties of the shark fishermen’s camp with halogen spot beams of sun, highlight- ing a white shrine on the hill above. A group of young men walk toward us, finally close enough for one to gesture and hiss, “Relax.” 

We toss them a greeting. It’s a much younger crew than I remember, streetwise and urban looking. A cold-eyed young man in a bandana scratches invisible insect bites. He’s muscled and lean. “No,” I answer to the tall one, “we don’t want to buy any abalone or weed. Enjoy the evening.” 

While fishermen would normally show a healthy curiosity where rig and gear are concerned, this lot makes an obvious effort to avert their eyes. They stride back to their camp. 

As we erect our tent, we hear a vehicle coming over the rise. Headlamps sweep the dunes, and the truck rumbles to halt 10 yards away. Jorge stares at the dusty Land Cruiser with its stack of boards, aghast. His cursing echoes across the landscape. Livid, he mumbles to himself as he assembles the fold-out kitchen. “Forty miles of coast without a soul. Forty miles. Give me a goddamn break.” After a tequila, his outrage cools to amusement. 

The fellow surfers keep to themselves, busily off-loading their truck. The next morning’s quiet is broken by the two-stroke whine of the shark pangas, off to the Cedros channel. Our new neighbors, having changed the flat they hobbled in with, are loading a day kit for an assault on the next point up. They drive off, leaving their tents and camp stove. 

We while away the day with sessions in the limp surf inter- spersed with reading and investigations of the dunes. A coyote trots by with a crab in her teeth, a string of drool yoyo-ing from her chin.

A few hours later, Jorge treads back to our tent after a hike. “You’re going to want to see this.” We walk to the north side of the headland. I take the binoculars and glass the beach until I find them. The Land Cruiser is buried to the pumpkin in a drift of talcum sand up at the next point. Their stick figures work silently with shovels. A half hour later, the truck rolls free. To return they must traverse a mile of wet beach with a rapidly encroaching tide. They seem to know they’re in trouble, accelerating toward us across the flats. A small point of rocks blocks their approach. Through the twin circles of the binos I see the truck fall into a hole, its snout buried under an explosion of saltwater, loose gear and parts blowing into the sky. We hoot and dance in the dunes. 

The driver crawls the rig up the sand, the vehicle coming to a rest. The rocks have blown out the sidewalls of the two left tires. The engine is swamped. Bands of whitewater move incrementally closer with each set. Not wishing to stack stupidity on stupidity by risking our truck, we watch. Un milagro. A small army of fishermen walks toward them from the shark camp. They push the truck to safety en masse, and the beast sputters to life. 

That evening we offer them a sundown drink, playing dumb, regaling in their version before letting on that we’d watched the whole thing. 

We make time to explore the shark camp the following morning. I notice graffiti sprayed on the plywood walls of one shack. “Punta Mu.” The name is unknown to me, and I’ve been coming here for 25 years. I ask the first fisherman I see about the name. He lifts his chin to the point out front and to the adjacent points as well. “Punta Mu, Punta Mu…todos Mu.” 

In the space between two shacks, Jorge sees a cross and asks the fisherman of its significance. He explains that a drunken man fell asleep with a space heater on. It ignited, burning him alive before anyone could help. 

We climb the hill to the shrine and peer inside. For the most part it’s standard issue. A framed print of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Some candles. Mounted on the block wall, though, is something extraordinary: a borrego with an extra set of horns sprouting from its forehead. No obvious forensic clues as to whether it is assemblage or aberration. We chalk it up to genetics and head back to pack our gear and clean the site. 

On the road out we investigate False Point. The sand is perfect and west lines spin off, their lips Saran-thin and speckled with darting baitfish. As we continue the drive, it’s apparent that every spot save the accursed Mu is rifling. 

Dropping into the lee of the next point, we see it. Stark against the hardpan, flags snapping in the afternoon wind, a dusty bluebigtopissilhouettedagainsttheglare.“CircoAndreau,”the truck reads. The tent is staked to the ground with car axles, their hubs still attached. It out-Fellini’s Federico himself. Driving through the adjacent fish camp we slow to interview a passing man about the circus. “It tours the camps,” he tells us. “No matter how small. One man and his wife. He erects the tent and serves as ringmaster. She vends the tickets and is the clown.” 

He asks where we have come from. I mention the mapped name of the point. “Oh,” he says. “Muy malo. Mucha chiva. Muchos adictos. They are sharkers. They trade the fish for heroin to their ice truck driver from Ensenada. They fish all day and do chiva all night. Muy malo. Did you see the cross? That is where they boarded in one of their own and burnt him alive. Muy peligroso, ese lugar.” 

I ask him of the word itself. 

“Mu? Es Mu y nada más. Mu.” He forks his fingers behind his head and bugs his eyes. “Contrario a los dios. Mu. Against the gods, my friend.” 

The man’s little boy is standing on our running board, smiling and sucking on the candy I bring as baksheesh for such occasions. As his father walks away, he stays on the truck as we troll toward the main road. I ask if he has seen the circus. 

“Three times,” he says, grinning. 

“What do they have at the circo?” I ask. “Tigres? Leones? What class of animals?” 

“No tigres. No leones. Two dogs only.” He jumps from the running board. I see him in the rearview mirror, chasing after us. Jorge slows down. 

“Solo dos perros,” he screams in our dust. “Dos perros sola- mente.” He’s laughing as he turns on his heel, marching back to the camp. 

"We used to call him the Extraterrestrial because he…he could smoke more hash than anyone, take more acid, and still go out there and surf better than anyone.”

Do you remember when you couldn’t walk outside without tripping over another fawning review of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Bill Finnegan book Barbarian Days? 

The Wall Street Journal called it “gorgeously written and intensely felt… dare I say that we all need Mr Finnegan… as a role model for a life, thrillingly, lived.”

The LA Times said,

“It’s also about a writer’s life and, even more generally, a quester’s life, more carefully observed and precisely rendered than any I’ve read in a long time.”

The Pulitzer Prize committee praised it as, “A finely crafted memoir of a youthful obsession that has propelled the author through a distinguished writing career.”

The Pulitzer Prize, of course, is America’s most prestigious award in journalism. It also includes ten thousand dollars in prize money to each category winner.

It threw me under the bus of a two-day obsessive read. Photos scattered through the pages showed the author to have visible obliques, was long-haired and tanned. Finnegan could surf, write and was a stud.

It’s a been while since ol Billy has touched surf, but this oversight has been rectified with a long piece on switchfoot maestro and king of Pipe before ol Gez Lopez swung onto the scene, Jock Sutherland, in the latest issue of The New Yorker. 

You can read it all here, and I beg that you do, but here’s a few lil bites on the neck to get you in the mood. 

Jock built a different sort of life on his home coast. He’s seemingly everybody’s favorite roofer, a part-time farmer, a revered elder with garrulous tendencies. I’ve heard him called “the mayor of the North Shore.” My old starstruck view of him was pure projection. In truth, he was, from an early age, leading a strange, half-wild, quite complicated existence.

When Jock was twelve, his mother sent him to stay with a man known as the Hermit of Kalalau, on the island of Kauai. The hermit lived in a cave on the Nāpali Coast—a roadless wilderness where sea cliffs rise as high as four thousand feet. “That was actually his summer cave, down by the beach,” Jock told me. “He had a winter cave up the valley.”

The hermit’s name was Dr. Bernard Wheatley. “I was the object of his displeasure,” Jock recalled. “Being a kid, I was unaware of the imperatives of his existence. There was a good little bodysurfing wave out front, but he didn’t want me to swim out there. He was responsible for me. I started whining, and I ended up bodysurfing it.”

Audrey Sutherland was a one-off. She grew up in California, went to U.C.L.A. at sixteen for international relations, worked as a riveter in the Second World War. She became a long-distance swimmer, married a sailor, worked in commercial fishing, and moved to Oahu in 1952. There she did substitute teaching, taught swimming, got her Army job. Her kids, growing up in the decommissioned barracks at the ocean’s edge, were all water babies. After their father left, they scrounged. “When you’re poor,” Jock told me, “you learn how to find food on the reefs, hunt, pick wild fruit, trade with your neighbors. We set out lobster traps. Spearfishing, night diving. Got a lot of fruit from the hills.”

Audrey drew up a list of things that every child should be able to do by age sixteen and stuck it on the wall. It read, in part:

—Clean a fish and dress a chicken

—Write a business letter

—Splice or put a fixture on an electric cord

—Operate a sewing machine and mend your own clothes

—Handle a boat safely and competently

—Save someone drowning using available equipment

—Read at a tenth grade level

—Listen to an adult talk with interest and empathy

—Dance with any age

This list changed with the times, adding computers and contraception, and nobody really kept score, but everybody got the idea.

But it was not in contests that he made his name. It was at Pipeline, which sits roughly halfway between Waimea and Sunset Beach. A few surfers rode Pipeline well, notably Butch Van Artsdalen, a hellion from La Jolla. But most people were afraid of it. When Pipe is working, it breaks with stupendous force in shallow water, producing one of the world’s most beautiful, deadly tubes. Jock and his buddies started riding it on small days. “I made one or two out of ten,” he said.

He kept at it, refining his approach. He started making the takeoffs, and seeing how to avoid the heavy lip, by quickly finding a ridable line and “pulling in”—crouching close to the face and letting the barrel envelop him. Then, with perfect positioning and a bit of luck, he would be thrown into the clear by the explosive force of the lip’s impact. Jock seemed to have more time as he rode than anybody else did. Dropping in to the heaviest waves, he would fade and stall, casually timing his bottom turn to set up the deepest possible barrel. He would disappear into the roaring darkness, then reappear, usually, going very fast, with that little grin.

The wave of recreational drugs that flooded American youth culture in the late sixties was a tsunami among surfers. Cannabis and psychedelics—LSD, mescaline—seemed designed to make you surf better. Jock took this inspiration to the limit. “I was pretty wild,” he says today. “I worried that I set a bad example.”

Outlandish stories swirled around Jock, who was sometimes called the Sunshine Superman, for a popular variety of LSD known as Orange Sunshine. On the North Shore, he and his pals liked to start their acid trips in the mountains of the Ko‘olau Range, which runs down the east side of Oahu. They knew the mountain streams, and where to find the old work camps from the sugarcane plantations, which had been abandoned as Hawaii’s sugar industry shrank. The workers had kept fabulous gardens, which were now full of wild fruit and vegetables. At some point, Jock’s troupe would head for the coast, to rinse off the day’s psychic grime in the surf.

Psychedelics weren’t harmless—we all came to know many acid casualties. But they had, as many contemporary researchers know, the power of revelation, the potential to expand self-awareness. Jeff Hakman, the other young haole phenom of the period, told an interviewer that the best surfing experience of his life had been enhanced by LSD, and shared with Sutherland. “We used to call him the Extraterrestrial because he was so good at everything,” Hakman said. “He could beat anyone at chess or Scrabble; he could smoke more hash than anyone, take more acid, and still go out there and surf better than anyone.” You never knew what Jock would do on a wave, except that it was likely to be something you had never seen before, like side-slipping in the barrel at Sunset or switching stance at big Waimea. It was no surprise to anyone that he took the top spot in the 1969 Surfer Reader Poll.

A gorgeous long read. Complete your education here. 

Tired ol gal built in 1972 as Del Webb's Kuilima Resort Hotel & Country Club and host to pivotal moments in surf history to get new name!

There is no other hotel on the surf circuit as storied as the Turtle Bay Hotel, a tired ol gal built in 1972 and launched as the grandiosely named Del Webb’s Kuilima Resort Hotel & Country Club a little way out of the seven-mile miracle on the Kam Highway. 

So many gorgeous memories. Hazy dreams of the Mai Tai, similar to Namotu Island’s infamous Skulldragger, that renders its owner drunk before the bottom of the tumbler is sighted; a dear pal paying five hundred bucks for a room so he could attempt to seduce a Mormon gal, a fifteen-hour marathon that began at Waimea Bay, through the Turtle Bay hot tub (and Mai Tais) and ended with the reward of a brief moment of digital pressure atop modest cotton underwear; driving back to the Pipe House after Mai Tais, windows down, music roaring, waking up the next day to find car driven into tree outside the joint, windows still down, music cranked to the stars. Dancing all night with athletic T-Girls after ASP banquet etc.

More significant moments include the Bustin Down the Door saga where the Aikau family visited the baseball bat-wielding Rabbit Bartholomew, Ian Cairns and co at the Kuilima apartments that surround the resort to defuse their war between the trash-talking Aussies and South Africans and the locals. 

And, if we’re to believe the research of writer Andy Martin, the place where the 11th Earl of Coventry and high-profile British pro surfer, Ted Deerhurst, was found dead in the tub of his condo, murdered at the behest of a shadowy North Shore gangster.

In Surf, Sweat and Tears, the epic life and mysterious death of Edward George William Omar Deerhurst, buy here etc, we find Deerhurst, besotted by a Honolulu stripper to the point where he loses his mind over her, and even when he’s warned away by a nicknamed “Pit Bull”, he keeps coming back.

Deerhurst wants to marry his stripper, and he winds up breathing his last breath, in an empty bath tub.

In SST, Martin talks to a man who found the royal’s body.

“Dan got back to 100 East Kuilima around 7:30 pm. The house was quiet…Ted was in the bath. He was naked. And he was dead. But he hadn’t been having a peaceful bath and sailed away into the great beyond. Something violent had happened to him. There was no water in the bath for one thing… Ted is face down in the bath with his legs sticking out at the side. He is not breathing. His lips have turned blue and rigorous mortis has set in. There is blood in the bath. There is a “contusion” (as it says in the report) at the back of his head. And there are injuries to his face too: cuts on his nose, a black eye. He looks, prima facie, as if he has been beaten up. But, say the price, Ted beat himself up.”

The Turtle Bay is also the sight of Kalani Robb’s scene-stealing cameo in Forgetting Sarah Marshall 

Anyway, the joint has been sold for three-quarts of a billion dollars to Host Hotels and it’ll be rebranded as a Ritz-Carlton. 

James F. Risoleo, President and Chief Executive Officer, said,

“We are thrilled to enter into an agreement to acquire Turtle Bay Resort, which will further expand and diversify our already strong presence in Hawaii. Oahu is a high demand leisure destination with consistently high occupancy, an internationally diverse demand base, and high barriers to entry, resulting in slightly negative supply growth historically and essentially no anticipated near-term supply. In addition, because of the Resort’s recent transformational renovation, we do not expect meaningful capital expenditures in the near term. We look forward to working with employees and local partners to build upon the Resort’s preeminent position on the North Shore of Oahu.

For a little overview,  

The Resort is situated in a unique location on 1,180-acres on the North Shore of Oahu with five miles of beach and coastline views. It features 450 rooms, all with ocean views, including 42 bungalows with direct beach access, a separate check-in, and a private pool. Other amenities include 18,000 square feet of indoor meeting space, a club lounge, six food and beverage outlets, seven retail spaces, a spa, fitness center, two golf courses, seven beaches, four resort pools, tennis and pickle ball courts, an equestrian center, a working farm, and access to 12 miles of oceanfront trails. The 49-acre oceanfront Land Parcel is entitled for development, and similar to the Company’s strategy at other properties, Host intends to enhance its value over the long term.