How to end up face-first in a ditch!

ILast Wednesday, red-helmeted warrior Jamie O’Brien took on and, briefly, conquered Waimea’s shorebreak on a six-foot long foam surfboard.

The great Hawaiian surfer, who is 190 pounds of rock hard muscle with 40 pounds of sturdy protective fat, and who once told me, “A big gut helps you breathe bigger and better”, woke up to a fifteen-to-twenty-foot Waimea Bay swell and saw this post by Nathan Florence.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BvK50u0gIX6/

“I had no interest in paddling out to big, fat Waimea with a hundred guys out,” says Jamie. “But if you get the right barrel in the shorebreak, it’s the most iconic thing you can do on the North Shore.”

Jamie knows that if Waimea is fifteen-to-twenty out they back, it’s going to be eight-to-ten, with a few twelve-footers on the sand.

Still, it ain’t easy.

“I paddled non-stop for three hours. The current is so strong that if you let your arms go limp, you’re probably going to die.”

Describe death scene?

“It takes you down to Jump Rock, which is no man’s land. If you get stuck down there the lifeguards will just leave you. It’s that gnarly.”

The way you manage the current, which Jamie describes as “out of this world” is with your head down and arms rolling over and if you feel like you’re a little too close to Jump Rock, you paddle out into the middle and back in again on the north side of the Bay.

This roll-in shorebreak tube, abbreviated on Instagram below, was Jamie’s second of the seven waves he rode in three hours.

“I rolled in, barely made the drop, got around the corner, put the brakes on, it sucked up, bowled out and the next thing I’m in the barrel. Holy shit! And it spat me out!”

https://www.instagram.com/p/BvLW7_KA5xi/

Jamie’s pal Dante Silva had been out all night when he was roped into the session. Jamie outfitted him in a float suit and told him, “We are on.”

Dante even caught the wave of the day.

“He set up for the mental barrel and then he lost it all underneath him,” says Jamie.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BvSIpFYAfio/

Was he hurt?

“Bruised ego,” reports Jamie.

In other news from JOB, his pal, Laird, whose performance in a recent vlog had fans calling it the “worst-ever” and “cringy”, has been pulled from future episodes.

“He’s sad about all the comments. They were pissed, dude. But they’re going to be happy. Poopies is back. They’re going to forget about Laird. He’s back, dude, he’s on.”

Did you know that Jamie O’Brien, the flame-haired star of the world’s heaviest wave (Pipeline, if you had to ask), used to have the nickname “The Little Fat Sausage”?

And that his pants used to wear out in the middle because his little pink legs would rub together?

“I wasn’t obese, just chunky,” Jamie once told me.

Orange skin. Red hair. It isn’t a recipe for popularity but as King of the Pipe Jamie says, “I have been accused of being a bit of a spitfire, so in that way, I absolutely live up to the stereotype. The red hair suits my personality.”

In this episode of his weekly vlog, Jamie joins the three-time world champion and four-time winner of the booger Pipe contest, Jeff Hubbard, at six-foot Pipe, on his own custom-made Catch Surf booger.

What should be a recipe for catastrophe ends in “Jamie owning it from the peak every set,” says Hubb.

And watch, below, for the music video that killed bodyboarding in Australia!

A four-minute aerial and tuberiding instructional…

The world number four and 2015 rookie of the year, Italo Ferreira, makes the cabin shake like a Ferris wheel ride.

In this edit, which was filmed around a qualifying event on Fernando de Noronha, that gorgeous, world heritage-listed archipelago a couple of hundred miles off the Brazilian coast, we see Italo shaking his ass wildly, spraying his fins, and pushing his surfboard till it rises like an overpass across his head.

As an instructional video, for airs and a little tubing, it’s so good you’d almost pay for it.

Happy days for surfing's Jan Brady!

FADE IN: We open with a sad boy in his early twenties scrolling through messages from surf pals.

“Nobody wants to surf with me,” he mumbles, choking off the words.

This is Nathan Florence, tall, sinewy but fleshy. He is the middle brother between two-time world champ John John and little Ivan whose rosebud lips and sleepy eyes mean he’ll never have to be anything but cute.

In this short, which forms part of Nathan’s learn-to-do-airs series, we follow Nathan’s continuing efforts to add aerials to his repertoire.

Some years before, Nathan had told me, sadly,

“I’ve landed three air reverses in my whole life.”

I had asked if this failure was a lack of desire or a mechanical issue?

“First, I never thought of them,” he said. “I didn’t care about ’em and then the way people started doing airs, like John, Matt and Albee, those things are actually nuts and then I started trying to do airs. And I just realised that I was a complete failure at them. The mechanics are foreign to me. I can get myself in the air but no matter what, when I land on my board, I’m eating shit.”

In this episode, Nathan slides off his robe and after much yelling and grabbing of edges he is sanctified.

“It felt real nice,” he says, face scrunching up with happiness, his long blond eyelashes fluttering.

Terrific wipeouts and many busted rhino chasers… 

For a long period, Nazaré occupied joke territory, a gigantic burger populated by monstrous Euro-kooks.

Do you remember those early clips? Brave crabs and courageous stink-bugs zipping down fifty-foot burgers that didn’t break?

Of course, once fifty-foot turned into seventy-five and then a few lizards started paddling the joint, the game changed.

Shane Dorian visited a few years ago and described it as a graveyard for jetskis and said he was happy to ride two waves and get the hell out of there.

The skimboarder Brad Domke, who’s taken his finless Exile sled to Jaws and to Puerto Escondido, told me, “Its an ancient beast. It’s like there’s a monster in the water making the water move really strangely and scary. I don’t know why. You look at photos with these barreling waves and you’re, like, when our turn came on the wave it wouldn’t make sense. It feels so mutant and big.”

This film records a paddle session featuring Kai Lenny (whom you know and love), Nic Von Rupp, Twigger Baker, Mav’s teenager Luca Padua and so on.

From the filmmaker: The Bomb of the day was indisputably scored by Nic Von Rupp, who went deeper than Lucas Chumbo on a massive left hander (01:31) with a vertical drop. Lucas is not used to having someone deeper than him when conditions are at that level, he probably didn’t notice Nic was there until both were fully committed, one for the books right there. Besides this double bomb with Chumbo, Nic also scored an impossible air drop (01:13) an hour later, making him one of the main standouts of the entire session. Both his waves are probable XXL entry material for this season awards.