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!”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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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Mason Ho, graceful in the tube, like a man who
is tiptoeing from a room where a child is sleeping. Rory
Pringle
Watch: Mason Ho and pals ride a one-day
sandbar in “Lambs in the claws of the tiger!”
By Derek Rielly
Believe in the magic of sand…
In this film from the prolific Rory Pringle, which
features his master Mason Ho and a network of fellow North
Shorians, we are gifted the miracle of a one-day
sandbar.
“Few days ago a big swell hit the Hawaiian Islands and pushed
sand all over the place,” writes Mr Pringle. “When this happens it
makes special waves in places that usually don’t have waves. Surf
spots like this only last a little while. This specific sandbar
lasted only about 12 hours till it was gone and the boys were on
it!”
Oh yes they were.
Like a bomb whose slow fuse has finally reached the dynamite,
the sandbar explodes into life.
This little film, short enough to keep your attention but long
enough to gift a complete examination of the surfing, is a
whirlwind, a dazzling frenzied whirlwind that will tear you up by
the roots and carry you high into the heavens, to places you did
not know existed.
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A boisterous cadenza! Rory Pringle
Watch: Ben Gravy and Mason Ho in “Then a
queer thing happened!”
By Derek Rielly
Of all the thousands of surf films I've seen in my
life, none has transported me to greater extremes of ecstasy than
this five-minute ditty…
This five-minute short, which stars film-grad-turned
surf vlogger Ben Gravy and Hawaiian Mason Ho, consists of a series
of fin tricks all performed on a brilliant winter’s day at Shark
Cove, just north of Waimea Bay and a short walk from the
local supermarket called Foodland.
Gravy is thirty-one years old and crowned with a hairline that
looks grafted from brave Russell Bierke. He gets on famously with
Mason, also thirty-one, and one can imagine that if somewhere
between midnight and one am there came a time when the the light
was switched off both would be able to do what comes naturally
without too many regrets.
At every turn in the film, both are ready with some new and
intricate manoeuvre. True genius is a gift of birth, of course. It
has very little to do with age.
“That was the best surf session of my life,” says Gravy, a
supreme connoisseur of surf sessions having recorded several
thousand of his own.
