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.

A South Pacific alt-universe with an edit by, and of, the world champ… 

Stephanie Lou Gilmore will always be in a lane of her own for those who appreciate style and the machinations of tuberiding.

If you’ll excuse the vulgarity, necessary vulgarity I think because I use it only to make a point, I’d suck a thousand clappy dicks to surf with the elegance of the thirty year one year old from Tweeds Heads.

In this three-minute short, shot by Wade Carroll and edited by Gilmore, we are gifted tuberiding as effortless as Gilmore’s seven titles.

Riding tubes, as we all know, is not something given to you, but something you gain.

And you gain it by winning small battles with honour.