Surfrider's Chad Nelsen (left) and Ian Cairns locked in ideological battle.

Hell-raising big wave icon Ian Cairns drops hammer on Surfrider for post-election warning over second Trump term

By Chas Smith

3 weeks ago

"You’d get 100% support for no offshore oil drilling if you wrote an article that included the other 50% of the nation’s environmentalist. We care too."

It has now been a full week since Donald J. Trump stormed to victory in the United States of America with certain corners still reeling. While the media is trying to sort out how it got everything so wrong and late night talk show hosts remain unable to dry their eyes, left-leaning advocacy groups are battening down hatches and bracing their people for a red-hatted apocalypse.

Amongst them is surfing’s largest environmental organization Surfrider.

Founded in 1984 in order to protect Malibu, the non-profit has expanded to advocate for the ocean all around the world. Its CEO, Chad Nelsen, took to LinkedIn, yesterday, to steady his charges.

“Okay. It’s time to prepare for what’s coming,” he opened before getting down to the nuts and bolts:

Sadly, we know what a second Trump administration means for our ocean and coasts, and it’s not good. It means climate denial, a fire sale of lease auctions for offshore drilling of oil and gas, attacks on national marine protected areas, and a total disregard for nature. Based on the 2016 Trump administration and Project 2025, it will likely include efforts to open our coasts to offshore drilling, weaken critical environmental laws and regulations (such as the Inflation Reduction Act, Clean Water Act, and National Environmental Policy Act), and diminish or even eliminate important federal agencies like NOAA and the EPA.

Nelsen went on to highlight Surfrider’s successes over the years and asked for more support as we head into a four year winter.

Big wave legend, father of professional surfing and onetime second best surfer in the world Ian Cairns was having none of it. Known for his right lean, the West Australian hell-raiser clapped back:

Firstly: I love the success that Surfrider has had and cannot understand why there’s a proliferation of surf related environmental groups, rather than one single super-group maximizing the message and resources.

Secondly: The premise of your article is that a Trump admin will roll back environmental protection is purely fear mingering. RFK jr is in the Admin and is a staunch environmentalist. Suggesting that conservatives don’t want clean surf just divides us rather than bringing everyone together. (Throwing the Project 2025 trope into the article is misinformation)

Lastly: You’d get 100% support for no offshore oil drilling if you wrote an article that included the other 50% of the nation’s environmentalist. We care too.

Be inclusive and kind.

A velvet hammer.

Do you have thoughts about all of this business? Will MAGA surfers stand up to Team Trump and tell them to lose the “drill, baby, drill” signs?

RFK Jr. going to save the day?

A whole new conservative conservation movement?

Who could have ever thought.

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What happened after the contest, though, is just as remarkable. Phyllis smiled and took her trophy, drove home and—did nothing. In terms of career advancement, anyway.

Matt Warshaw on surfing’s remarkable first world champion Phyllis O’Donell, dead at 87

By Matt Warshaw

3 weeks ago

"I can't think of anyone, at her level, who was less interested in surfing as a path to money or fame."

Phyllis O’Donell, who won her final in the 1964 World Championships at Manly Beach about 45 minutes before Midget Farrelly won his, and thus became our sport’s first world champion, died this week at age 87.

She was private and level-headed, intense but funny, upbeat by nature. Zero pretense. Sure-footed in every sense of the word. O’Donell loved getting in the water, and for 15 or so years loved riding waves most of all, and clearly she was ambitious and goal-driven—but I can’t think of anyone, at her level, who was less interested in surfing as a path to money or fame.

Back to the ’64 championships. It was a mild late-autumn Sunday afternoon, with a huge crowd on the beach and along the seawall. Fun sandbar waves, mostly rights. Sydney-born O’Donell was the newly-crowned Australian national champion but she paddled out as a longshot underdog to Linda Benson of San Diego.

Five years earlier, Benson, as a tiny high school sophomore, hot-dogged her way to victory in the Makaha International, was then featured in movies and magazines, and had basically become surfing’s own Doris Day. O’Donell, 27 in 1964, hadn’t yet started riding waves when Benson won Makaha, and was all but unknown outside her local beaches.

But roll the film (watch here and here) and O’Donell, to my eye anyway, is the more advanced—or at least more fluid and polished—of the two surfers. She was a fan of Bobby Brown, the young but doomed regularfooter from Cronulla, and it shows. Smooth as silk but not above throwing a spinner or two into the routine.

O’Donell’s win wasn’t a fluke, in other words.

Surfing World editor and filmmaker Bob Evans not only thought the same, he devoted six paragraphs in his contest write-up to the women’s final—other publications dashed the women’s event off in a line or two—lauding Benson and O’Donell both, but ending thus; “[O’Donell’s] placement in the wave was ideal and her trimming and arching through the hollow sections was pretty to watch. Every ride these great girl riders made earned spontaneous applause, [but] Phyllis O’Donell was a decisive winner.”

What happened after the contest, though, is just as remarkable. Phyllis smiled and took her trophy, drove home and—did nothing. In terms of career advancement, anyway.

She continued to surf and compete. She entered the ’64 Makaha contest. A few years later she would move briefly to Southern California to work for Dewey Weber Surfboards. She took third in the 1968 World Championships.

But O’Donell might as well have invented the concept of life-work balance, and surfing for trophies and titles was in a gray area but leaning toward work.

This quote, from an interview Phyllis did in 2000, makes the point:

In 1964, you became the first women’s world champion. Did it change your life?

I was living in Banora Point [near the Queensland border] at that time, and it would have been more beneficial career-wise if I’d moved back to Sydney after winning the world title, but I wouldn’t do that. I had a good job in the local ten-pin bowling alley, where I was an assistant manager. I worked two days and three evenings each week so I could surf a lot. I wrote a surfing column for the Sunday Mail. So all told I was doing fine.

(Ain’t nobody knows surf history like Matt Warshaw. Chip off five bucks a month or fifty bucks a year to get these weekly missives from Matt as well as access to his treasure trove of archives, old interviews, movies etc.)

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Caroline Marks poses for SI and, right, wins Olympic Gold in Tahiti.

Olympic Gold medallist surfer Caroline Marks “sizzles” in second Sports Illustrated bikini shoot

By Derek Rielly

3 weeks ago

"Sports Illustrated really celebrates all diverse body types and that was my favourite part about it."

The Olympic gold medallist Caroline Marks has marked a return to the glossy pages of Sports Illustrated with her second bikini shoot, described by the magazine as “sizzling”.

The magazine sent out a teaser shot of the half-Greek 2023 world champ from Boca Raton, Florida, wearing an on-trend black string bikini, sun-kissed tresses blown off her face by either a stiff wind or some sort of portable outdoor fan.

“Though we’ll have to wait to see the full results of Marks’s photo shoot today, we are thrilled to share the first look, seeing the surfer posing on the beach wearing a black string two-piece,” wrote SI. “A spin on the classic bikini, the suit features crisscross neckline straps on top and double strings on the bottom. Marks was glowing, with the water behind her signaling that she was totally in her element. Her blonde hair blew in the ocean breeze and her glam was kept simple to showcase her natural beauty. Complete with a Floridian tan, Marks looked so stunning.”

A who’s who of surfing, including pint-sized tour veteran Kalani Robb, dived beneath SI’s Instagram post to celebrate the milestone.

USA Surfing wrote: Oh my goodness. Beautiful, powerful and amazing inside and out. ❤️

Caroline Marks for SI — Caroline Marks lights up SI’s IG account.

Just after turning eighteen four years ago, Marks debuted in Sports Illustrated telling its readers,

“The whole crew I was working with, everyone was so positive. I felt really comfortable and confident and, you know, I had just turned 18, so for me, that was like a really big deal of like kind of showing more of my body and being around like a bigger production. Obviously, Sports Illustrated is a very big brand, so for me, the comfortability factor was huge and I think Sports Illustrated really celebrates all diverse body types and that was my favourite part about it. Still to this day it is one of my favourite shoots and it’s really cool to have all the photos still and just have those memories.”

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Lady Diana (left) and her young surfing prince.

Researchers finally stumble upon origins of Princes William and Harry’s surfing love!

By Chas Smith

3 weeks ago

"We've finally solved one of life's most confounding mysteries..."

Cathedral bells are chiming across the United Kingdom, this morning, after researchers made a profound breakthrough overnight. For decades, now, the greatest minds in England, North Ireland, Scotland and Wales have puzzled over how the young royals, Princes William and Harry, fell in love with surfing. Their House of Windsor has placed five backsides on the throne, George V, Edward VIII, George VI, Elizabeth II and Charles III.

None notable wave sliders.

And yet William, next in line for the crown, has enjoyed both the boogie life and the longerboard life for years, surfing in Wales, England and Scotland, three of his four holdings. Harry, though currently banished, was just snapped getting placed into a Kelly Slater barrel by none other than Raimana Van Bastolear.

From whence did this “need for speed,” to quote California surfing royalty Matt Archbold, come?

New analysis suggests from the late great Queen of Hearts, Princess Diana herself.

Per the Daily Mail think-piece, Lady Diana, “…took her mind off her separation from Charles in 1993 on the sandy beaches of Nevis in the Caribbean. She took William and Harry, then aged ten and eight, bodyboarding and her friend Catherine Soames joined them. The pictures (of the surfing-adjacent) hit the front pages in the UK and when Diana returned home, she said: ‘That was the best holiday I’ve ever had.'”

And thus the hook was set. William described a Scottish surfing session from some 20 years ago whilst he was at university, declaring, “It was a bit like putting your head in a freezer when you went underwater, but the wetsuit I’ve got is pretty good. I couldn’t feel my hands for about half an hour. After a while they get so numb. There’s no noise. It’s just you breathing. You’re in a different world with the fish.”

Harry, of course, in Lemoore with the aforementioned Van Bastolear solemnly stating, “In Tahiti, we still call you Prince Harry. But at Surf Ranch, it’s my brother.”

Further scrutiny reveals that King Charles surfed Cornwall in 1973 but that was before either of his sons were born so doesn’t count.

And there we have it. One of life’s more confounding mysteries likely solved.

Huzzah.

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Kai Lenny impaled on foil board, the hydro-foil cutting through his buttered cocoa skin.

Thoughts and prayers for surf star Kai Lenny after near-fatal collision with foil board

By Derek Rielly

3 weeks ago

The brush with death comes less than one year after he was hospitalised following a helmet-crushing wipeout at Pipeline.

One week of American euphoria following the fairytale election of a devil-may-care, dare-to-dream businessman to the highest office in the land was almost squashed earlier today when the country’s most beloved surfer, Kai Lenny, nearly died in a foil-boarding accident.

Lenny, who is thirty two and with lips as red as if he’d just applied a fresh coat of pomegranate lipstick, was surfing his foil-board in Maui when he “wiped out” after a back-flip attempt and the board’s hydro-foil slashed his chest, dagger style, and perilously close to his heart.

“It got a little spicy and I foiled myself across my chest,” Kai Lenny explained in a video posted to YouTube. “I really wanted to land a backflip. And I had this perfect section, so I threw the backflip and I sort of missed the grab.

The near-fatal collision comes less than one year after the was hospitalised after a wipeout that destroyed his helmet during the Backdoor Shootout, becoming Pipeline’s sixth high-profile scalp for the winter.

The world’s best surfers were quick to acknowledge how his life might’ve drastically zigged if Kai Lenny didn’t have the polycarbonate shell on his head.

“The helmet,” wrote Jack Robinson, punctuating the profundity with two sets of prayer hands.

Kai Lenny posted a photograph of his brain being examined by the noted medico Dr Jason Keifer at Brain Health Hawaii.

“Since my head injury at PIPELINE on January 4th, I’ve been doing everything I can to get back on the horse and become better than I was.

Some time ago now, Kai Lenny appeared on the very occasional podcast Dirty Water where, over the course of ninety minutes, we listened to exciting stories about foiling with a trillionaire, Twiggy Baker fighting off a shark at Jaws and big-wavers threatening to beat hell out of each other in heats, T-boning a twelve-foot tiger shark fishermen called God on his windsurfer when he was thirteen and so on.

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