Graphic: Sixteen-foot Great White shark bites off teenage girl’s leg in wild existential tug-of-war with rescuers, “I felt a pop. I thought ‘I hope my leg dislocated because if it didn’t it would be gone’ and I looked down and my leg was gone.”

“It was like a puppy chewing on your finger.”

Here’s a piece of footage, old as the hills, just got spat out on Discovery’s Shark Week again recently, but, god, it’s wild.

American Heather Boswell is nineteen and on a six-month tour working in the galley of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research ship Discoverer.

Three hundred miles east of Easter Island, Boswell and pals take a day off to swim and snorkel.

Boswell is stalked and hit by a sixteen-foot Great White.

It grabs her leg (“It didn’t hurt at all, it was kind of like a puppy chewing on your finger,” she’ll recall later) as she tries to swim away.

Crew members hold out a broom to pull her in.

“When they were playing tug of war with the shark they reached down and grabbed my arms and pulled me but the shark still had a hold of my left leg,” Boswell would tell Oprah. “There was tug of war and I felt a pop. I thought ‘I hope my leg dislocated because if it didn’t it would be gone’ and I looked down and my leg was gone.”

On the home video we hear screams and as limb separates,

“Oh my God… It took Heather’s leg off.”

Boswell describes the event as “really really rough” and that she “felt like a ragged doll. And then when he brought me back up, I didn’t feel pain then either, all I felt was a pop. The shark bit most of my leg.”

After she was dragged aboard Discoverer the White went after another swimmer who was hanging off a ladder.

A few shots fired by a crew member sent the fish back to whence it came.

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Must-watch full-length surf feature Snapt 4, “A raging storm of guttural joy!”

And with one-hundred thousand dollars to be distributed to film's stars as judged by red-hot buttons Taj Burrow, Bobby Martinez and Mick Fanning.

Newport surfer and filmmaker Logan Dulien is a former opioid enthusiast who kicked the dragon in the guts and who now produces quietly mighty full-length surf features.

Snapt4 is a little different to most surf movies. It offers a hundred gees in prizemoney to the best performances in the film, as judged by red-hot buttons, Taj Burrow, Bobby Martinez and Mick Fanning.

The film stars Mason Ho, Jack Robinson, Clay Marzo, Ultimate Surfer Zeke Lau, Seth and Josh Moniz, Baz Mamiya, little Parker Coffin (the unpretty Coffin brother), Benji Brand, Ian Crane, super Jew Eithan Osborne and sexy as all hell Carlos Muñoz, each surfer risking their balls in the fire ’cause Logan is their friend.

The cash is districted thus, fifty gees for first place, twenty for second, third gets ten, best barrel, ten gees and best manoeuvre ten gees.

“They will have all month to score the sections individually,” says Logan. “The surfer with the highest section total between all three judges wins . This will be announced early December in Hawaii. Until then will let the viewers chime in on who they think won.”

Who y’thinking’s gotta get the cash?

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Brazilian bodysurfer stuns world by riding giant wave at notorious Hawaiian outer-reef Jaws, “Kalani goes into the ocean where fish are afraid!”

Kalani Lattanzi belongs to the knuckle-duster-in-your-face school of surfing!

A Brazilian bodysurfer, Kalani Lattanzi, has stunned the world by taking on Maui outer-reef Pe’ahi, aka Jaws, with just a pair of swim fins, a hand plane and a tight-fitting pair of trunks that barely contain, let’s be frank, the hatbox that is his loins.

Lattanzi, who is twenty-seven, and who now lives on Maui, gathered all his virile strength to swim out on November 2, a little after lunch, on the first real Jaws day of the season.

Lattanzi rode three waves before entering and, importantly, exiting the void on the wave filmed below.

He describes the experience as “beautiful” and says it was the best barrel of his life.

When BeachGrit called, Lattanzi was deep in construction work, three hours or thereabouts to go before he might engage in conversation, although in other interviews he has described Jaws as being a little easier to ride than the devil that is Portugal’s Nazaré.

Last year, Lattanzi released his biopic Kalani: Gift from Heaven, which follows his adventures there.

“Kalani goes into the ocean where fish are afraid,” says one fan.

More to come.

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South African superstar Jordy Smith reveals his (almost) descent into COVID-lockdown madness in a Jozi hotel room, “It was as full of the vibrations of power as machines which rout out grooves in wood!”

But only a disdainful pinprick! Surfs first South African winter in fourteen years…

In the second of a series of five-minute films, the South African superstar Jordy Smith, who turns thirty-four at his next birthday, reveals how he and his wife extracted themselves from America just as that country was starting to reek with COVID; a fundamentally grim place to be for a boy and his girl from Cape Town.

A flight to Johannesburg followed by two weeks in a hotel room that had a way of extracting his vitality, like clotting blood; this little airless box soon filled with a combined odour of clam shells, salt marshes and sicking brews, much like an unwashed corpse.

But enough with the niceties!

A thirteen-hour drive and Jordy is home in Cape Town, bobbing like a cork in as good waves as you’ll anywhere in the world.

“In the South African winter you don’t want to be anywhere else but right there,” he says.

Next episode: Watch Jordan play with danger at Jeffreys Bay!

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Go-for-broke former world #4 surfer Dane Reynolds releases new riposte to WSL’s “pandering bullshit that’s exploiting surfing!”

"Even when the conditions are shit, riding waves is the best thing in the world," says Dane.

Dane Reynolds, the thirty-six-year-old father of three and former world number four surfer from Bakersfield in California,  has released his latest riposte to what he calls the WSL’s “pandering bullshit.”

The eleven-minute short, called Literally and hosted, ad-free, on Vimeo, is lovingly arranged and contains the flavours of all the local surfers that Dane can draw upon, although he quickly outshines the product. 

“Even when the conditions are shit, riding waves is the best thing in the world,” he writes.

Original and delightful, as always, and, as always, a world away from the culty and churchy WSL. 

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