Watch tear-jerking penultimate episode of big-wave world champ Billy Kemper docu-series: “I’m in so much pain, I’m just trying to get through each second…”

Episode five of ‘Billy’… 

I’m not, by nature, a man given to tears or foolhardy flights of sentimentality.

I’m tolerably happy because I’m grateful for the absence of pain, and for life’s little pleasures, for my children, sunsets and for my daily mating ritual.

The six-part series, ‘Billy‘, which documents travails of big-wave world champion Billy Kemper who was seized by a Moroccan wave and dashed against rocks, breaking pelvis and knee, well, don’t it just poke a thumb into the eye.

Tears galore.

The episode grows chilly with the death of a dearly loved matriarch, the dreadful pain of rehabilitation and the separation of a man from his family.


Hair-raising: Watch brave little Mason Ho, all hot lead and cold steel, in a “a love of manly independence!”

You keep rubbing that stick, as they say, and you’re gonna get a lot more than a spark.

Little introduction is needed, now, for Sunset Beach’s Mason Ho, who is thirty-three this year.

In today’s weekly instalment of Mason’s winter and spring sessions around the North Shore of Oahu, we find the comparatively short (though a giant in bravery terms) Chinese-Hawaiian asserting his manly independence at a non-wave, really, an outcrop of reef in front of the Foodland near Waimea Bay.

Mason, as always, in all hot lead and cold steel.

You keep rubbing that stick, as they say, and you’re gonna get a lot more than a spark.

Essential viewing.


Two-time world surfing champion John John Florence peels back curtain on new ultra-fast Pyzel surfboards!

Confident. Well-informed. Deadly.

The two-time world surfing champion John John Florence, with his frank, mobile face, clear and white complexion, blue-grey eyes and soft yellow hair, is the picture of health in this revealing four-and-a-half minute edit.

Florence, riding Dark Arts-constructed Pyzels, appears level-headed and deadly in earnest, his surfing arousing the online viewer from his lethargy in a stirring session at a spring North Shore sandbar.

The edit is anchored by a mock-heat with teenage surfer Luke Swanson, which John loses, although this seems to please and not embarrass the twenty-eight-year-old Champ.


Revealed: The tragedy that shaped big-wave world champ Billy Kemper, “I still have nightmares about it; I can still hear my mother screaming…”

Episode four of the wonderful, if padded out, documentary series ‘Billy’… 

You know the story: little Billy Kemper, a four-times Jaws winner and 2017 big-wave world champ, is belted to within an inch of his life at a Moroccan ledge.

The six-part series, called ‘Billy‘, follows this trip to Morocco, the injury, his long rehabilitation and his triumphant return to contests.

Episode four is a real tear jerker, one that will have the viewer crouching in his armchair like an animal that is cold.

It follows his triumphant return to America (thanks to executive producer and WSL CEO Erik Logan who, last episode, tearfully whispered to his wounded comrade, “Gonna bring you home, Billy”), a visit from Laird Hamilton who offers Billy his home, with its gymnasium and pool and ice baths, to rebuilt his busted body and the revelation that the death of shredder older bro, Eric Diaz, of a drug overdose has driven everything.

Billy’s words come helter-skelter, his thoughts coming from the pit of his stomach.

“I just did everything I could to do what he taught me, to live up to what he had set for me,” says Billy.


One-time best surfer in the world Dane Reynolds reveals new manifesto, “Is there a Satanist Cabal BBQ’ing babies at George Soros’ house while Bill Gates implants tracking devices in every human being or is half the population losing their goddamn minds?”

"Covid tests are being used as conduits for microchips to be implanted into our bodies that ultimately will be used to make us slaves that mine cryptocurrencies."

There is, I’ll posit, no better journal of surfing than Dane Reynolds and Mini Blanchard’s Chapter 11 TV  channel.

It is, simultaneously, wicked, innocent, provocative, intellectual, magnetic.

Very much like its master Reynolds, who is thirty-five and the last bulwark of a sport in the grip of its darkest enemy, the chilling rise of the adult beginner, the VAL-apocalypse.

In a sprawling thought piece surrounding today’s episode, Reynolds is heckled at Zuma,

It looked fun enough so I suited up and ran up the beach to where there was a hole in the crowd. A guy parked in a black Porsche SUV starts yelling out his window “Fuckin beat it Reynolds go back to Silver Strand and leave your cameraman at home you fuckin kook…” I laughed and gave him a sympathy nod cause I thought it was an attempt at humor but as I keep running and his yelling gets fainter I realize he isn’t joking and now it actually becomes funny. The last words I hear is ‘that’s what I thought.’

In the water a man suggests Reynolds might wanna get into non-fungible tokens or NFTs.

Out in the water a long haired fellow on a soft top asks if he can have 30 seconds of my time for a business pitch. You can’t really say no so he proceeds to inform me that NFT’s are all the rage and they could be right up my alley.

“What are NFT’s?” Well shit, I still don’t quite understand but someone is creating something called crypto punks which are 8 bit digital art files that are being traded for millions of dollars. Fuckin crazy. My brain does not compute. Fascinating and foreign. Why would you want ownership of this art? Why is it crypto? What the fuck?

Reynolds, in good form, questions life in 2021.

Is there a Satanist Cabal BBQ’ing babies at George Soros’ house while Bill Gates implants tracking devices in every human being or is half the population losing their goddamn minds?

The soundtrack is characteristically superb and includes song one from Ween’s 12 Gold Country Greats, I’m Holding You.

“I’m trippin’, writhin’ and squealin’, pukin’,” sings Gene Ween.

Much more, but click on link etc.

CH | 11 | TV | 009 from CHAPTER 11 TV on Vimeo.