The generous comic mouth laughs easily, but there is a lot of living and some pain printed in the eyes. 

The world’s most famous redhead Jamie O’Brien, the almost-forty-year-old vlogger from Pipeline Beach on Oahu, has completed the fabled surf and snowboard in one day following a trip to the reefs of Hawaii’s Big Island and the slopes of the volcano Mauna Kea.

The unlikely looking O’Brien, famous for his slowly disappearing crown of salmon-coloured hair, body with the pallid meat smoothly trowelled on and cheeks like painted peaches, assaults the task of surfing and snowboarding with excessive vigour.

It ain’t easy, but O’Brien has a positive genius for making things happen, a continuing reproof to those in the surf industry who said he’d never make it etc.

The generous comic mouth laughs easily, but there is a lot of living and some pain printed in the eyes.

The Big Island, of course, is one of the few places on earth where you can be surfing in trunks in the morning and gasping for breath at 13,500 feet, fingernails turning blue, a few hours later.

See the carrot-topped master chase the rarest prize in all of surfing, a wave at The Pipe!

Jamie O’Brien is a radiant and robust half-Australian, half-American who can be counted among the best half-a-dozen surfers currently surfing Pipeline, a difficult hard-breaking lefthand wave near the Oahu town of Haleiwa.

In this compelling POV edit from the almost forty year old whose quasi-modernist bungalow squats a dozen footsteps from the sandy path to Pipeline, O’Brien paddles out on a hall-of-fame day, the tropical sun a blazing citrus orange, and we are privy to his conversations with Mason Ho, Koa Rothman, Nathan Florence and so on, as well as his manoeuvrings to catch one of the rarest prizes in all of surfing.

Essential.



And, he ain’t the only one the damned novelty wave almost claims.

This might make a few of the meaner sons of bitches here deposit their watermelon seeds onto the ground, but there’s a real good case to be made that Jamie O’Brien, the carrot-topped king of Pipeline, is the most popular surfer in the world.

A YouTube channel with almost one-million subscribers, a whole damn army of fans in every corner of the world, oh it’s as plain as the shining sun.

Therefore, when the famous Waimea River became swollen like never before following wild rains and locals opened it up to the Bay to create biggest rivermouth waves ever seen there and Jamie tried to ride it only to be sucked out to sea and returned barely alive, gasping, claiming he’d almost died, well, what a tragedy that would’ve been for surfing.

You would’ve seen footage of the event three days ago on Mason Ho’s channel, and it ain’t bad, although Mason fares poorly compared to Jamie, but it don’t snatch the high drama of the day.

Here, we see the angry river as it roars through the valley, we see the small channel dug that creates the impetus for the whole thing to open up and create the wildest rivermouth y’ever seen.

And we see Jamie, who is mobbed by fans the minute he arrives in the carpark, pawing his way up the beach like a wretched sailor after a terrible quarter of an hour battling a ten-foot shorebreak and twenty-knot currents.

“Gnarliest experience ever… did you see me almost die? I sucked into the vortex of all vortexes!”

And, he ain’t the only one the damned novelty wave almost claims.

Essential.