A shot in the arm for all middle-aged surfers!

The surfer, musician and artist Ozzie Wright, the model for a thousand imitators, has stunned surf fans with the release of an epic short that proves age is just a number and that fifty years old is the new fifteen.

Ozzie Wright, who turns fifty in just seventeen months, is “a straw-haired aerial specialist from Narrabeen, Sydney, Australia… his quirky pen-and-ink sketches of thin sad-eyed hipsters were used in Volcom surfwear ads, and Australia’s FHM magazine named Wright the country’s fifth best-dressed man in 2002 in an ironic nod to the shabby-chic trend he helped popularize. Wright is the lead singer of the Goons of Doom, a tongue-in-cheek semi-punk band formed in 2004.”

The last time we saw Oz on these pages he’d listed his Suffolk Park spread, seven-thousand square feet of wildly fertile volcanic dirt one hundred footsteps from oft-times epic beachbreaks.

In 2018, Oz sold his two-storey Narrabeen house built in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright with its notes of Japanese Imperial Hotel, and which he’d owned since 2003 before moving out in 2013 and buying a house in Newport, a few suburbs north. (Later sold for 2.3 million.)

It was in the Narrabeen house, one hundred metres from the famous sandbottom left at 5 Loftus Street, that the surf movie classic Doped Youth was filmed in the summer of 2003-4. The movie, which was conceived and made by Ozzie and Waves editor Adam Blakey, starred Kelly Slater, Tom Carroll, Ozzie, Mick Fanning and Joel Parkinson and was released as a DVD with the magazine Waves.

Where were we?

Oh yeah, this short film. It’s the Ozzy part from the surf doc Riding the Wind by Zack Balang and filmed during those wild COVID years, 2020 through 2023.

He loose and sharp.

Essential.

Go-for-broke Dane Reynolds vs master of style Tom Curren…

The go-for-broke surfer from Bakersfield, California, Dane Reynolds, and Tom Roland Curren, a three-time world surfing champion who was unbeatable for most of his career and who popularised the modern Fish, have been filmed going wave-for-wave at California’s dreamy Rincon Point.

Reynolds, who is forty this year, and Curren, sixty-one, are a study of contrasts.

Reynolds employs a stall, load-up and explode style that includes many experimental and aerial manoeuvres while Tom Curren is cool minimalism, a man who influenced a generation of American surfers including the noted Kelly Slater, himself a world champion surfer of renown.

“On a wave Tom Curren is ageless,” Vaughan Blakey told me a couple of years back when he released the Curren biopic Free Scrubber. “The fact that he’s not looking for big sections to hit is easy on the eye. It’s not all about the hammers. You’re not waiting for him to do something. He’s just riding waves.”

Dane Reynolds, meanwhile, divides his time between the surf around Carpinteria and his small surf shop, which he owns and operates.

Two-and-a-half summers back, Jen See wrote movingly of CH11 and its place in surfing culture.

Let’s go inside.

A round glass table readily at home in your grandparents’ living room stands in the center of the room. It’s an obvious thrift shop find. Piles of stickers sit on the table’s two shelves. As a grom at heart, I took the free stickers, yes.

Surf films run on the video screens, which should not surprise you at all.

A poster hangs on the wall from the premier of “Glad You Scored” at the nearby Majestic Ventura Theater, a battered single-screen movie house. There’s a framed photograph of Reynolds surfing, and a framed movie flyer from Australia. Nothing fancy.

Clothing from Former runs along one wall. The line has subdued colors, which is to say, there’s a lot of black. Reynolds pulls design elements from eclectic sources, and the current collection brings a punk-mod vibe.

Reynolds is also producing clothing under his Chapter 11 TV label, and it occupies the store’s opposite wall. Bright, playful, and mostly hand-drawn, it feels entirely different from Former. The groms seem to like it — smaller sizes were scarce.

In an Instagram story, Reynolds explains one of the designs. While sending a text to filmer Hunter Martinez during the Haleiwa comp, Reynolds told him to “Capture the moment.” At the same time, Reynolds was drawing a shooting star for one of his daughters. It’s now a cute as fuck t-shirt and hoody. I regret not buying one.

One corner holds hats and t-shirts from Trashboy, a creation from Courtney Jaedtke, Reynolds’s wife. It derives from son Sammy’s early obsession with the garbage truck, if I remember correctly. Between them, Jaedtke and Reynolds produce an almost dizzying array of clothing and art. It’s hard to keep up.

Boards and suits remain on the sparser side. A few boards hang from the ceiling with space for more. A stack of cards at the front desk stands ready for custom orders to Channel Islands. The extremely analogue approach fits. A rack holds a dozen or so wetsuits.

An opening in the back wall shows a small workspace with a four-color t-shirt printing press. It’s Saturday afternoon, and Reynolds is back there screening shirts. He looks relaxed and happy, like there are few places he would rather be. He waves a cheerful hello.

Surf today?

Nah, it was flat all the way down the coast. Looked like a swimming pool.