Port Macquarie Great White attack.
Pull up to any beach on the six-hundred clicks stretch, whether it’s Tuncurry, Crescent Head, Crowdy Head, Wooli, Port Macquarie, Coffs Harbour, Byron Bay, Ballina or Kingscliff, and you’ll be in waters bloodied by known killer Great White sharks. 

Aussie surfer airlifted to hospital after attack by 10-foot Great White; all surrounding beaches closed

Off-duty cops finds catastrophically injured surfer on beach as Port Macquarie confirms its reputation as a Great White hotspot.

To call the stretch of coast from Forster in the south to Byron Bay five hours north a Great White Superhighway is to employ the most fantastic powers of understatement. 

Pull up to any beach on the six-hundred clicks stretch, whether it’s Tuncurry, Crescent Head, Crowdy Head, Wooli, Port Macquarie, Coffs Harbour, Byron Bay, Ballina or Kingscliff, and you’ll be in waters bloodied by known killer Great White sharks. 

And, earlier today, while our own Surfads was tearing hell out of a little stretch of coast in Port Macquarie, a twenty-three-year-old surfer was being airlifted to hospital after a suspected Great White attac at nearby North Shore beach, a remote joint only accessible by ferry.

An off-duty cop found the catastrophically injured surfer and used a dog lead as a tourniquet on the man’s leg wound. 

“Same thing as always, too,” says Surfads. “Mid-morning, crystal clear water. Certainly hits close to home. Hope the young fella is ok.”

In 2020, surfer Chantelle Doyle was dragged out of a Great White’s mouth by her husband, who belted the fish until it let go. 

And, last year, Toby Begg was hit by a Great White at Lighthouse Beach in Port Macquarie. 

Beggs became one of the few human beings on earth who can say they survived multiple bites from a Great White shark.

He was dragged so far underwater it went dark and he thought he was going to drown. He was only able to swim for the surface after his foot ripped off at the ankle.

Back on the surface, the Great White hit him again, Toby Begg scrunching into a ball, which would save his life, but causing his leg to take most of the impact.

“Then he was on the surface punching it in the head for ages,” a BeachGrit source close to Beggs said. “Both his hands were balloons from hitting it. After 30 seconds it let go and he started paddling in. It’d severed the femoral artery in his leg and the only thing that saved him was there was a doctor and emergency room nurse walking on the beach (separately who didn’t know each other). His foot is gone and they’re saying his other leg might come off at the hip but they’re trying to save it. He’s a mad keen surfer and wants to get back in the water.”

After Mick Fanning called him in hospital and gave him a pep talk about how he’d bounce back Toby Begg reportedly said, ‘That was nice of him, but the shark snapped his fucking leg rope… I’ve lost my foot and maybe my leg, so I dunno what he was going on about.’”

More as it comes re: today’s hit.

Load Comments

Chaos expected at Paris 2024 Teahupoo after Nathan Florence predicts “rogue ten-footers and big mutant bowls”

Meanwhile, Filipe Toledo slips in the bookmakers' estimation, falling from top six favourite to 51-1 rank outsider. 

The popular surf vlogger Nathan Florence, voted surfer of the year in 2023 and brother of US Surf Olympian John John, has set a cat among the pigeons, as the expression goes, after predicting “six-to-eight-foot big mutant bowls with rogue ten-footers” for Paris 2024 Teahupoo. 

As if guided by a divine hand intent on bringing chaos to an Olympic Games already besieged by terrorism, a west swell will likely deliver, according to Nathan Florence’s interpretation of wind guru and Surfline’s figures, “big mutant bowls.” 

“I don’t know how big, eight at thirteen seconds, the period is pretty small, you want  fifteen second range… but if the swell stays and the wind stays nice and clean, the 29th as well as the 30th are great days. We could have some really epic waves, something the surf world will be proud of in the Olympics.”

How big?

“As it is,” says Nathan Florence, “Eight foot at thirteen seconds, with this westerly angle, for these two days, we’re going to see six-to-eight foot with rogue ten-footers coming through on competition day. Which is fucking epic.”

Nathan Florence predicts either his brother John John or Gabriel Medina will win the gold medal, although acknowledges Australia’s Jack Robinson is a threat if big as well as the Tahitian Kauli Vaast.

Outsiders worth a buck or two in the betting ring, says Florence, are Brazil’s Joao Chianca and Moroccan Ramzi Boukhiam.

Bookies no longer favour a Filipe Toledo medal, relegating the two-time world champ to 51-1 rank outsider.

“I’m very excited to watch this,” says Florence.

Load Comments

Nathan Hedge and Andy Irons.
Nathan Hedge, at left, with the great Andy Irons. Both men scared of very little, surf-wise.

Aussie surf stars issue grave warning to athletes competing at Paris 2024 Teahupoo, “Someone could die in the Olympics”

“You actually feel like you are fighting for your life”

The Narrabeen surf star Nathan Hedge needs little to no introduction, of course, a pint-sized firebrand whose courage in waves of consequence, Cloudbreak to Pipe to Teahupoo, is legendary.

In 2022, he and Kelly Slater, remember even back then both men were well into middle age, danced a rigadoon around the world champion Filipe Toledo in excellent six-foot Teahupoo barrels.

As Chas Smith reported,

Slater and Hedge traded waves, big and perfect, one after the other after the other with Toledo holding priority well out the back, refusing to paddle, one after the other after the other.

Slater, barreled, unable to contain smile.

Hedge, barreled, unable to contain smile or beat, smartly, boss.

Toledo, un-barreled, holding priority for fifteen-odd minutes while Slater and Hedge swapped beneath him.

In the dying seconds, the King of Saquarema swung on a baby tube then punched board in channel.

Now, in an interview with a regional Queensland newspaper, Hedge, along with Pipe Master Bede Durbidge, has issued grave warnings to competitors ahead of the Games.

“You actually feel like you are fighting for your life,” Hedge said. “At the end of most other sporting events you are pretty sure you are going to be alive. You are not going to get limbs ripped off or cut and you are not going to be rescued.

“I dislocated my shoulder out there. I have had teeth pulled through my bottom lip, I have had gashes on my head. There have been some horrific injuries at Tahiti. I have been waiting for the next heat and watched guys get absolutely annihilated, put on the rescue sled and sent off to the hospital and they have put the event on hold.

“Then you have to paddle back out there and re-enter the coliseum again straight after. There have been people who have passed away out there or had horrific injuries. The trade off is that you could get the best wave of your life or you could get the worse beating of your life. You weigh it up.”

Bede Durbidge, meanwhile, was succinct, telling the paper,

“Somebody could die in the Olympics.”

Load Comments

Luigi Rosselli design for 31 Gaerloch Ave Tamarama.
The Luigi Rosselli Where the Wild Things Monster in repose design for new Tamarama build.

Tamarama “Where the Wild Things House” faces unexpected hurdle in race to become Australia’s first $100 million oceanfront build!

“If this project is not an exemplary, outstanding response to a significant natural environment, then I do not know what is.”

One year ago came the terrific news for fans of surf adjacent real estate when an old brown-brick house called Lang Syne overlooking both the reef of Tamarama to the south and Mackenzies Bay to the north sold for $45 mill.

The bullish sale followed the thirteen mill paid for a crumbling four-apartment citadel in Tamarama, which once hosted world number 32 Kelly Slater.

(Nineteen Dellview St, Tamarama, with its panoramic views of the impossibly blue Pacific Ocean and squatting on almost five thousand feet of land, was, for a time in the early two-thousands, let’s say 2006-2012, the hub around which the city’s surf media revolved.)

Anyway, the century-old Lang Syne was swiftly demolished and the noted architect Luigi Rosselli was employed to design a house worthy of its location on the beachfront and only a dozen or so clicks from the Sydney CBD.

Rosselli came up with a house that was designated the Where the Wild Things Are House, with its giant woolly humps resembling one of the romping monsters from the Maurice  Sendak picture book in a sort of momentary repose.

“The family were seeking a home where they could come together from their scattered locations across the world and get back to the source: a place to be reunited, replenished, and cocooned,” wrote the architect.

Luigi Rosselli design for 31 Gaerloch Ave Tamarama.
The view from the lil cul de sac where surfers check Maccas.
Luigi Rosselli design for 31 Gaerloch Ave Tamarama.
Swinging little front yard.
Luigi Rosselli design for 31 Gaerloch Ave Tamarama.
Luigi Rosselli design for 31 Gaerloch Ave Tamarama.

“In the design approach for this new Australian ‘icon’, the goal is to retain the organic beauty of the site, with its wind-carved rocks, through an organic plan with a counterpoint play of eroded horizontal slabs and cocoon shaped vertical breaks, the latter to be constructed with the bricks, slate roof tiles, and sandstone retained from the demolition of the existing home on the site.”

Some were impressed, some were repelled by the design, plenty felt a little of both. 

Now, it can be revealed the local council has rejected Rosselli’s plans for the Where the Wild Things Are House.

Well, not exactly rejected.

Council wanted more info, the New York-based owner Dravid Droga didn’t provide it and council deemed it a refusal.

The matter is now before the Land and Environment Court where the Rosselli project is expected to sail through without impediment.

As the architect Zoltan Kovacs reported to the council about the Where the Wild Things House, “If this project is not an exemplary, outstanding response to a significant natural environment, then I do not know what is.”

Load Comments

Olympic surfers on high alert after German shoe giant Adidas goes over falls ahead of Teahupo’o Games

Big trouble in little Tahiti.

Our surfers are, officially, arriving at the Teahupo’o Olympics, buzz filling the tropical air, thrill and excitement, what could be and might be etc. The Games officially kick off in four days with a parade down Paris’ famed Seine some 10,000 miles away. Filipe Toledo, John John Florence, Vahine Fierro etc. will not be there, of course, though there must be some sort of celebration at the End of the Road, no?

I don’t know. I will be holding a table off the Champs-Elysees though Surfer Magazine is sending two artificially intelligent bots to cover Tahiti from the shadow of the Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee and “they” might have more information but, in the meantime, our heroes and heroines should be walking on egg shells as troubles present at every turn.

Take the case of German shoe giant Adidas, a sponsor who, one might think, would employ teams of public relations and lawyers informing, guiding, keeping out of problems and especially in light of recent Kanye West business. But here we are with them super busted for celebrating the ’72 Munich Games ahead of Teahupo’o with pro-Palestinian model Bella Hadid as face.

You certainly recall, at least through reading, when 11 Israeli athletes were killed by the breakaway Fatah group Black September.

Adidas pulled the ads, apologized, Hadid has hired lawyers and a giant mess.

Optics, as they say, but if Adidas can step right in it what about Quiksilver, Hurley, Rip Curl?

Are our surfers double checking signifiers of their partners before paddling?

I don’t know that I would trust Big Surf farther than I could throw it these days.

More etc.

Load Comments