Behind-the-scenes as Mason Ho eats up French Polynesian surf contest: “I don’t want to be that guy mumbling into his drink at the bar!”

An emotional thrill!

Happy Mason Ho, thirty-one years old, is an attractive man with huge eyes and a brown moustache covering a mouth as delicate as a woman’s.

For most of his career, Mason has dreamed of being a full-time contestant on the World Championship Tour.

He was five years old when his Uncle Derek won the world title.

“I’ve wanted to win the world title since I was a kid,” he says. “But to be a world champ you have to…get… on the tour. So my goal before my goal is to qualify. So I need to hypnotize myself into thinking it’s fun.”

That dream might’ve been relegated to the occasional wildcard, but his black magic is occasionally still applied to qualifying events.

In this short behind-the-scenes film by his footman Rory Pringle, we see Mason stomping his way to a victory at the Rangiroa Pro three weeks ago, an atoll noted for its fine pearls in the Tuamotus in French Polynesia.

It is a win for exuberance, I think, something which is completely lacking in modern life.


Watch: Desert tube-conquering Imogen Caldwell in “A dazzling style of living!”

Girl who grew up on the beach learned a little about tube weaving…

Imogen Caldwell, twenty-four, was raised under the blazing desert sun and with a front row seat to the most picturesque left in the country, The Bluff, fifteen hours north of the Western Australian capital, Perth.

Isolated, yeah.

Moved there with her family when she was six. Camped on the beach. Eventually, mum and dad got to run the campsite there. They moved to a house fifty metres from the lineup. The windows shake when it’s big.

Imogen is the sort of person who is studied and gazed at in stunned surprise. Men feel the veins pulsing in their temples.

Tall, well-made, skin that looks as if it has has the flavour of fresh cream.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B5bXsaHn-hg/

But we’re not here for that sort of play, not today at least.

Here, in under three minutes, is Imogen implanting herself in a series of tubes at The Bluff and a little further north, that’ll leave your tongue hanging out.


Watch: first vision of Tom Lochtefeld’s outrageous Palm Springs tank: “Wait a second! Hold on! I just pulled back in a pool!”

Wavepool pioneer creates slab that destroys pros!

As noted yesterday, surfing’s great thinker, Tom Lochtefeld, the man who created the Flowrider thirty years ago, had created the tech for the new Magnusson-Robb pool in Palm Springs.

(Take a lil trip down memory lane here to the Flowrider with Tony Hawk and Christian Fletcher.)

Tom’ new tech, which is called SurfLoch,  is diff to KS, Wavegarden, American Wave Machine and so on. It uses a combo of vacuum and pressure to make waves.

The promo lit goes,

“An opening at the bottom of each chamber allows the wave energy pulse to be released into open water independently of each other. The controlled variations of the independent pulses can generate an infinite variety of wave swells.”

In this film by Vans, Dylan Graves circles the Palm Springs pool and is given the grisly job of trying to negotiate its slab during a test session.

“Hold on! Wait a second! Hold on! I just pulled back in a pool,” he says after.

That’s entertainment.


Candid: Italo Ferreira’s private tour of his Baía Formosa hideaway; happy tow-ins via his hundred-gee beach buggy!

Here, in this little fishing village, the world champ is an absolute king.

It might come as a surprise that James O’Brien, the chubby red-haired daddy of surfing’s guiltiest treat, is a serious entrepreneur who has built a lucrative career around a YouTube channel.

Talk to James and you don’t get the goofy clown, you get hard kisses that leave little flecks of blood on your lips. A serious person with both eyes on the future.

In this episode of James’ weekly vlog we get part three of his journey to world champ Italo Ferreira’s Baía Formosa empire.

Here, Italo is the absolute king.

He owns the lineup, the best house and a hundred-gee beach buggy that can, and is, employed as a vehicle for towing in.

James, meanwhile, is bright, smart and happily demonic.


Battle of the sexes: Documentary reveals hippie surfers’ visceral hatred of women, “Get off my wave, bitch!”

More proof hippies are the worst!

Here’s a story as old as time, compelling as ever.

Women stuck under the jackboot of the male patriarchy, denied opportunity to flower, harried at every turn etc.

A new documentary by Dutch filmmaker Juul Hesselberth called “Just Go Fucking Surfing follows four Gold Coast surfers, with emphasis placed on their struggle.

One of the surfers, Audrey Styman-Lane told the ABC, “Male surfers do drop in on women surfers a lot and, when you ask them why, they say, ‘oh, sorry, but I didn’t think you were going to make it.”

Her twin sister Grace said old hippies were the worst.

“They’re like, ‘save the planet, peace brother’ — and then ‘Get off my wave, bitch.'”

Both said they’d lost sponsors ’cause they didn’t want to wear revealing swimwear.

“We want to be seen as professional athletes,” Audrey told the ABC. “Not sex objects.”

Jess Grimwood said she had to hide her homosexuality while competing.

“When I was doing it you couldn’t be a lesbian. All the chicks that were gay, were behind like secretly gay,” adding the WSL was planning a women’s surf contest to coincide with Sydney’s Gay Mardi Gras.

Watch trailer here.