Watch: Russell Bierke being served honeymoon dick at monster Nazare yesterday!

His tiny antlers get sucked!

The Australian Russell Bierke is one surfer who is prepared to pay, what Hawaiians call, “the ultimate price.”

Two years ago, he was blue as a Smurf” and “on all fours spewing” after a wipeout in fifteen waves in Victoria, an injury that put him in intensive care.

Yesterday, Russell warmed his paws under the skirt of Portugal’s Nazare, but only briefly.

The result was unpretty.

“This was by far my longest hold down ever!” Russ told the filmmaker Pedro Miranda. “I barely got a breath before the second wave landed on me. Felling pretty sore today, got a good whiplash when I skipped in front of the wave, but no injuries which is good. Felt like I could barely walk up the beach when I got there.”


Watch: full-length retro-classic “The Bruce Movie!”

Take a swing back to 2005 when there wasn't a surfer on earth like Bruce Irons…

I love to interview Bruce Irons, the almost forty-year-old from Kauai. Dial his digits, throw a starter question and drown in quotes.

He’ll talk to anybody and his censor button don’t work. A rare commodity. Like a city restaurant that serves an old-fashioned roast beef dinner.

Recent highlights.

On missing the Maldives Invitational: “It was a string of fucking…okay…it’s partially my fault. I was moving out of my place, I was hotel hopping, I had all my fucking stuff in storage, a car full of shit, and I got my boards sent to a friend’s place in Venice. As I was driving up there, I grabbed all my stuff. And I open it all up and I’ve only got a double board bag. It was, like, shit, crunch time. Plane to catch. I needed to open up the bag, go boom, boom, boom. Oh my fucking god. This is not going to work.

“I get a taxi to the airport, my luggage is in the back. The driver gets into me for going so short a distance. A twenty-buck fare. He’s mumbling shit. Want me to get out? Right before we get out he tells me he’s from Ethiopia da da da. Whatever, all good, he’s talking, talking as I get out and then he takes off with all my luggage. Are you fucking kidding me? So I Uber back to the taxi bull pen. Eight lines. Fifty cars. They’re all yelling at each other. And I tell ’em, one of your taxi guys has my shit, the Ethiopian dude. The guy there says there’s so many cars and so many different races and I’m standing there going fuck, fuck, fuck. Then, because my iPad was in one of the bags, I tracked it to Hollywood. I go to my car and I’m flying towards Hollywood where this fucker is and then he comes back to the bull pen, turns off my iPad, but I’m already back there. I’ve fucking got him. The motherfucker. I tell him, what’s up motherfucker! You turned off my iPad! He said he didn’t know whose it was. (The trip) just wasn’t meant to be. It sucked. Those stories seem outrageous don’t they? I wouldn’t believe it if someone told me.”

On a hypothetical death row scenario: “This is a fucking great topic. How’d I get caught? I wouldn’t. If you know you’re going to end up on death row, you’re fucked, so you might as well go on a killing spree, killing your estranged wife’s lover first. So you kill him, chop him up, pack up all your ammo and guns and go down the street and take the bank down, take down the squadron of police and go until you get killed so you don’t make it to death row. You go out in a blaze of glory, chopping down fucking everybody in your sight.”

On joining the WQS at thirty five: “I definitely want to win something. Oh fuck yeah.”

Bruce Irons was the best free surfer in the world between 2004 and 2005, just before Dane Reynolds stepped out from behind the Rincon curtain.

This movie, which was made at Bruce’s peak by his then “lifetime” sponsor Volcom, is instructive ’cause no one under twenty-five knows who Bruce Irons is anymore.

And people should talk about Bruce. He’s a gas.


Watch: A cast of unknown surf rats spend one month in the West Oz desert!

The gallant and enduring spirit of the uncelebrated surfer.

Here, in all their uncelebrated glory, are the Western Australian surfers Jake Edwards, Nick Muntz, Jack Chalis and Josh Cattlin plunging into the north-west with tents and tube-friendly boards.

It’s a feature not dissimilar to Billabong’s “Holy Tubes in the Naked Desert“. Blue skies. Blue water. Tubes so wide you could jockey a camel through them etc.

It’s difference lies in its examination of the experience of the little-known ripper who migrates north from Perth each winter to chase the big south swells away from the fronts that destroy Margaret River.

Watch them in their tents being torn apart by the wind. As lizards scuttle about and small black beetles walk laboriously across the sand in the search for juicy shrubs. These are the sort of surfers who consider themselves well off if they don’t have to sleep naked in the freezing sand.

Trying to find a little saliva to moisten the mouth.

Dreams of racing streams of ice-cold water.

Sucking on date stones for nutrition.

How gallant and how enduring is their spirit.

Watch in a few parts, I’d suggest. It’s long. But watch.


Watch: Ben Gravy’s endearing long-form Surf Ranch VLOG!

It's forty-two minutes long!

Yeah, forty-two minutes. Before you jerk down the window and throw the damn computing machine out the window, I would suggest, at the very least, a cursory viewing of this feature.

Ben Gravy, who is thirty years old and crowned with a hairline that looks grafted from brave Russell Bierke, is a film school grad turned surf vlogger. A couple of years ago, Ben figured if he could film and cut and deposit one surf clip on YouTube every day he’d get a little traction among the two hundred thousand or so surf fans around the world. So far he’s got 43,000 subscribers on his channel and a total of nine million views over a thousand-ish clips.

Good numbers, yes, and reflective, I think, of an enthusiasm and every-man appeal. Innocent. Frank. Kind. Ben can surf but he ain’t a true pro nymphet. A second-rate but determined player.

This forty-two minute film is typical of Ben’s approach. He’s been jaw-boning Kelly for a year or so about getting into his pool.

Finally, Kelly relents.

Ben’s journey unfolds in slow-motion. The drive to Lemoore. The hotel. Looking at an email from Kelly. The gates opening. His first wave. (Does he wear a nose clip to prevent brain-eating amoebas? Discuss.). Ben’s inquisitive GoPro examines every damn detail of the Ranch and hunts novelty waves in the overflow channel and the inside shorebreak.

“Three years ago, I was twenty six years old, washed-up, barely surfed, blown-out knee with a doctor telling me I might never surf again,” Ben says. “I changed my life, I changed my mindset and today I came to the Kelly Slater wavepool and I surfed with Kelly Slater. Anything is possible. If you chase your dreams, if you put positivity and goodness into the universe, it’ll come back to you. I’m living proof.”


Michael February stars in “Why do I surf? Because it represents freedom. Because I can breathe!”

Is Mike Feb a bad fit for the WSL or is the WSL too tight for Swinging Mike?

You might’ve seen the sixties feel-good flick Born Free. I’m guessing not.

Here’s a snapshot.

Based on a memoir by a British gal Joy Adams, it follows Joy and her stud George, who’s a game warden in Kenya, as they raise a lion from cub to adulthood.

Instructive quote:

Yes, yes, she was born free and she has the right to live free. Why don’t we live in a more comfortable setting George? Other people do. We chose to live out here cause it represents freedom for us. Because we can breathe.

In this short by Cape Town-based filmmaker Tao Farren-Hefer, which is called Born Free, we follow Michael February, who is 25 and the current world number 31, as he roams South Africa in his vintage Mercedes.

It’s a film of uncommon passion and beauty. We watch deftly sliced footage of Feb as an 11 year old in 2004 juxtaposed with the catlike tread of his WSL-level approach in 2018, and all scored to the cocaine of the woodwind family, the grimy ol saxophone.

It’s more of a growl than a salutation.