Barely a man, Australian big-waver thrusts himself to the hilt at Cloudbreak!

In this four-minute film, which I regard as something worth nuzzling, we see Russell Bierke returning to Cloudbreak, Fiji, for the first time in four years, since he busted his foot in three places.

Russ has been surfing Hawaii’s outer-reefs since he was thirteen, won 2016’s Cape Fear contest at Ours and is one of only two Australians (the other is Jamie Mitchell) on the WSL Big Wave Tour.

Last April, Russ, who lives in Ulladulla in between his dragon-slaying adventures around the world, survived a two-wave hold-down at Port Campbell, in Warrnambool, Victoria.

The waves were fifteen-to-eighteen feet, clean as anything, the sun warm, and after a day tooling around with his pals Tom Carroll, Ross Clarke-Jones, Ryan Hipwood and Kelly Slater, Russ stole into a smaller insider.

Took off, got hit by his board, knocked unconscious.

“It’s super vague,” Russ told Warrnambool newspaper The Standard from his hospital bed. “I remember seeing a wave coming and then I was on the beach on all fours spewing (up water).”

In a world of tough kids, he impresses.

Virginia Beach surf filmmaker dusts himself off after"world's lamest surf assault!"…

Regular readers will be aware, by now, of the “world’s lamest surf assault.” To bring everyone up to speed, as they say, a light collision in one-foot waves resulted in one surfer being arrested and cuffed at his workplace and, briefly, jailed.

“The funny thing is, I fell off my board. I was avoiding a collision,” said the accused attacker, Alex Burdett. “If you look at the video, I’m on a five-two twin and he’s on a ten-foot longboard. He puts two hands on my shoulders and I jump over his board. I didn’t physically touch him. I’m goofy and he’s regular. I can’t jump backwards.”

Watch here.

His accuser, the filmmaker Jordan Montgomery, told BeachGrit, “I did what I had to do to protect myself…He laid a hand on me and in the United States you can do that. Surfing is a recreational sport and I’ve been surfing for fourteen years.”

Eight months after the “world’s lamest surf assault”, Alex and Jordan fronted court where a not-guilty verdict for assault and battery was reached. BeachGrit believes that both parties signed no-talkie agreements hence no more quotes from the two men.

Meanwhile, Jordan has gotten back to his business of filming other men surf.

In this attractive enough short called Sandbar, we see Michael Dunphy, Eric Geiselman and Evan Geiselman cabana hunting on North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

So far, no charges have been laid.

Come and get a glimpse of desert skin…

Somewhere on the edge of the desert on the Western Australian coast is a lefthander that makes every other wave you’ve surfed taste like a turkey cocktail (Vermouth and Angostura Bitters. Shake.)

And if you’re a Western Australian, and you surf, this wave is mapped in your DNA. You’ll feel it. The first big cold fronts come through sometime in June and all thoughts turn one thousand clicks north. If you’re a tradie or a freelancer, you scrub out work commitments for a month in the desert. Caravan. Tent. Cases of Emu Export, a second-rate beer that’s an obsession in these parts. As if drinking this camel piss and not wincing makes you a better man.

In this eleven-minute film, we see a welcome return to form for a company that is now, effectively, a subsidiary of its former arch-rival Quiksilver. Twenty-three years ago, when Billabong owned surfing in much the same way Dirk Ziff does now, it took Shane Dorian, Rob Machado, Occy, Sunny Garcia, Brendan Margieson, Kelly Slater, Paul “Antman” Paterson and Johnny-Boy Gomes to the north-west for the first of the Billabong Challenges. 

In the film here, which is called Desert Hilton, the cast includes Occ (now fifty-two), Shane Dorian (forty-six) and Jack Robinson, Shaun Manners, Kai Hing with a brave cameo from Laura Enever.

Jack and Shaun star in the water; Occy is in all his fussy and hopeless magnificence on land.