Ho's shuck and jive vs Fanning's hooligan pride!

Here, we see Mason Ho belly-bang the three-time world surfing champion Mick Fanning at Lowers in a wild showdown that pits Ho’s shuck and jive against Fanning’s hooligan pride.

Ho, thirty-three, and Fanning, forty, are a whooshing flash among the late-autumn gloom, leaving spectators’ mouths flapping mutely.

The waves are of a good size, clean, and both surfers go for the “kill shot”.

Fanning is magnificent although little Mason Ho’s jackknifing appeals to me more.

No Great Whites, those supercharged Pontiacs that patrol the region,  were spotted during the sessions filmed although they would’ve examined our heroes’ limbs from the grey depths.

There is an added poignancy to this short film when we see Ho gifted a lesson in board decoration by the great Drew Brophy, the iconic surf artist who is in a coma after being hit by COVID (help out with his medical bills here.) 

Also starring Ventura super Jew and Israeli Olympian Eithan Osborne!

Even after all these years, Dane Reynolds’ famously corked turns lacerate the heart. 

Don’t they?

As he nimbly navigates sections, the daddy-of-three and famously shaggy curmudgeon practically vibrates as he channels anger, apprehension and a sense of foreboding into what is, let’s be honest, superlative surfing. 

Very interesting wave at six minutes and nineteen seconds.

Eithan “Never Again” Osborne, meanwhile, is the classic living example of that wonderful old proverb from King Solomon, “A righteous man falls down seven times and gets up.” 

Perserverance is everything in surfing and Ethan proves it by keeping pace wth his much-older master.

Essential. 

A bag of horrors!

Any hole, any pit, for Mason Ho and damn the consequences.

Pleasure, as Mason, who is thirty three, knows, is the first sweetmeat of reason. This short video is a compendium of Mason’s most spectacular wipeouts, all cock, knees, balls, thighs, pussy and belly in a basting of blood, the soap and towels followed by a round of goodbyes.

Mason credits his survival to his use of CBD oil and believes, says his filmer Rory Pringle, that “it’s a big part of why he’s able to handle wipeouts like this.”

Hard not to admire.

“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.