Hard luck kid and blue-collar surfing hero Mike Wright stars in “Rock!”

Who don't love a little rock?

Michael Wright, aka Mike, is a twenty-four-year-old surfer from Culburra Beach in Australia, brother to world champion Tyler, tour journeyman Owen and couple of others, Kirby and Tim, I think.

He is, according to the WSL, one of the “planet’s premier freesurfers.”

This edit, which is seven minutes long, employs excellent music and a full-frame perspective which allows examination of the current world number thirty-two’s fantastic technique.

An adventure as timely as today’s headlines.


Tom Curren, Mason Ho and pretty blonde T-Girl combine homemade jams and action in “This is the death of western civilisation!”

"You can almost assume what you think you know about him,” Mason says of Tom Curren, “but don’t even think you know.”

Tom Curren is an almost sixty-year-old three-time world surfing champion with eyes as blue as robin’s eggs whose abilities on guitar are as unorthodox as his manner of living.

Curren hails from Santa Babs on  the central Californian coast and is the son of an evangelist Christian mammy. He rebelled early, enjoying pre-mixed cocktails, when ten, daily marijuana, from the age of thirteen and was married at eighteen. 

Mason Ho, you know from his daily North Shore films, is thirty-two and fond of delivering rough loads.

In this sixteen-minute film by Joe Alani, the pair, along with a pretty blonde T-Girl, make music and garrotte the waves around San Francisco with ropes of come.

Essential.


Ain’t That Swell’s Vaughan Blakey and Jed Smith dagger fingernails down Newcastle surfing’s spine in stunning new documentary!

"A glorious madhouse full of absolute lunatics… "

An oddly electric moment yesterday during Newcastle surfer Ryan Callinan’s post-heat presser.

As the camera swept over the crowd, the viewer’s attention was drawn to the heroic profile of Vaughan Blakey, brother of commentator Ronnie and one half of the long-running Ain’t That Swell broadcast team, squawking ecstatically, as if he wanted to seize Ryan in his arms and pull him down between his thighs.

This documentary by Vaughan and his ATS co-host Jed Smith celebrates what Vaughan describes as “the skitz energy of this town and why people from here are legends. It’s a glorious madhouse full of absolute lunatics but they’re all down to earth, really good people. Nowhere like it.”

Plenty of whiz and fluff and bludgeon strokes of Vaughan’s sucker ding dong.


Newport beachgoers flabbergasted at legendary Hawaiian aristocrat cavorting in fat cones!

Classic supersonic Mason Ho… 

In this, the two hundred and seventy-fifth instalment of Mason Ho’s winter and spring, our innards are yanked out by Mason’s capacity to sit cosily inside Newport’s The Wedge as if it was a luxurious lodge and he was warming himself in front of a fireplace.

“The thing with style,” says Mason, “is that style truly does come out when you don’t give a fuck. Right when you truly don’t give a shit what your surfing looks like, that’s when some sort of style comes out. As soon as you let go of everything, you’re styling. When I was growing up, I copied all of my favourite guys but I was never as good as them. Once I got the theory down and stripped it back…boom…finally…something came out. There was some style. Finally…”


Big-wave world champ Billy Kemper finds absolution after the multiple tragedies, Erik Logan’s tears and a busted pelvis in final episode of ‘Billy’!

The tear-jerking conclusion of a wonderful six-part series… 

In the struggle and turmoil that agitate the USA today, Billy Kemper seems to belong to a remote and silent past.

Kemper, almost thirty-one, a four-time Jaws winner and the 2015 Big-Wave world champion, is a nobleman of the old school where struggle is hidden in some remote world of quiet contemplation.

You know the story, of course, or you should by now.

Billy is belted to within an inch of his life at a Moroccan ledge right at the start of the COVID pandemic, the hospital there don’t know what they’re doing, wrong drugs are administered, humiliating episodes of diarrhoea and so on, and so WSL Erik Logan moves heaven and hell to get him back to the US.

“Gonna bring you home, Billy,” Logan, an executive producer on the series whispers to Billy in episode three. 

There follows much rehabilitation, which includes cameos by Laird Hamilton and Gabby Reece, and, today, his return to Jaws.

It ain’t the best episode, if we’re to be frank, but it still meets with high approval.