Stephanie who? Caity Simmers releases girl-surf masterpiece!

Caity's walking a knife edge between weird-cool and weird-weird and it’s entertaining to watch her do her mad thing.

Have you missed Caity Simmers? It’s been a long time since Trestles and the latest world champion has kept a low profile.

Why? Well, it seems that Caity’s been really, really busy surfing. And I can’t say I can argue at all with this choice. The girl has her priorities straight, that’s for sure.

Earlier today, she released a new edit with a characteristically oblique name. It’s called Blouse. You will recall that Caity previously named an edit after a Sylvia Plath novel — The Bell Jar — so we should know better than to expect the usual thing when she announces a new edit. She comes at this thing from her own particular angle.

The liner notes description reads: “A lightweight, decorative surf film made of fine fabric.”

Given the sheer amount of water involved, I feel like lightweight might not be the word I’d choose here. The fabric is, in fact, fine.

With a run time of 20 minutes, Blouse includes a delectable assortment of Caity’s clips from the past year. Like any box of chocolates, there are a few duds, but also plenty of goodness to enjoy. The b-roll is low-fi and I enjoyed the off-beat weirdness of it. Her music choices swerve away from the mainstream.

Mostly, this thing involves lots and lots of surfing, which is my kind of edit. I do not need interviews, contest footage, or story-telling. I am a simple kid and like to watch surfing. Caity gets me.

If there’s a signature moment in this edit, it comes around the three-minute mark. The clip is from this past December during California’s swell bender. You will recognize the spot, despite the blurred out background. I don’t think I need to help you there.

Caity paddles into a beautiful, clean left. She hits the bottom turn, then in perfect rhythm, swings into the barrel. Exiting clean, she finishes it with a nice, little hit off the top. It’s not a long barrel, but it’s as smooth as anything you’ll see in surfing. Caity looks like she could do it with her eyes closed.

Since this wave comes after a barrel bender in Hawai’i, it’s safe to say, that Caity Simmers has gotten barreled more this year than the average human. She also seems to be having a damn fine time doing it. If any part of her is jaded about what is doing with life, she isn’t letting on.

Footage from West Australia comprises the strongest segment of the film. Yes, she hits the Box. There’s a series of non-makes — Caity has a street skater’s willingness to show her disasters — before she nails a deep one. There’s also a lofty, hero-shot air.

If there’s something missing here, it’s turns on big, open faces. It’s not that I doubt that she can surf those waves, but more, I’d love to have seen a bit more of it. It’s hard to be two places at once, though, and Caity’s heart is clearly in chasing barrels.

The world title does not seem to have made her any less hungry. There are moments in her surfing where she seems to be almost hyper-aware of the cameras, who she is, and what’s at stake. There are moments of self-consciousness that her early edits didn’t have. But when she forgets, and just surfs, it’s still fresh and free.

I would love to see more women put out edits — even if it’s just practice days around Tour stops. Please, I’m just a girl standing in front of the internet, begging for more women to make surf videos. The world is burning. Give me one nice thing.

For now, we can spend 20 minutes with one of surfing’s more unique characters. Caity Simmers’ quirky and creative, and she’s so far eluded any efforts, if any have existed, to make her conform. She’s walking a knife edge between weird-cool and weird-weird, and it’s entertaining to watch her do her mad thing.

If there’s one thing that the stream of disparate and often hilarious images in her edits tell us, it’s that she’s her own person. And from the looks of it, she seems pretty determined to stay that way. It sure feels like surfing could use a few more people like her.

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Surf vlogger Ben Gravy films near-death 20-second wipeout at Waimea Bay!

"It was like in a movie. I was completely out of air and I was still swimming to the top. I can't believe I made it."

Ben Gravy is a high-end intermediate surfer from New Jersey whose pivot from drinking to vlogging saved him, he says, from a life as a drunk.

“I drank like a fish,” says a man who now pays his bills promptly and who owns a title-free automobile.

As long-time fans of the novelty wave maestro but wary of falling for his skilful headlines, we were initially sceptical of his latest edit, “Nightmare Wipe Out Scenario 20 Second Hold Down.” 

But, reader, this is better than being manipulated pleasurably by the hand of a woman with tawny-browny hair and plump-thighed legs.

The edit doesn’t mess around.

In the opening scene, Ben Gravy staggers through the beach car park as a camera operator yells,

“Did you almost die out there? I filmed the whole thing! Dude, you had less than a second to catch your breath before that second wave came on top of you!”

Gravy chokes back the tears.

“I’m not kidding. It was black dark and I’m trying to look around. It was like in a movie. All that stuff you hear people talking about. It was dark and I was completely out of  air and I was still swimming to the top. I can’t believe I made it to the top.”

Harrowing, essential, life-changing.

As Gravy writes in the liner notes,

“I broke my rule in Hawaii & I went surfing on the last day of the trip,” writes Gravy. “It was especially gnarly, because it was the first day of the Eddie swell & the surf was rising fast. Waimea Bay was definitely the biggest I’ve ever surfed it & I experienced what is by far the scariest wipe out of my life, accompanied by a 20 second hold down. I’m very happy to be here still living on Earth.”

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Nathan Florence proves why he’s surfing’s king of POV in newest glimpse behind the wet curtain!

Nathan Florence's latest edit quickly irons out the wrinkles in his and Koa Rothman's bellies.

For a man who, likely, spent his earliest youth playing dress-up in his mother’s frocks, Nathan Florence has become the surfer upon all others judge themselves, a man who is greeted effusively by the best and bravest surfers in Scotland, Ireland, Hawaii and Australia.

Regarded as handsome and even cute by the co-eds in school, the face of Nathan Florence, thirty, has since formed into an adult mould; a face rather horsey with strawberry blond hair and lean controlled features.

His latest edit is from a North Shore sandbar and it quickly irons out the wrinkles in his and Koa Rothman’s bellies. The pair, along with a wild cameo from Olympian brother John John which hits at the eight-minute mark, hurl everything at the waves until you hear their filmer making little mewing whimpering noises from behind the camera.

As always with a Nasty Nate Florence short, essential.

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Guinness World Record winning surfer Dylan Graves gets barrelled in Poland!

Dylan Graves explores the essential nature of fun while immersing himself in the surf culture of whatever outpost he has delivered himself to.

BeachGrit readers have long thrilled to the weird wave follies of Puerto Rico’s Dylan Graves, the holder of the Guinness World Record for most turns on a wave, a leg-trembling forty spasms.

Dylan Graves is almost forty now, the velvet smoothness of his pretty face has gone and here and there you can see small wrinkles, but once upon a time he used to be on the Quiksilver roster. Dylan was the clean-looking Young Gun playing cute foil to the hoary champ Kelly Slater. Between Young Gun and now, Dylan took on the WQS (ain’t much success) before settling into that ever-warm freesurfing zone in Puerto Rico.

What started as a series on Weird Waves for Vans has now been lightly tweaked and is found on Dylan Graves’ own YouTube channel. It can safely be said that Dylan Graves explores the essential nature of fun and does so while immersing himself in the surf culture of whatever outpost he has delivered himself to.

In this episode, which is one of his best, Dylan visits the surf scene in Poland, a country bravely standing as the last outpost of Western civilisation.

To the cheers of locals, Dylan shelves several tubes on the Hel Peninsula, a long, narrow sand bar that separates the Bay of Puck from the open Baltic Sea.

Essential.

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John John Florence releases deeply personal account of Hawaiian winter

Straight from the heart!

If popularity can be measured by collective madness, board short sales and sales of hijabs for men, weeping women and the adoration of middle-aged surf fans, then there is without a shadow of a donut that John John Florence, three times a king, is the most popular surfer in the world.

Not even for Kelly Slater have there been such monstrous scenes of amorous cannibalism.

The big American with the even bigger ass, and rounder, too, than the miracle of Ethan Ewing’s obscenely ripe melons, is in another league, as they say, and John John Florence is the sun around which the tour now pivots.

He is the only non-Brazilian to win a world title since Fanning in 2013.

Which means all eyes are on the thirty-two-year-old father of baby Darwin and brother to Nathan and Ivan, as the tour begins anew at Pipeline in four weeks.

Will he abandon fam to chase tour beyond Hawaii? To Abu Dhabi? Portugal? Brazil? Crush Brazilian dreams for another year, just for laughs.

In the meantime, a new release from Studio Florence, called Here, which documents his travails from not this, but the last, Hawaiian season, 23-24.

Essential.

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