Just in: Water footage of monster clean-up set during Hawaii mega-swell that destroyed three jet-skis and snapped a photographer’s spine! “Someone just launched a ski forty feet!”

“Go go go! That guy on the ski! Holy shit!”

Four days ago, the Californian surf photographer Ryan Moss was rushed to the Queens Trauma Center in Honolulu after snapping his spine during one of the most filmed, and commented, moments in recent surf history.

And, now, the fruit of that particular harvest is hitting YouTube, including this excellent account of the day by Koa Rothman, the gorgeous middle son of North Shore philanthropist Eddie Rothman.

This episode of This is Livin’ includes a water angle of the clean-up set that destroyed three skis and almost paralysed a photographer, as well as a cameo from Kelly Slater and a man performing an excellent Donald Trump impersonation.

Most impressive of all is the revelation that the session is all paddle, no tows.


Breathtaking POV: Jamie O’Brien, Ben Gravy and Kalani Chapman ride biggest waves of their lives during Hawaii’s “swell of the century!”

Seventy feet? Eighty-five feet?

In this episode of Jamie O’Brien’s vlog, we find the thirty seven year old who nearly died on a one-foot day at Waikiki, shepherding his friend Ben Gravy into waves very much beyond his level, and with support from North Shore charger Kalani Chapman.

Jamie, who is 190 pounds of rock hard muscle with 40 pounds of sturdy protective fat and who grew up at Pipe, snatches POV footage that is breathtaking.

Even Ben Gravy, as he struggles with the machinations of his borrowed tow-board, unsure whether to jump up and down to regather speed or fade back to the juice, is a revelation. A still from the session, I imagine, will hang over his little bed and perhaps even in a New Jersey cafe.

Movie star handsome New Jersey vlogger Ben Gravy during Hawaii’s “swell of the century!”

Are the waves twenty-to-thirty feet, as suggested by Jamie, or seventy-to-eighty-five feet as proposed by movie star handsome Ben?

Whatever, the three survive the “swell of the century” and each man rides the wave of his life.


French Jew and Israeli Olympian Eithan Osborne stars in “Jesus was a Jew, yes, but only on his mother’s side!”

"Hunting novelty waves in the midst of a global pandemic…"

“Life”, Phil Roth, a literary titan and a Jew, once wrote, “is just a short period of time in which you are alive.”

Words to live by, I should think.

Eithan Osborne is a surfer, and also a Jew of some note, and he is from Ventura, California. Two months ago, Dane Reynolds, his goyim friend, made the movie, The Happiest Jew in Ventura. 

In today’s release, “Jesus was a Jew, yes, but only on his mother’s side,” Eithan traverses France, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, “hunting novelty waves in the midst of a global pandemic,” according to his master Wasted Talent magazine.

Here’s the back-story:

Planning transcontinental surf trips against the backdrop of a global pandemic isn’t the easiest of affairs. Travel bans, quarantines, testing…etc. Equally, getting friends from afar to home shores is just as tedious.

Enter Eithan Osborne. One of California’s most promising exports, and no brighter moment in such weird times than being a person holding three passports. American, Israeli and most crucially–French.

“Wait, Eithan has a French passport? Let’s get him over!”

This was the gist of the conversation one cloudy September afternoon. However, what we weren’t prepared for was Eithan’s eagerness. Four days later, there he was in the arrivals of Biarritz airport. Negative covid test in hand. Ready for all of the beers, some of the wines and maybe, just maybe, some surfing. And with the biggest storm of the year approaching, our timing wasn’t exactly ideal with every spot in the North Atlantic looking maxed out—so naturally, our eyes turned to novelty. And nothing is more novel than the Mediterranean.

Oh The French Riviera!

Could anything be more novelty. Could anything be more luxurious. Is this the birth of luxurious novelty? Luxnov? With the car loaded, we dream of wedges breaking off the bow of an oligarch’s super-yacht. A few turns to the beach and then being invited up for caviar and Champagne. With one of the better swells over the past few years on the charts, it very much looked like we were about to find out.

72 hours later, we head back to the Atlantic side with tired eyes and wry smiles. With fun waves and weather on the charts, we link with local surfer and ‘Bong stable mate’ of Eithan’s, Justin Becret, adding a hint of local favour to the crew for the last few days of Eithan’s stay. With a stellar career on the pro-juniors under his belt, if it’s taught Justin one thing in the process, it’s consistency. He can punt with the best of them, with an outstanding track record of landing. He’s also a dab hand in the tube, and watching him and Eithan going head to head on the ramps of Capbreton and the tubes of La Gravière was more than impressive. We can’t help but feel the future of the bong stable is in a good place.

As that draws to a close to this year’s French Atlantic shenanigans for us. With a change of pace, a different coast, an absence of premiere tour but a large slice of novelty.

All in all, not bad for the surf trip that wasn’t meant to be.

Three out of five stars.


Ultra-surfer Kai Lenny releases shocking POV footage from historic Jan 10 Mavericks swell; describes waves as “ruthless” and “scary”!

This is what a thirty-foot wave looks like, according to a wide-angle POV camera.

As previously written, twice, there will be no bad things said about Kai Lenny, the daring twenty-eight-year-old multi-discipline surfer from Maui with sea-spray eyes shaped like pecans, skin the colour of buttered cocoa and lips as red as if he’d just applied a fresh coat of pomegranate lipstick.

His legend just grows and grows and grows.

Yesterday, at twenty-to-thirty-foot Mavericks, Kai again used the power of GoPro to record his session, the wide-angle lens reducing the giant waves to something a child might ride during the “cruiser” session at a wave park.

The highlight, I think, is the shadow the waves cast on the lineup just before they arrive.


Documentary: The wild, and mostly true, story of how a male model from Mexico became the go-to-photographer at Teahupoo!

The photographic ace Domenic Mosqueira and his rise to the top of the game… 

When the Hawaiian two-time world champ John John Florence flies into Tahiti to hammer a Big South, the photographer he’ll gift his image to is the Mexican-born former Versace model Domenic Mosqueira.

“When I see his name I feel adrenalin,” says Dom, “’cause as soon as he calls, it’s go-time. He’s always excited to surf and you know you’re going to have your hands full for a week. It’s exciting and motivating to have that much talent and you don’t want to let him down. It lights a fire under your ass.”

Dom, who is scratching forty now, ain’t one to boast and if you ask him why he thinks John has made him his number one shooter in Tahiti, he says, “I think that I’m discreet. I don’t make too much of a fuss and I respect what he wants to do with the images.”

In this video, we get a little peek behind the curtain of Dom’s world, life at the end of the road and shooting tow swells intent on compressing a man into the famously shallow coral that gives the joint its absurdity.

A lesson in persistence.