Happy Italo, shiny skinned tour guide to chubby red JOB.

Candid: Take a private tour of world surfing champion Italo Ferreira’s beachfront palazzo in Baia Formosa!

Derek Rielly

By Derek Rielly

Beachfront palace with infinity pool, Mad Max-style four-wheeler, dreamy righthand point. Come see Italo in natural habitat…

Jamie O’Brien is an insanely popular thirty-six-year-old vlogger from Ehukai in Hawaii; Italo Ferreira, twenty-five, is the rags-to-riches Brazilian who beat Kelly Slater and Gabriel Medina at eight-foot Pipe to win the world title two months ago.

In this episode of his weekly YouTube series, Jamie, who coached Italo at Pipe, jumps on eight flights over thirty-plus hours to visit Italo at his beachfront palazzo in Baia Formosa, a fishing town in north-east Brazil, population eight thousand; a joint where the only paved roads are the ones that lead into the village.

It is something that we still know so little about the sport’s reigning king, whom we last saw dressed like an Orthodox Jew and meeting Formula 1 hero Lewis Hamilton.

And this video, which takes you through Italo’s house with the infinity pool, into his Mad Max-style four-wheeler, out the suicide garage door and to the dreamy point where he grew up surfing on a drink cooler lid, peels the curtain back just a little.

Part two next week.

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Kelly Slater's gun makes a soft hiss and a fine misty spray comes out of its nozzle. Frame grab by Jack Coleman

Watch Kelly Slater in: “Be overwhelmed by the most terrifying sensation of lust that is possible to imagine!”

Derek Rielly

By Derek Rielly

Kelly rides bareback in Hawaii!

Who would’ve thought, twenty-two years ago when Kelly Slater retired from the pro tour with six world titles, that he’d be darting around on the tour, and putting us all in a merry spin in his freesurfs, in his forty-ninth year.

This two-and-a-half-minute short shows Kelly in Hawaii and performing bareback gymnastics that, I hate to admit, would seem beyond the reach of most men his age.

I watched this and was transfixed.

The sheer animal ferocity of the man is frightening.

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Mason comes over the mountaintop with daddy Mike's convoy on his backdoor.

Watch: Mason Ho give his Tommy Peterson Fireball Fish a tubesteak shine!

Derek Rielly

By Derek Rielly

Duck season on the North Shore!

There was a time in the mid-nineties when the idea of owning a Tom Peterson-shaped Fireball Fish would send you crying, with happy, into the silk folds of your kimono.

And, as fate would play it, Tom, then known as the little brother of the very famous Michael aka MP, had his shaping bay around the corner from my first job.

Tom would visit every day, terrible breath but a lovely spirit, and regale with tales of his brother.

I didn’t buy one of his Fireball Fishes because, then, as today, money finds it hard to escape from my zippered pockets, much to my regret etc.

Mason Ho has never had to buy surfboards and so when family friend Tom hand delivered a Fireball Fish, which is a channel bottom fish with a step-tail, cut to Mason’s especially little dimensions, all he had to do was wax and ride.

Which you can watch below. Includes very good, if brief, cameos from daddy Mike and little sis Coco.

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Coromandel exploring with little Billy, not quite dwarfish, and Luke, biggish.

Surfing in New Zealand sucks: “$1300 on petrol, 7,300 cubic liters of carbon into the atmosphere in search of best waves on Coromandel peninsula!”

Derek Rielly

By Derek Rielly

A tragicomedy starting Luke Cederman and Billy Stairmand…

Humour and surfing are never good bedfellows.

A notable exception is Luke Cederman, from Raglan in New Zealand, a funny man we employed to make this year’s time travel-themed wetsuit film, Once Upon a Time in New Zealand.

(Watch here.)

Two days ago, Luke loosed episode nine of the One and a Half Men series he makes with the almost-WCT level pro Billy Stairmand, who is rated number sixty-nine on the WQS and whose diminutive size (not quite dwarfish but short) juxtaposes nicely, in a comical sense, with Luke’s six-three frame.

In this episode, we find Luke and Billy searching for waves on New Zealand’s fabled Coromandel Peninsula, a fifty-mile digit of land that sticks out on the north-east coast.

Gets real good waves. If you can find ’em.

“Billy & Luke spend $1300 on petrol, sing 79 duets and release 7,300 cubic liters of carbon in to the atmosphere in search of the best beach on the Coromandel peninsula,” writes Luke in the episode description.

At episode’s conclusion, Luke sings as Billy beatboxes, “Because I am me I have a shit time. It’s like I killed a group of children in a previous time. In my past life I did some very bad things and this is karma catching up on me. I DID SOME BAD THINGS IN MY PAST LIFE AND NOW FUCKING KARMA IS CATCHING UP ON ME! AND I FUCKING, FUCKING HATE THE COROMANDEL! WHY IS IT ALWAYS SHIT AND CLOSING OUT FOR ME! FUCK!”

Worth your nine minutes.

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Champ Italo and coach Shane Dorian.

Watch: “Surfers are frequently, secretly fond of each other!”

Derek Rielly

By Derek Rielly

There's many a strange impulse to be found behind-the-scenes at the 2019 Pipeline Masters…

This is a fascinating, if formless, gem from Red Bull, twenty-two minutes of fly-on-the-wall footage from 2019’s Pipeline Masters, won by Italo, made entertaining by Gabriel’s Machiavellian ways, provincial innocence meets metropolitan cunning etc.

Here you can eavesdrop on conversations between Kelly Slater and Shane Dorian, see surf media folk fall in love with their pro surfer quarries, hear Yadin Nicol admit he would’ve shut down Mick Fanning’s 2013 world title dreams for a shot at a Pipe semi if only he’d had the “yoda” skills of Gabriel Medina, Jon Pyzel telling a story of blowing off teenager Italo for a sponsorship and quite a deal more.

An occasion to be treasured.

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Photo: Jack English
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