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.

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.

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.

He has nearly been ushered into heaven several times (read about the time he was “blue as a Smurf and all fours spewing” after a wipeout in Victoria) and Russell was the protagonist in the highly cited film Flow State, which was released in October.

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.

RIGHT AS RAIN – RUSS AND DARCY from O’Neill Australia on Vimeo.