"Mason controls the little cosmos he has created using all the wonders of his enormous skillset."

This latest edit from the studio of Rory Pringle features BIPOC surfer Mason Ho in a wild wave-for-wave exchange with Australian surf stars Shaun Manners and Noa Deane, who swap their surfboards for boogies, those forty-eight inch long foam boards invented by Tom Morey in 1970.

Noa Deane, you know well, the surf virtuoso who cried for three days following backlash to his WSL joke, Manners, maybe less so, but who is a beautifully unvarnished Western Australian.

Pleasant, nice guys, enchanting even, and both with eye-catching women.

Mason Ho is Hawaii’s whip-slicked queen of taboo and BIPOC role model (seventy-five percent of his ancestry is Chinese-Hawaiian, a quarter white Americano) and who isn’t afraid to go for the “kill shot.”

Terrible injuries follow making this edit better, I’d suggest, than a comfortable suburban house with tropical plants, stereophonic music, drinks, erotic opportunities and discreet people.

Climbing against all odds from poverty to a position of honour and privilege!

A rare treat this morning in the form of thirteen-year-old John John Florence, his tweenie brothers Ivan and Nathan, as well as mama Alex, on a trip to South Africa circa 2006.

For eighteen days the Florences, along with writer Jamie Brisick and filmers Sonny Miller (RIP, brother) and Dez Hoffman, traversed the storied coastline, giving surfers “a telling glimpse of the greatness that would be coming from this classic surfing family.”

Climbing against all odds from poverty to a position of honour and privilege, the now thirty-year-old John John has been anointed with two world titles, turning a truly original life story into a Hemingway classic.

Essential.

A wildly unique design created in 1995 by a Commie-hating soccer mom lookalike that promises to ruin your surfing forever!

I am a wrinkled old-timer with a harem of surfboards, stubbornly intermediate is my level and most days I leave the surf emitting ughs of disgust at my performance.

Over the years I’ve loved the Lost Fish and its volatility. First taste, 1999, four years after its arrival, last taste, a few years ago.

Biolos’ round-nose-fish was different from the prevailing wisdom of the time (1995), even among the early fishes. The 5’5″, as ridden by Chris Ward and Cory Lopez, turned a generation on to the idea that a performance board could be kinda kooky looking, a pointed nose but with a forward wide point and all wrapped up with a regular pulled-in 14″ tail (and radically thin at 2 1/16″). It’s a combination that, even now, some shapers don’t get, sending devils out on those thick and straight-railed cruise ships with 20″ tails.

“The tail as always the dirty little secret,” says Biolos. “It’s the same width as a normal high-performance board was at the time. And it was this lack of a big, wide tail that allowed the boys to surf them in such radical waves.”

Biolos, a Commie-hating soccer mom lookalike, says “The reason I started making these was purely because Chris Ward asked me if I would make him a ‘Fish’. This was over the phone in the fall of ‘94 while Chris was in Hawaii. He said Tom Curren was on a Fish and he wanted one. I had no idea what Chris was asking for, really. I knew of The Lis-type fish (based on San Diego kneeboarder Steve Lis’ twin-fins from the early ‘70s) and the Fireball Fish (Australian Tom Peterson’s take in the ‘90s). This was before the internet and The Surfers Journal type of historic surf journalism so I went down to a local surf shop (BC Surf Shop,) and checked out some classic twin fins from the 70’s that were hanging on the wall and took mental notes. These boards we very MR-esque. Most were late 70’s, early pre thruster 80’s twinnies. If you look at this board, and our RNF (round nose fish) in general, you will notice the actual nose is fairly pointy and the tail is kinda pulled, not unlike the MR twins. The board pictured would be about a year after the first one I made and it was definitely already refined as I’d started riding these types of boards by then as well and was getting them dialled. I was sorta working in a vacuum ‘cause so few people were making these types of boards at the time.”

As well as board sales, the design brought a wild acclaim to the San Clemente shaper.

“The impact on my life was immense,” he says. “It put me on the map. It was the breakthrough for me as a designer and shaper. Before the RNF, I was that shaper guy who paints rad stuff and makes surf party vids. It afforded me the opportunity to get good surfers on my boards without them really needing to risk using them in contests. It bought me time as a designer to learn to get better. It made it possible for me to travel the world as a shaper. Once the design hit, I was immediately getting calls from around the world to come shape. Europe, South Africa, Australia, it all happened after the RNF.”

See the video below?

It’s a reboot of a reboot of the old classic 5’5” x 19 1/4”, and it’s gonna run over six parts.