Teahupoo Feature: “Oh, you a pro homie?”

A sublime long-form cut of a season at Teahupoo…

I ain’t one for slow-mo and believe it to be a crutch for lesser skilled filmmakers who want to appear serious and puffed-up and important. Same thing with photographers who dump colour and pull the sharpener lever hard in Photoshop.

In this ten-minute film by Ryan Moss, a Californian who divides his time stateside and in Hawaii, we’re gifted that rarest of morsel – a pared back, unpretentious, pressure relieving examination of a season at Teahupoo, locals only etc, that claws onto the viewer.

The Road to Homecoming, as its called, has all the ingredients of a stinker: no pro homies, slow-mo landscapes and drones and so on, and yet it palm bangs my rear end.

The score by J Cole’s 2014 Forest Hills Drive successfully achieves the feat of matching rap with surfing.

Highlights: the first wave after the intro, 2:25 in; the closing drone shot.

Open a window, kick your feet onto a chair, order some sausage.

Watch.

Load Comments

Watch Noa Deane in “A nice mixture of poison and treacle!”

A destructive two-point-five minutes…

To know Noa Deane is to love him. I think. I’ve only had limited contact but have found him to be a supremely loveable, lovably freakish fellow.

Favourite quotes:

(Guns) “It’s a powerful fucking thing in your hands. It’s a weird feeling. You’ve got a gun with a bullet that can kill someone. Is it sexy? Yeah.”

(In-N-Out) “It’s so unhealthy and cheap. It’s everything I want in one thing.”

(Morocco holiday) “The surf was doing my fucking head in. I couldn’t deal with it anymore. I was, I wanna get outta here, I fucking hate this same shit, it’ll be fucked, let’s fuck off.”

(Moroccan cuisine) “Me and and Jay smoked some hash and we were so high we went and ate snails. They’re like abalone, a little chicken-esque, too.”

(Airs) “If you do a big air and you bone it, it shows how passionate you are about airs.”

(Me) “Is Derek Rielly a pussy?”

The burlesque in Noa’s surfing and simplicity of attitude is a nice mixture of poison and treacle.

Although he is a decently modest person, his surfing faces his audience, and even in this throwaway short, it will make your jowls wobble.

Load Comments

Watch: Koa Rothman and Nathan Florence in “Tahiti ain’t just Teahupoo!”

Four days of boredom followed by some blue-water boom boom!

I wonder, with the passage of time, whether North Shore pals the Florence bros, Koa Rothman, Eli Olsen, Kiron Jabour and co will be regarded as a sort of Momentum Generation.

Of course, apart from John John, and Kiron’s HIC win last week, none show any interest in WCT careers. But when shipped to significant waves, Teahupoo, Jaws etc, the little gang claw at the monsters with an impatient passion.

In this, the latest vlog post from Koa Rothman, the handsome son of Eddie Rothman with the sunny brown curls and slow-twitch muscle fibres, demonstrates an easy ability to carry a dozen minutes.

The highlight of episode 26, Surfing Secret Spots in Tahiti, is a session where Koa, Nathan, Ivan (Florence) and co use a jetski to step-off in eight-foot waves at a righthander that has notes of P-Pass.

Some years ago, I interviewed Shane Dorian and Alex Gray about this wave after one session.

Dorian said the wave gives “me a lot of anxiety.”

Alex said of a set Dorian caught, “It’s the craziest wave I’ve seen ridden ever.”

“Bionic, bionic barrels,” said Shane.

And it’s pretty as hell.

Watch!

Load Comments

Watch Zeke Lau in “Never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut”

Muscle and moaning and crippled waves…

The Hawaiian rookie Zeke Lau is, unlike most tour debutantes, neither wispy nor weak.

At Bells this year,  Zeke was a “lion” who “monstered John” .

“It was thrilling and almost wincingly painful to watch, like a David Attenborough documentary where the elegant ruminant gets savaged by a lion then has its insides ripped out by a pack of hyaenas,” wrote Longtom. “The champ looked so helpless. All that insouciance at the Gold Coast was gone and in its place was a  lonely blond-haired kid being frowned upon by an older man on the stairs who shook his head sadly as the siren sounded.”

Zeke. Zeke. 

The European leg of the tour, the most strategic of all, when the contenders close on the summit, was a little below par for Zeke. A thirteenth in France; a ninth in Portugal.

He is rated eighteenth in the world post-Euro leg, two spots above the fancied Griffin Colapinto and four above Yago Dora.

This three-minute short emits a tremendous effort, rails and fins pushed, amid the ramparts and so on of ancient Europe.

Watch if you feel suffocated by airs.

Load Comments

Watch Creed McTaggart and Wade Goodall in “My libido depends on the size of my glands!”

Swinging tubes with location of dreamboat wave kindly revealed at end!

This is a two-and-a-bit edit that won’t mutilate your work day and is a joy ride you’ll thrill to.

It features the Australian surfers Creed McTaggart, Wade Goodall and Ellis Ericson (who didn’t make the headline for space reasons) vigorously dissecting a wave in northern NSW, where all three now live.

Did you know of Australia’s great surf migration? All roads lead to Byron Bay and surrounds. Wade recently sold his house in nearby Bangolow as he searches for even more deluxe digs and Creed followed the songlines from his home in Western Australia.

When he isn’t surfing or performing in his band Wash, Creed makes an excellent interview.

On coaches: Coaches fucking piss me off. I did four ISAs and I just fucking hated it. It’s such a weird vibe. So intense. It didn’t feel real. It felt fake and I hate coaches telling you where to put your arms when you surf. I’ve always want to surf how I wanted to surf.

On driving cars: It’s really scary for me. I feel like I don’t belong on the road. If there’s someone tailgating me, for example, I freak out and speed up. I’m semi-dyslexic and I always to forget to fucking turn on the lights and the windscreen wipers. All that pressure! Once you’re on the road, you’re part of a family, a whole family, but no one likes you and everyone gets road rage. It’s this one giant seething organism trying to get to this place and that place and  I’m stuck in the middle cutting people off, totally oblivious, just trying to learn. I just fuck with my own head, really. It’s probably not like that. I get really nervous and anxious.

On heaven: There’s a heaven I enjoy by myself where I’m lying in bed and it’s thunder storming outside and I’m all cosy and I’m reading a book or listening to music and there’ll be moments where I think, fuck this is heaven. And then there’s the other type of heaven with your friends, having beers in the afternoon. I get a lot of flashes of heaven. More heavens than hell, I try to make it.

Now hit play…

Load Comments