Derek Rielly (left) with Bob Hawke. | Photo: Richard
Freeman
Surf media legend Derek Rielly appears on
world’s most popular surf podcast!
By Chas Smith
Core Lord.
Derek Rielly is a multi-hyphenate artist.
Author, editor, creator, award-winning across all. The only issue
with his constellation of talent is that he does not particularly
enjoy, or lean into, self-promotion. Difficult, then, to find a
spot to hear, or read, the literary giant reflecting upon his own
life.
Jed Smith, one half of the world’s most popular surf podcast
Ain’t That Swell, must have sensed the gaping Derek Rielly-sized
hole in the space and took it upon himself to fill it with an
episode of “Core Lords.”
It is a brilliant 2-plus hours. The two discuss surf media
history, meandering down memory lanes of Australian Surfing Life,
Surf Europe, Waves and Stab. There is forays into the writing
craft, Malcolm X, the current state of politics and the years when
Jamie O’Brien was a rock star.
Smith is a deft interviewer, guiding the delightful conversation
which, to borrow from Rielly himself, is truly essential.
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Fears mount John John Florence will sit out
season after longtime coach Ross Williams announces retirement
By Chas Smith
"We live in an awesome world and an even better
community. That is our surf world."
The 2025 World Surf League Championship Tour is
but days away from the opening hooter and while surf fans should be
celebrating the return of professional competitive surfing, a bleak
pall has taken hold. First, the generational talent Gabriel Medina
announced that he would be forced to sit out much, if not all, of
the year after suffering an injury to his pectoral muscle.
And as if the loss of the Dark Knight was not enough, a worse
fear is materializing.
John John Florence calling it all off.
Worry took hold at the end of the 2024 season, one in which the
former prodigy took home his third trophy but was cagey afterward,
hinting it might be his last. Those anxieties have only, since,
entrenched with various rumors suggesting the preternatural talent
was hanging it up culminating, moments ago, with the announcement
of Florence’s longtime coach Ross Williams’s retirement.
The Momentum Generation stud took to Instagram in order to
declare:
Just wanted to give a shout out to my tour partners last
year. Thank you so much for all the memories. @john_john_florence
@tatiwest and @bettylou.sakura.johnson , I really appreciate you
guys putting trust in me and allowing me to be part of your
journey. We’ve had some amazing results Along the way. These last
10 years was an exceptional learning life experience. John, winning
his third world title last year was definitely a highlight. But
also Tati fighting her way through to finishing third in the world
in the finals was epic. Betty Lou you’re at the very beginning of
your journey and I’m so happy that I was there along the way
through your formable years. You have a big future. And for anyone
curious out there, I’m gonna continue my coaching in 2025 and
beyond. But 2024 was always gonna be a very big year for me that
included traveling to every single event. But it’s not sustainable
for me as far as balancing my career with my family life. It’s too
much time away from my precious family. So I will continue
coaching, but will focus more of my work here out of Hawaii.
Surfing is my love. It’s my everything. It’s what makes me wake up
in the morning. It’s what intrigues me. I will always revolve my
life around surfing and coaching is a big part of that. I have a
lot invested into Luke and finn and Tama as well and will continue
working with them on their journeys! I’m sure I’ll pick up more
surfers along the way. What really intrigues me is the technical
aspect of surfing so I will be open to taking on surfers at the
highest levels as well as recreational surfers to help them fulfill
their goals and being the best surfers they can be. My good friend
@gregsworld did an interview with me a couple years back. You can
see the geekiness and how psyched I am on surfing and coaching. We
live in an awesome world and an even better community. That is our
surf world. I feel so Appreciative to be part of it. Also, I
wouldn’t be able to do any of this without my lovely wife, Jennifer
Williams. She’s my rock, my everything. And I’m excited to be at
home with her in 2025!
Florence, it must be assumed, done too.
I’d bet that the former towhead surfs Pipeline then waves
goodbye before being party to fellow tour surfer Tyler Wright’s
possible execution in Abu Dhabi the following month.
Will the loss of Medina and Florence, in their prime, be enough
to dampen your excitement or is the specter of Filipe Toledo
chickening out, again, enough to keep you engaged?
David Lee Scales and I discuss during this week’s episode of The
Grit! which also just so happens to be chock full of manly talk.
Worth a listen unless you are Justin Baldoni.
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South Australian surfer and fisherman Jeff Schmucker
gutting sharks on his daddy's boat, aged eight, and inset, big
Great White on his stern.
Surfers told to avoid South Australia’s
west coast until “strong shark mitigation in place.”
By Derek Rielly
"From Fowler’s Bay to Port Lincoln it’s the worst
place in the world to go surfing. And it’s getting
worse.”
For the past fifteen years the Streaky Bay fisherman and
surfer Jeff Schmucker has been trying to get a pretty simple
message across – the population of Great Whites on South
Australia’s west coast has blown out and there’ll come a point in
the real near future when surfing will become unsustainable for
anyone who isn’t thrilled with the idea of being disappeared by a
Great White.
In 1999, Australia declared
the Great White “vulnerable”and made it illegal to hunt or harass
the fish
Since then,
RIP surfers Peter Edmonds, Tadashi Nakahara, Rob Pedretti, Mani
Hart-Deville, Mark Sanguinetti, Tim Thompson, Nick Slater, Cameron
Bayes, Jean Wright, Nick Peterson, Simon Baccanello, Todd Gendle,
Khai Cowley, Lance Appleby, Brad Smith, Nick Edwards, Kyle Burden,
Ben Linden, Chris Boy, Ben Gerring, Laeticia Brouwer and Andrew
Sharpe.
I’d written a similar piece shortly after the attack but
Schmucker would be real grateful if I could get it out there that,
if you want to surf on South Australia’s west coast, your odds of
being killed are going to be dramatically shortened.
Schmucker knows these waters.
He first started fishing out of Streaky Bay with his Daddy back
in the early seventies when he was eight. He knew how to gut a
shark by the time he was nine and before he was in double figures
he was sitting on the stern of the family trawler pulling in bronze
whalers.
Jeff Schmucker, eight years old, guts a
shark.
He adores his coastline, calls it one of the most unique in the
world with its six estuaries, dodge tides, shallow
water sea grasses, its wild offshore fishing. He says pole-fishing
for tuna in the raw as hell Great Australian Bight is “one of the
most electrifying methods for excitement and action.”
Jeff Schmucker giving a big South Oz right-hander
hell.
Schmucker says the latest attack has left Streaky Bay even more
traumatised than usual.
“The kids are reeling, there’s all sorts of emotional stuff
going on. Everyone’s fucking upset and not sleeping. And fair
enough. I didn’t sleep for the first few days. I was waking up in
the night with the logistics of it, the reality of it. It’s fucking
brutal. The kids who were there are thinking of it. They can see
the blood splashing in the water. It’s firmly in their
minds.”
“I lay awake at night wondering whether his bones are still
inside the shark
and where is the shark,” Katrina told the Port Lincoln Times in
2001. “If only we could get that shark and get the body. It sounds
gross, but it’s no more gross than getting than
getting a body out of a wrecked car.”
The day before Jevan was killed, New Zealander Cameron Bayes was
dragged off his board and killed by a Great White at Cactus, a
couple of hundred k’s away along the same coast.
“And she tells me, ‘Jeff you got do something about it.’ It’s
fucked. It’s still raw.”
Schmucker says, “I don’t want people to be hurt. It’s not the
people who are eaten, they’re gone, it’s the impact on the
communities in the surfing world. It really hits people
hard.”
Still, surfers continue to roll the dice. A few days ago,
surfers were chased out of the water by a Great White at Caves, a
surf spot a couple of hundred k’s west of Streaky Bay.
“These people think they can surf Cactus with twenty people and
be safe. They’re fucking dreaming. From Fowler’s Bay to Port
Lincoln it’s the worst place in the world to go surfing. And it’s
getting worse.”
Schmucker says he doesn’t want to be the boy that cried wolf,
but at the same time he’s a realist. He hears what the government,
what surf lifesaving has to say, that it’s all anecdotal, no hard
evidence, but he has almost fifty years in the water down there, in
the surf and on boats.
If you didn’t know, all longline and gill net commercial
fishermen have had a HD camera on their boats for the last fifteen
years.
“And it’s all kept on a hard drive. Fifteen years of data,” says
Schmucker. “Every time there’s an interaction with a threatened
species you have to put it in the log book. All that data is there
and that data will be conclusive in the growth of the (Great White)
population, all these Whites from three footers to twenty footers
entailed in the fishing gear.”
He says the roll call of surfers dying is hard to
take.
“I feel a little responsible for surfing in South Australia. If
I don’t say what I think, there’s going to be so much tragedy in
people’s lives. In the late nineties, we were down to seeing one or
two Pointers a year.”
So, what can you do about it?
“Two things. Section 79 of the Fisheries Act allows for the
destruction of a shark that has killed someone. If it was the same
shark, and it’s a possibility, that ate Todd last year and got
Lance this year, and they’ve got both boards so they get the DNA,
the shark needs to be killed on the same day. You need to kill a
rogue shark. Second, look into monitoring all sharks over ten foot.
The little ones are eating fish. Tagging is easy. Maneaters come to
you. But you gotta burley up. Give us a sea lion, shoot one of em
between the eyes or electrocute it, and you’ll have more Pointers
than you can point a stick at.”
“Listen,” says, Schmucker,
“This about saving lives, saving people from lifetime traumatic
experiences. You don’t go to a game park and get out of the car and
walk around. People put the blinkers on with surfing. I was
addicted to surfing like no other cunt on the planet, surfing from
when the surf came up to when it went down. But if you’re surfing
here on the Eyre Peninsula, be a fucking realist. You shouldn’t be
going in the water until there’s some strong mitigation in
place.”
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Surf influencers face destitution after
Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban in US
By Chas Smith
"Congress has determined that divestiture is
necessary to address its well-supported national security
concerns..."
Surf influencers are waking up to a harsh
reality, this morning, and possible financial destitution.
In an expected-yet-surprising ruling, the United States Supreme
Court has upheld a ban on
the popular short-form video sharing service TikTok. “There is no
doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a
distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, means of
engagement, and source of community,” the justices wrote in their
unanimous opinion on the case, which was delivered Friday morning.
“But Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to
address its well-supported national security concerns regarding
TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign
adversary.”
ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, will now have to sell
the application or shutter it by January 19th.
Surf influencers who enjoy sharing changing tips, little beach
dances and product reviews currently bereft, though maybe drawing
some hope from incoming president Donald J. Trump who declared,
“The Supreme Court decision was expected, and everyone must respect
it. My decision on TikTok will be made in the not too distant
future, but I must have time to review the situation. Stay
tuned!”
But how much do you utilize TikTok in your daily surfing life?
Are you a content creator, helping populate the platform with
light-hearted fun? A consumer, scrolling through very fine Nic Von
Rupp edits? Or a hater, spouting uninformed opinions about Gen-Z
and their inability to grow up?
Your favorite anti-depressive surf website apparently has a TikTok that I completely
forgot about.
RIP.
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Tyler Wright, two-time world surf champ,
bashed, screamed at in the surf.
Gay surf champ Tyler Wright reveals
shocking violence in the waves, “I’ve been attacked by men,
screamed at, hit in the head.”
In a discussion with the University of Technology Sydney on
“progress and challenges for women in surfing” and published on
YouTube a few days back, Tyler says:
“I have been attacked by men in the water hit in the head,
yelled at screamed at. The amount of times that happens is
alarming. That’s not normal for a grown man to come and scream in
your face.”
In the video, researchers Dr. Ece Kaya (UTS Business School) and
Dr. Leila Khanjaninejad (UTS Transdisciplinary School) “examine
these gender-based obstacles and propose solutions to create a more
equitable environment.”
The chair of the Surf Coast Women’s Boardriders Club Ashika Kanhai, who is a climate
lawyer from Fiji and is also featured, says, “There is a kind
of underlying view of women assimilating to the preconceived ideas
of the right type of board that you should have and the right type
of way you should surf.”
Tyler then talks about being a teenager and the “creepiness” of
being told sex sells by a thirty-six-year-old man.
Dr Ece Kaya says,
“We would like to see more women in the leadership positions. We
would like to see them in the governing bodies, in the judging
towers, we’d like them to be coaching more.”
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Jon Pyzel and Matt Biolos by
@theneedforshutterspeed/Step Bros