The trio, along with Pollet, De Carne, Mason’s filmer Rory Pringle, Mikey Corker and Stu Gibson, spent one week on the unnamed hunk of sand, driving mostly, but surfing here and there, giving Medina the opportunity to dazzle in righthand slabs.

Rare free-surfing footage of Gabriel Medina tearing hell out of remote Australia alongside Mick Fanning and Mason Ho in “Kangs”

Derek Rielly

By

"It's the stroke flick of the year!"

The last time I’d interviewed Nick Pollet, famous for his his comedic collaborations with Swellian Lord Adam “Vaughan” Blakey, he was a few hours from a trip to Australia’s Great White-infested southern flank with Mick Fanning, Gabriel Medina and Mason Ho.

“I’ll swim and shoot but, fuck, real close to the other photographers,” the Byron Bay auteur had told me.

That movie, called The Kangs, a cutesy way of saying Kings and also ‘cause Medina wanted to see some kangaroos, has now been released. And, from the moment Medina first puts on his rubber gloves, submerges his hand in a jar of lube and rims…oh but don’t let me give too much away… it’s the stroke flick of the year.

Pollet says the highlight was triple world champ Medina, a rare bird whom you’ll rarely see on free surfing trips. He says his true character only emerges when the camera isn’t on him and, so, he employed his sound engineer musician pal Alain De Carne, who scored The Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe, to capture each forbidden utterance. It’s the shell we can’t pry our ear away from.

“He recorded the whole trip and me and Vaughan had to sift through the audio,” says Pollet although the price of art is to sometimes lick the stank fingers. “It was a bit punishing to be honest,” he says.

The trio, along with Pollet, De Carne, Mason’s filmer Rory Pringle, Mikey Corker and Stu Gibson, spent one week on the unnamed hunk of sand, driving mostly, but surfing here and there, giving Medina the opportunity to dazzle in righthand slabs.

“He blew me away. I was shooting footage in the water and it doesn’t do him justice,” says Pollet, “he so’s good out there it’s crazy.”

The movie exits your screen with a soon-to-be-classic tune Wide Open Land.

I define this as the sound of love.

Florence bro's surf check.

John John Florence stuns surf world with release of intimate homemade video from South Africa only weeks after “devastating throat punch to the World Surf League”

Derek Rielly

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"The question must be asked again and again. Why bother with the WSL?"

John John Florence is better than every other other horned-up lunkhead on tour.

The almost thirty one year old from Pipeline on Hawaii’s North Shore is living proof of the adage simplicity is the ultimate sophistication as he shepherds his family of four, two brothers, mammy Alex and wife Lauren, around the horn of southern Africa.

In these sublime twelve-minutes, Florence’s elegance and grace, as well as his well-noted mystery, radiate from the screen. There is no look-at-me grab for attention, only a sensuality that delivers desirability and vitality in spades.

As noted two weeks ago, the video studiously avoids mention of the Jeffreys Bay Pro where the two-time world champ was controversially clipped by Conner O’Leary for a ninth place finish, again a hint that he may not return to the tour in 2024.

“In John John’s case, there’s nothing left on the tour for him,” wrote Surfads. “And with every underscore, every mistimed comp window, every title decided at 4 foot Trestles, with his little brother and the world slab tour beckoning, with the carrot of Olympic qualification dangling for a only a couple more months… the question must be asked again and again. Why bother with the WSL?”

 

Matahi Drollet, part of surfing's heat of the year, alongside fellow local Eimeo Czarmak. Best heat at Teahupoo since Slater and JJ in 2014.

Insane scenes in Tahiti as local surfers create history in Kelly Slater-sponsored Teahupoo event with “best surfing of the year!”

Derek Rielly

By

Matahi Drollet and Eimeo Czermak rain 10s at the Tahiti Pro Trials in the best heat at Teahupoo since Kelly Slater and John John Florence in 2014…

It’s fitting in this post-truth epoch, where Asians are white supremacists, men dominate women’s sport and marauding gangs festooned in gold chains loot Louis Vuitton stores in the name of equity, that the reigning world champion surfer can’t surf the tour’s most demanding waves, Teahupoo and Pipeline.

In three days, the world’s Championship Tour surfers will park ‘emselves at Tahiti’s End of the Road, the closest access point to Teahupoo, and compete in an event that is likely doomed to run in poor conditions. It’s a scenario tailor-made for world champion Toledo, who is wildly difficult to beat in waves under six feet, but a walk-through at Teahupoo and Pipeline when eight-foot sets stack on the horizon.

The trials, however, are something else.

With one wildcard on offer and in six-to-eight-foot waves wiped smooth by light northerly winds, the two local surfers Matahi Drollet and Eimeo Czermak put on a show unseen at the waves since Kelly Slater and John John Florence’s epic semi in 2014.

With less than ten minutes gone, Drollet, 25, a man who won the XXL award for biggest wave ridden in 2015 when he was only 16, slouches into a 9.50 followed by a ten.

Czermak, a boy with golden highlights in strawberry blond hair, the ginger snaps floating in freckled white skin, delivers his riposte, an 8.17 then his own ten.

Needing a 9.61 he roams the park, pulling into wild west bowls, futilely as it turns out.

Watch the full final here.

Stewart thrills spectators with his arabesques, fouettés, picqué tours and port de bras inside the long tubes.

Sixty-year-old “godfather of bodysurfing” steals show from world champs Italo Ferreira and Carissa Moore at opening of world’s best wavepool!

Derek Rielly

By

Spectators thrilled with legend's arabesques, fouettés, picqué tours and port de bras inside the long tubes.

Some years ago now, a tribute to the bodysurfing and bodyboarding icon Mike Stewart appeared on BeachGrit its author positing, “He is simultaneously the, Duke Kahanamoku, Miki Dora, Tom Curren and Kelly Slater of his sport; its godfather figure, its most stylish practitioner and its greatest champion.”

Rarely is this sorta hyperbole tested, but in the case of Stewart and the sport’s current leaders, Italo Ferreira, Carissa Moore and Stephanie Gilmore, a showdown at the Boa Vista wavepool in Brazil, easily the best of the genre, put Stewart at the top of the surfing totem.

Stewart is sixty years and has won the Pipeline Bodysurfing Classic fourteen times and the bodyboarding world crown nine times. He was filmed at the planned community one-and-a-half hours from São Paulo, thrilling spectators with his arabesques, fouettés, picqué tours and port de bras inside the long tubes.

Starting at one million dollars, well-heeled surfers can buy their way in via apartments and villas built around a wave pool it ain’t a stretch to call the “most high-performance wave in the world.”



The view from Nasty Nate's mouth!

World’s most popular surf vlogger almost paralysed at Jaws defies doctors to capture harrowing POV footage from Australia’s heaviest wave!

Derek Rielly

By

There ain't a wave on earth that would make Nathan "Nasty" Florence wet-stain the front of his red bunny pyjamas.

Not even six months ago, Nathan Florence whom BeachGrit has correctly, I think, dubbed “the world’s smartest surfer”, he reads, can assemble a cohesive sentence or two together etc, was being rushed to a Maui hozzy by Kai Lenny after a wipeout that snapped a vertebrae in his spine.

Nathan “Nasty” Florence, middle bro to the elder and various serious John and little-y Ivan, said it was his new-found love of pressing metal in male-only gymnasiums, his monster glutes and quadriceps/hams building a fortress of muscle around his lower spine, that had saved him from a life in a chair.

Now, the boy with yellow-tinted eyes who fears nothing ’cause there ain’t a wave on earth that would make him wet-stain the front of his red bunny pyjamas, has finally released his three-month old POV footage from Shark Island, a short drive south of the Sydney CBD.

Shark Island, of course, is home to local legend Ronnie “Skull” Hill who rides a home-made jetboard through the lineup, scooping up waves from outside and deep on the reef, before riding to glory.

Although unseen on this magical day, Nathan’s cameo quickly fills the gaps, his ferret-like reflexes raising the bar of what is, and isn’t possible, at Shark Island.

Jon Pyzel and Matt Biolos by @theneedforshutterspeed/Step Bros
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