The little movie rises to a frenzied climax that's exhilarating. Here, Puerto Rico-raised Dylan Graves. Vans

Watch: Dylan Graves and Dane Gudauskas get their kazoos blown by juicy tubes in Lagos, Nigeria!

Derek Rielly

By Derek Rielly

And scented with the aroma of urban dysfunction…

Now that tubes are available at the swipe of a credit card and the punching of buttons in a certain order, it makes little sense, if any, to keep secret waves in the natural world that do roughly the same.

In this excellent short film by Vans, and starring Dylan Graves and Dane Gudauskas, two pro surfers in their thirties who both wear their hair long and parted in the middle Patti Smith-style, we visit, and closely examine an excellent wedging right in Tarkwa Bay in Lagos, Nigeria.

Surfer‘s Will Bendix reported on the joint in 2017 with a compelling long-form piece, and which you can read here.

The briefest excerpt:

“Swells would refract off a mile-long breakwall like they’d hit a bumper in a pinball machine, bouncing toward shore and jacking into dark tubes that churned through Tarkwa Bay. But in the years since that first exploratory trip, the West African country has dominated global headlines with stories of escalating terrorism, kidnappings and ethnic violence. ‘Briton kidnapped by armed gang while leaving Lagos airport,’ read a Sunday Express headline in July 2013. ‘234 schoolgirls kidnapped by extremists,’ said CBS News the following April. “Double suicide bombing at Nigerian university,” reported Newsweek in January 2017.”

Do Dylan and Dane find Nigeria charming and fun or does it leave them a little flat like bubbly in a coupe?

Watch. 

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Mason leaves no stone unturned, no wave unembraced.

Watch Mason Ho (and pals) in “The things he did to me were terrible and exquisite!”

Derek Rielly

By Derek Rielly

Mason leaves no stone unturned, no wave unembraced.

There are few guarantees in life with the exception that one day we’ll all be drawn towards a blinding speck of light whereupon our deeds we’ll be tallied up and we’ll be dispatched either to heaven or sent to rot in hell.

Apart from that inevitability, the filming combo of Rory Pringle and Mason Ho is a perennial.

Over the course of every week during the North Shore season, the pair will find enough waves to stitch together into an edit featuring a Jimi Hendrix song taken from his mama Brian’s collection, in this instance, Rock Me Baby.

These are little films that give you a feeling of tropical sunshine on your skin.

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You'll be hypnotised watching Oz.

Watch Ozzie Wright and Jimmy Banks in “He made queer little snorts like a pig sniffing around the trough!”

Derek Rielly

By Derek Rielly

A thoroughly anti-depressive little clip featuring two of Australia's greatest screwfoots.

The sands of time wait for no man and this year the wonderful and lovely Oscar Wright turns forty-four and one-time Bronzed Aussie and master shaper Jim Banks hits sixty-one.

But age has wearied neither surfer.

In this shortish edit, filmed in the tropical Indian Ocean, we find Oz in his trademark open-zip rubber jacket riding a six-foot long Jim Banks-shaped surfboard, turning it this way and that, riding switch, cheater fives, fins first takeoffs.

Music is provided by a live performance by Jim, on guitar, and Oz on his ukulele.

Very stylish and dissipated.

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Darcy Piper slides as if coated in Vaseline into this blue cold-water hole.

Watch Russell Bierke and Darcy Piper in “Before the Great Australian Bushfire Inferno!”

Derek Rielly

By Derek Rielly

A thrilling adventure to surf empty cold-water reef ledges, and filmed before the country was burned to a cinder.

Russell Bierke is one of those breathtakingly rare surfers who aren’t quite WCT level and yet in some way are far more magical.

Russell is twenty-two years old, diminutive and old world. A bantamweight, small, muscular and wiry. He was born in Hawaii and is the son of the Californian-born shaper Kirk Bierke whose boards are sold under the label KB Surf and made in Ulladulla, three hours south of Sydney. Russell’s earliest memories are of watching his dad run out the door whenever the surf was big, going to the beach and seeing him ride these big, blue-water reef waves, and wanting to be part of the game.

He has nearly been ushered into heaven several times (read about the time he was “blue as a Smurf and all fours spewing” after a wipeout in Victoria) and Russell was the protagonist in the highly cited film Flow State, which was released in October.

This film, in which he co-stars with his Ulladulla neighbour and pal Darcy Piper, features these two little bees drawing their nectar and existing in a state of perpetual euphoria from a series of empty ledges along the coastline of…oh we really don’t need that detail do we?

All of this was filmed before the inferno that engulfed Australia and had, at one point, flames licking at the border gates of Bondi Beach.

RIGHT AS RAIN – RUSS AND DARCY from O’Neill Australia on Vimeo.

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Occ and Moz, a formidable duo, in and out of the water. Courtesy Peter Baker

Watch: Maurice Cole in “I was always timid, I always felt different; I never felt comfortable until I started surfing.”

Derek Rielly

By Derek Rielly

A tender cinematic portrait of the great Australian surfer-shaper…

I doubt it’s an exaggeration to say that the Victorian surfboard shaper Maurice Cole is one of surfing’s last living links to its dirty, pre-woke WSL culture.

Maurice was a black kid adopted by white parents and who was twelve years old before Australia acknowledged its indigenous people were human and could be counted in the country’s census and allowed to vote.

Surfing, which Moz became very good at, two Victorian titles, sixth at the worlds, was his escape, a relationship he articulates in this tender film by Peter Baker, brother of noted surf writer Tim Baker.

“I was always timid. I always felt a bit different. I never felt comfortable until I started surfing,” says Moz.

Peter made this film in 2017, winning Best Short at the London Surf Film Festival, but has only just made it available for public release.

Moz, whom you may know as Brutus in various comment forums, also talks about prison and the resulting PTSD and depression.

“I asked my wife and my family not to visit me. I was in a hard place. It was for survival that I cut myself off from the world. I came out vulnerable, but very angry, very aggressive. I’d back it up big-time. When I came out of jail I was pretty crazy. I was always carrying this dark side with me.”

The last time I spent significant time with Moz on the phone I asked him what had happened to all the money he’d earned.

I reminded him of his lucrative shaping deals in Japan and Europe, of his palace in Margaret River with the nightclub, the fleet of jet skis and so on.

“I have nothing (but) I’ve got a pretty good surfboard collection,” he laughed. “My wife’s over me. I made so much, lost so much. That’s why I’m here in France. I pick up five grand here, ten grand there, pay a few debts. I have a twelve-year-old car worth five hundred bucks. I think I’ve got my integrity. Can you tell that to my wife? That it means something? She’s over the drama of making surfboards. She wants to live a simple, peaceful life. She’s been with me since I was eighteen, poor thing. She’s just burnt out. I was telling Ross and he said, ‘You can’t fucking retire. You’ve got too much fucking shit to do!’”

Legend. 

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Photo: Steve Sherman/@tsherms
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