See the carrot-topped master chase the rarest prize in all of surfing, a wave at The Pipe!

Jamie O’Brien is a radiant and robust half-Australian, half-American who can be counted among the best half-a-dozen surfers currently surfing Pipeline, a difficult hard-breaking lefthand wave near the Oahu town of Haleiwa.

In this compelling POV edit from the almost forty year old whose quasi-modernist bungalow squats a dozen footsteps from the sandy path to Pipeline, O’Brien paddles out on a hall-of-fame day, the tropical sun a blazing citrus orange, and we are privy to his conversations with Mason Ho, Koa Rothman, Nathan Florence and so on, as well as his manoeuvrings to catch one of the rarest prizes in all of surfing.

Essential.



And, he ain’t the only one the damned novelty wave almost claims.

This might make a few of the meaner sons of bitches here deposit their watermelon seeds onto the ground, but there’s a real good case to be made that Jamie O’Brien, the carrot-topped king of Pipeline, is the most popular surfer in the world.

A YouTube channel with almost one-million subscribers, a whole damn army of fans in every corner of the world, oh it’s as plain as the shining sun.

Therefore, when the famous Waimea River became swollen like never before following wild rains and locals opened it up to the Bay to create biggest rivermouth waves ever seen there and Jamie tried to ride it only to be sucked out to sea and returned barely alive, gasping, claiming he’d almost died, well, what a tragedy that would’ve been for surfing.

You would’ve seen footage of the event three days ago on Mason Ho’s channel, and it ain’t bad, although Mason fares poorly compared to Jamie, but it don’t snatch the high drama of the day.

Here, we see the angry river as it roars through the valley, we see the small channel dug that creates the impetus for the whole thing to open up and create the wildest rivermouth y’ever seen.

And we see Jamie, who is mobbed by fans the minute he arrives in the carpark, pawing his way up the beach like a wretched sailor after a terrible quarter of an hour battling a ten-foot shorebreak and twenty-knot currents.

“Gnarliest experience ever… did you see me almost die? I sucked into the vortex of all vortexes!”

And, he ain’t the only one the damned novelty wave almost claims.

Essential.

Brilliant lunacy!

It’s been a wild ol December on the North Shore, “40mph storm winds, massive waves, torrential rain and even hail.”

These conditions conspired to create the scenario at Waimea Bay where Oahu’s Waimea River, which flows from the back of the valley, becomes so swollen all it takes is a bunch of shovels, a little sweat to bust it open and let it hit the oncoming surf to create what y’see here.

Mason fares poorly, which is rare given how strategic and methodical he is when it comes to these sorta novelty waves and at one point is washed out to sea.

Jamie O’Brien, whose shuck and jive you know well, wins the day.

For a man of almost forty years who looks like a hamburger on a griddle, an overgrown Annie doll, Jamie O continues to delight.

The 2003 Pipe Master, who is 190 pounds of rock hard muscle with 40 pounds of sturdy protective fat, and who once told me, “A big gut helps you breathe bigger and better” and who leaves no muffin unbuttered, has delivered a world first by recording his heat at the Vans Pipe Masters with a camera on his helmet.

For a man of almost forty years who looks like a hamburger on a griddle, an overgrown Annie doll, Jamie O’Brien continues to delight.

And, though the heat, which opens the day, is slow and operated under a day when the breeze is so light even the peach trees aren’t stirred, Jamie appears maddeningly cool.

We meet Nathan and Ivan Florence in the pre-contest crowd, we see the tiny ant people distant on the beach and we feel the turbulence of several wipeouts.

More than essential.