"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.

"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.

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…”