While other surfers are shaken like dolls in the big waves, Mason Ho coolly slips into the twenty-footers as if he were putting on a pair of silk pyjamas.

In this short film by Mason Ho’s faithful film jockey Riordan Pringle, we find his master madly jack-knifing multiple sets at Waimea Bay during last week’s Black Friday swell.

Mason Ho coolly slips into the the twenty-foot waves as if he were putting on a pair of silk pyjamas and pillow-propping himself against the headboard of his upholstered Californian king and glancing at the winking diamond face of his Patek Philippe.

Other surfers are less lucky, shaken like dolls, heads banged against the water until their eyes cloud.

Mason Ho is delivered to the famous Bay by his daddy Michael Ho, “one of the world’s best tuberiders in the mid- and late ’70s (he helped invent the “pigdog” tuberiding technique)”, although Daddy Ho decides discretion is the better part of valour and decides not to attend the crowded lineup.

If you want to see sixty-seven-year-old Michael Ho at his indestructible best click here. First wave, hands behind the back set at Backdoor cut to Black Magic Women, Santana. Epic.

But, back to Mason Ho.

“The way his brain works is a lot different than any of my other friends,” says Kolohe Andino. “It’s refreshing to hang out with him, and get him talking about something. It’s like he’s a complete innocent. My friends and I might get eggy about something, but I’ve never heard him bum out. He gives me some of the best vibes I’ve ever felt.”

Kelly Slater says that Mason Ho is “so psyched and happy sometimes I think he’s putting it on, and messing with everyone. But he’s always just that way. He’s a cross between in-control and in-awe at all times.”

Mason Ho has a safety word he uses if the situation ever gets sticky. “When shit gets bad,” he says, “I think of this one word, imua. And, it means, ‘to move forward.’ It’s an ancient Hawaiian saying. They’d use it right before they went to war, or begin a march. When I’m down, I yell that out instead of ‘Fuck!’ I yell, ‘Imua!’ I mean, I don’t if there’re people around. That would be corny. I ain’t a hundred percent Hawaiian, but it feels good to think about it.”

After the session Mason Ho sits in the tray of Daddy Ho’s pickup, wide-chest still dewy with Pacific Ocean, heaving smoothly.

Essential.

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

In the second instalment of Filipe Toledo’s docuseries Peace and Power, the two-time and reigning world champ has gifted surf fans a wildly personal glimpse into his life in San Clemente with his extended family.

Here we find Filipe Toledo, artist wife Ananda Marçal, children Mahina and Koa along with Daddy Ricardo and mammy Mari in their sprawling Orange County compound, living as only a happy family can, connected by blood and love.

The scenes of Filipe Toledo and his little boy Koa reveal a father and his progeny in the beginning stages of that crucial relationship between father and son. Father is provider, role-model, teacher, authority figure but also the little boy’s guide to the true nature of love and the provider of maps to success and happiness.

(Although, to quote Sherwood Anderson, “You can’t always be too fussy about what you say to a young boy. Really, sometimes, you should take him into your confidence, into your life, make him a part of your life.”)

Watch as father and son embrace when Filipe exits the water. As grandaddy Ricardo cradles the boy as the family sits around the outdoor fire pit.

If you’ve got boys, what kind of father are you?

Are you leaving ’em with smudges, cracks or totally broken?

You ever get haunted by quotes?

Michael Chabon got me real good in his book Manhood for Amateurs.

“Sooner or later, you will discover which kind of father you are, and at that moment you will, with perfect horror, recognize the type. You are the kind of father who fakes it, who yells, who measures his children with greatest accuracy only against one another, who evades the uncomfortable and glosses over the painful and pads the historic records of his sorrows and accomplishments alike. You are the kind who teases and deceives and toys with his children and subjects them to displays of rich and manifold sarcasm when–as is always the case–sarcasm is the last thing they need. You are the kind of father who pretends knowledge he doesn’t possess, and imposes information with implacable gratuitousness, and teaches lessons at the moment when none can be absorbed, and is right, and has always been right, and always will be right until the end of time, and never more than immediately after he has been wrong. And when your daughter’s body begins to betray her, and her sky flickers in the distance with the heat lightning of sex, you clear your throat and stroke your chin whiskers and tell her to go ask her mother. You can’t help it–you’re a walking cliché.”