Watch: Craig Anderson and Taj Burrow in “Will you come loofah my stretch marks?”

Two surfers, one retired, the other a recluse, reappear in four-minute short for deck-grip sponsor…

You could say that age, and disinterest, has not wearied the retired Taj Burrow and the reclusive Craig Anderson.

Both men, one forty, the other just-turned thirty, have long waved the digitus medius at pro surfing, at the game etc and yet, here, we are reminded why we loved them so.

Taj Burrow was, and still is, an amalgam of Griffin Colapinto and Filipe Toledo while Craig Anderson is still unlike anything we’ve seen before or since – a nice-looking person in butch poses.

The action starts one-minute in (Do you like scenics and raindrops? Start at the beginning) and there’s a surfeit of slow-motion, something which eats me alive.

But I’ve never been a patient man.


Outrageous tubes: Peruvian Surfer Takes Glug from Desert Point’s Perfume Bottle!

A three-minute liberation from the ordinary.

I won’t pretend I know a damn thing about Jonathan Gubbins, the Peruvian surfer who can be found, periodically, at Teahupoo or Skeleton Bay or, in this case, Desert Point.

Is this as good as Desert Point gets, a dulcet entry and a face that isn’t glutted by weeds or steps?

Spin the dial, hear the violin and you tell me.


Rigorously spectacular: Watch John John Florence’s closer to Lost Atlas!

John John's best movie part?

That golden period. All collaborative artists have ’em. It’s only years later, upon reflection, that we can trawl through their work and call it. Kai Neville is a 36-year-old filmmaker who owned the performance surf film space from his 2010 debut Modern Collective all the way through to his magnum opus, 2015’s Cluster.

But for Kai, it was his second film, Lost Atlas, made in 2011 and shot entirely on his little Canon 7D, that built his reputation into a profitable exercise (Red Bull used Kai for Jordy Smith’s bio movie Bending Colours).

Seven years later, it’s still his masterwork. It came at a time when he had John John Florence, Jordy Smith, Dusty Payne and Dane Reynolds in his pocket and more than eager to nail clips.

Until Lost Atlas, the world only had a shadowy idea of how good eighteen-year-old John John was.

Kai showed us.

This section was the close to Lost Atlas. It was filmed on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, and typical of Kai’s ruthless editing, comes in at under three-minutes.

No slow-mo, no fades, no motion graphics.

Just a face-full of ultra-hard surf candy and, I’d posit, John John’s best-ever movie part.


Watch: Red Bull Airborne Highlights Pack!

Two minutes of puffy buff-and-snuff!

Did you watch Red Bull Airborne live from France two days ago? It was, and is, the idea of former WCT surfer and two-time “world air champ” Josh Kerr who says it’ll be a WSL series in 2019.

I liked it.

There was something soft and moist and welcoming to Red Bull Airborne, like a woman, to quote Nabokov, with noble nipples and massive thighs.

These couple of minutes show a tremendous energy and spirit and will leave you feeling like you’ve just come home from summer camp – brown and warm and slightly drugged.


Watch: Leo Fioravanti in “Waiter! There’s a kook in my soup!”

Come to the adult learner capital of the world! Hossegor!

In my more lucid dreams, I see myself living in the French town of Hossegor, there in the Bay of Biscay’s starboard quarter. I have a house at the base of the sand dunes at Les Culs Nuls and three refined surfboards to suit the varying beachbreak conditions.

Sometimes the waves are very small, sometimes too big, but like the fairytale with the kid and the animals, mostly the waves are just right.

But then I climb the dunes and the tableau is ruined by the rude wind of thousands of adult learners from all over Europe. You’ve never seen such a thing!

As the Australian shaper Maurice Cole, who put Hossegor on the map surf-wise, told me last year, “There are more people in the water than you’ve seen in your life. Here, there are 1,615 people down at Siegnosse taking surf lessons. It’s in the newspaper. It’s incredible. Being really small, every hundred meters, there’s a fucking surf school. I went out the other day, offshore, nearly shoulder high on the sets, and there were 60 people out, and no one could surf. The only thing keeping me laughing was riding a longboard and playing the slalom course, much to the distress of the other bastards. And, pretending that I couldn’t surf. I’d do an “el spazmo” and people were throwing their boards away in horror.”

Of course, if you’re Leo Fioravanti, the twenty-year-old former WCT surfer who relocated to Hossegor from Italy, and whose step-daddy is Kelly Slater’s keeper, Stephen “Belly” Bell, you have the necessary skills to navigate this slalom course.

In this pleasingly short edit, we see Leo’s hurried smears, his reconstruction of lips and his transfer of weapon from box to pocket.

There’s an innocence and a frankness to Leo’s surfing that, I predict, will enable him to poke and cut his way back onto the WCT.