A destructive two-point-five minutes…

To know Noa Deane is to love him. I think. I’ve only had limited contact but have found him to be a supremely loveable, lovably freakish fellow.

Favourite quotes:

(Guns) “It’s a powerful fucking thing in your hands. It’s a weird feeling. You’ve got a gun with a bullet that can kill someone. Is it sexy? Yeah.”

(In-N-Out) “It’s so unhealthy and cheap. It’s everything I want in one thing.”

(Morocco holiday) “The surf was doing my fucking head in. I couldn’t deal with it anymore. I was, I wanna get outta here, I fucking hate this same shit, it’ll be fucked, let’s fuck off.”

(Moroccan cuisine) “Me and and Jay smoked some hash and we were so high we went and ate snails. They’re like abalone, a little chicken-esque, too.”

(Airs) “If you do a big air and you bone it, it shows how passionate you are about airs.”

(Me) “Is Derek Rielly a pussy?”

The burlesque in Noa’s surfing and simplicity of attitude is a nice mixture of poison and treacle.

Although he is a decently modest person, his surfing faces his audience, and even in this throwaway short, it will make your jowls wobble.

Four days of boredom followed by some blue-water boom boom!

I wonder, with the passage of time, whether North Shore pals the Florence bros, Koa Rothman, Eli Olsen, Kiron Jabour and co will be regarded as a sort of Momentum Generation.

Of course, apart from John John, and Kiron’s HIC win last week, none show any interest in WCT careers. But when shipped to significant waves, Teahupoo, Jaws etc, the little gang claw at the monsters with an impatient passion.

In this, the latest vlog post from Koa Rothman, the handsome son of Eddie Rothman with the sunny brown curls and slow-twitch muscle fibres, demonstrates an easy ability to carry a dozen minutes.

The highlight of episode 26, Surfing Secret Spots in Tahiti, is a session where Koa, Nathan, Ivan (Florence) and co use a jetski to step-off in eight-foot waves at a righthander that has notes of P-Pass.

Some years ago, I interviewed Shane Dorian and Alex Gray about this wave after one session.

Dorian said the wave gives “me a lot of anxiety.”

Alex said of a set Dorian caught, “It’s the craziest wave I’ve seen ridden ever.”

“Bionic, bionic barrels,” said Shane.

And it’s pretty as hell.

Watch!

Muscle and moaning and crippled waves…

The Hawaiian rookie Zeke Lau is, unlike most tour debutantes, neither wispy nor weak.

At Bells this year,  Zeke was a “lion” who “monstered John” .

“It was thrilling and almost wincingly painful to watch, like a David Attenborough documentary where the elegant ruminant gets savaged by a lion then has its insides ripped out by a pack of hyaenas,” wrote Longtom. “The champ looked so helpless. All that insouciance at the Gold Coast was gone and in its place was a  lonely blond-haired kid being frowned upon by an older man on the stairs who shook his head sadly as the siren sounded.”

Zeke. Zeke. 

The European leg of the tour, the most strategic of all, when the contenders close on the summit, was a little below par for Zeke. A thirteenth in France; a ninth in Portugal.

He is rated eighteenth in the world post-Euro leg, two spots above the fancied Griffin Colapinto and four above Yago Dora.

This three-minute short emits a tremendous effort, rails and fins pushed, amid the ramparts and so on of ancient Europe.

Watch if you feel suffocated by airs.