Champ Italo and coach Shane Dorian.

Watch: “Surfers are frequently, secretly fond of each other!”

Derek Rielly

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There's many a strange impulse to be found behind-the-scenes at the 2019 Pipeline Masters…

This is a fascinating, if formless, gem from Red Bull, twenty-two minutes of fly-on-the-wall footage from 2019’s Pipeline Masters, won by Italo, made entertaining by Gabriel’s Machiavellian ways, provincial innocence meets metropolitan cunning etc.

Here you can eavesdrop on conversations between Kelly Slater and Shane Dorian, see surf media folk fall in love with their pro surfer quarries, hear Yadin Nicol admit he would’ve shut down Mick Fanning’s 2013 world title dreams for a shot at a Pipe semi if only he’d had the “yoda” skills of Gabriel Medina, Jon Pyzel telling a story of blowing off teenager Italo for a sponsorship and quite a deal more.

An occasion to be treasured.

The best tuberiding sequence in a movie since Greenough's ancient masterpiece Innermost Limits of Pure Fun.

Watch: Mason Ho’s POV masterpiece: “Let the lame have their spinal cords so electrified they can now do gymnastics!”

Derek Rielly

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See the tube with newfound gusto.

This is a six-minute short that will pin your arms behind your back and pop open the sweet little buttons on your sweet little pink dress.

In it, we find Mason Ho with the new GoPro Hero 8, a tiny high-end POV camera that captures his tuberiding with such fidelity you feel like you could reach out and start tweaking Mason’s nips as if you were grabbing pinches of salt.

I suspect that over the course of the North Shore season, with Mason dropping clips every other day, you might’ve felt like you’ve seen all there is to see from the thirty-year-old son of Sunset Beach’s Michael Ho.

The tuberiding sequence that form the middle part of the film will hypnotise with its detail, the movement of hips, arms, eyes and feet.

82-50-15. Judgement Day comes for us all, eventually.

Watch: Three generation of shredders, granddaddy, daddy, jailbait teen!

Derek Rielly

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The entire surf cycle, from eighteen through fifty and a grand ol eighty-two!

The sands of time wait for no man and this short film shows what’s in store once the downy hairs of youth are shed and life no longer feels like some kind of fiery liquid being squirted up your nostrils under high pressure.

Called 82-50-15 and forming part of O’Neill’s excellent O’riginals series, we examine three generations of surfers from the Lee family, who live at Redhead Beach, near Newcastle, Australia.

Eighty-two-year-old granddaddy hit the surf for the first time in the mid-nineteen-fifties, daddy Justin, now fifty, was a hot-rat in the eighties and here’s little Connor, eighteen, riding waves bareback and with a sense of power that’s overwhelming.

An interesting study of surfers through the cycle of life.

Directed and shot by Billy Lee Pope, the angel who makes our Anonymous board test films.

The little movie rises to a frenzied climax that's exhilarating. Here, Puerto Rico-raised Dylan Graves. Vans

Watch: Dylan Graves and Dane Gudauskas get their kazoos blown by juicy tubes in Lagos, Nigeria!

Derek Rielly

By

And scented with the aroma of urban dysfunction…

Now that tubes are available at the swipe of a credit card and the punching of buttons in a certain order, it makes little sense, if any, to keep secret waves in the natural world that do roughly the same.

In this excellent short film by Vans, and starring Dylan Graves and Dane Gudauskas, two pro surfers in their thirties who both wear their hair long and parted in the middle Patti Smith-style, we visit, and closely examine an excellent wedging right in Tarkwa Bay in Lagos, Nigeria.

Surfer‘s Will Bendix reported on the joint in 2017 with a compelling long-form piece, and which you can read here.

The briefest excerpt:

“Swells would refract off a mile-long breakwall like they’d hit a bumper in a pinball machine, bouncing toward shore and jacking into dark tubes that churned through Tarkwa Bay. But in the years since that first exploratory trip, the West African country has dominated global headlines with stories of escalating terrorism, kidnappings and ethnic violence. ‘Briton kidnapped by armed gang while leaving Lagos airport,’ read a Sunday Express headline in July 2013. ‘234 schoolgirls kidnapped by extremists,’ said CBS News the following April. “Double suicide bombing at Nigerian university,” reported Newsweek in January 2017.”

Do Dylan and Dane find Nigeria charming and fun or does it leave them a little flat like bubbly in a coupe?

Watch. 

Mason leaves no stone unturned, no wave unembraced.

Watch Mason Ho (and pals) in “The things he did to me were terrible and exquisite!”

Derek Rielly

By

Mason leaves no stone unturned, no wave unembraced.

There are few guarantees in life with the exception that one day we’ll all be drawn towards a blinding speck of light whereupon our deeds we’ll be tallied up and we’ll be dispatched either to heaven or sent to rot in hell.

Apart from that inevitability, the filming combo of Rory Pringle and Mason Ho is a perennial.

Over the course of every week during the North Shore season, the pair will find enough waves to stitch together into an edit featuring a Jimi Hendrix song taken from his mama Brian’s collection, in this instance, Rock Me Baby.

These are little films that give you a feeling of tropical sunshine on your skin.

Photo: Justin Jay/@justinjayphoto
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