Ain't nobody immune to the cruelty of a wide-angle POV camera.

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

Derek Rielly

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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.

The classic work of Dom Mosqueira.

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

Derek Rielly

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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.

Total flabbergast.

Mason Ho’s 2020 cream pie compilation: “I hunger for the rapture of extreme risk!”

Derek Rielly

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Come into Mason's world of total flabbergast. It's dynamite.

It’s easy to love Mason Ho, the thirty two year old with the magnificent body and Eurasian appearance; silky clouds of jet hair floating to a twenty-six-inch waist.

This cream pie compilation of Mason’s best clips of 2020, rams a finger into the hole and disembowels the viewer, at least metaphorically.

Forty-six minutes or thereabouts of rock dodging, monster and mini tubes and all with the spark of a bantam loosed from his cage.

Watch with a double shot.

Down the hatch.

Thomas Carroll, still as beautiful as a Botticelli nymph.

Documentary: Two-time world champion surfer Tom Carroll’s “Lost Photographs of Pro Surfing’s Rise”

Derek Rielly

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"We love that feeling of going back to that moment and then freezing it, observing it."

The world tour in the eighties was a real manure-and-bruises circuit, filled with cutthroat savages, immoral buffoons and with the requisite sex-pot distractions.

Much brutal womb sweeping, by all accounts.

The Australian Tom Carroll, who would win two world titles and three Pipe Masters, was a rare gem in that crowd, looking like a quizzical Botticelli nymph but equipped with the intellectual heft you’d expect from the son of a one of Australia’s greatest newspaper editors. 

With single-lens-reflex cameras bought at inflated prices from master photographer Jeff Hornbaker, Tom used the viewfinder as a way of “sitting back from the world and slowing it down.”

This lovingly produced documentary records Tom’s thoughts on the process and the route to his first exhibition, which also includes a photograph of his older brother, back when he was a ravishing blond.

 

Happy Pipe Master John John Florence with Koa "I get any wave I want" Rothman in background.

POV: Examine the machinations of the heaviest lineup on earth with Koa Smith in “Mic’d up surfing Brutal Pipeline!”

Derek Rielly

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A very good behind-the-scenes account of epic Christmas Eve Pipe swell… 

Pipeline is a wave that will stomp a mud hole in your ass, if you’ll excuse the street patois.

Very few of us will smash through the wall of muscle that surrounds the lineup to even attempt to ride a wave that’s like an elevator with the down button punched.

Koa Smith, the almost twenty-five-year-old three-time National Scholastic Surfing Association National Champion, knows the wave and its people well.

In this twelve-minute film, Koa brings his GoPro and microphone into the lineup during the North Shore’s epic Christmas Eve swell.

We see John John Florence, Mason Ho, Benji Brand, Kalani Chapman, all the big guns, even Koa Rothman who famously announced prior to the winter season that he would be taking any wave at Pipeline he wanted.

“No hard feelings. I’m not trying to be a dick,” Rothman said in October. “I’m just letting you know now that is what is going to be happening. So have a great day and watch out.”

What transpires?

Essential viewing.

Photo: Jack English
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