World's most famous surfer makes children's dreams come true…

This might make a few of the meaner sons of bitches here deposit their watermelon seeds onto the ground, but there’s a real good case to be made that Jamie O’Brien, the flame haired king of Pipeline, is the most popular surfer in the world.

A YouTube channel with half-a-million subscribers, a whole damn army of fans in every corner of the world, oh it’s as plain as the shining sun.

And, therefore, I’ll posit that the daddy that invited Jamie to the Surf Ranch on the occasion of his son, and son’s pals, graduations got himself a helluva deal.

Jamie refused an appearance fee, even the airfares of his entourage, and made an episode of his insanely popular vlog of the day.

Fifty gees or thereabouts and the kids get their heads on YouTube and the daddy’s baby girl gets a wild tube experience that would put a sleepy tingle in anyone’s legs.

When I call Jamie, he is shopping in California, and he tells me he also visited the Tom Lochtefeld pool in Palm Springs with plans to go back there in a week.

He says the Slater pool was an oddly beautiful thing, difficult to work out, powerful overall, yet soft in the lip and says of the thirty or so waves he caught, he only stayed on his feet all the way through to the end on one.

Getting the daddy’s kid barrelled, he says, was a challenge he accepted because it “was a test of all my barrel-riding capabilities.”

It’s sixteen minutes in.

Gets good when the kid falls, Jamie scoops her up and pushes through the tube with a combination of powerful arms and excellent timing.

Re: Palm Springs,

Jamie says the vibe, with its electricity provided by Cheyne Magnusson, a man so chubby he hasn’t seen his privates in twenty years, and his dangerous friend Kalani Robb, was “energetic.”

“Some places have no limits,” he says. “This is is like BSR in Palm Springs but with better technology and with a cooler vibe with a real twist on it.”

Right now that pool is running off eight chambers.

After the rebuild, new pool with more concave in the bottom, it’ll have sixteen.

“The waves are getting better and better every day,” he says.

The Palm Springs Surf Club episode drops Monday, US time.test of l

Stage one of the old Wet 'n' Wild site's rebuild is sweeter than a jasmine mist coating your face like a fine desert sweat.

Ain’t nothing bad about a three-foot wedge built in the loving arms of a desert one hundred miles west* of Los Angeles.

It don’t rain, it don’t get cold and it ain’t Waco where you stay in broken-down tin shacks with red velvet curtains and the ghosts of David Koresh and his seventy-five white Christian brothers and sisters, incinerated by the FBI just one mile up the road on Mount Carmel, tapping on your window in the dark of night.

This is stage one of Cheyne Magnusson’s rebuild, using the King Jesus of wavepool design Tom Lochtefeld’s tech, at the old Wet ’n’ Wild site in Palm Springs, California.

In a post to his sixteen-thousand followers, let’s call ’em Branch Magnussions, Cheyne wrote, “1/3 the amount of wave generating as BSR. Pool shape untouched since 1980. Less water than every other full scale wave park out there. Still making sections for the boys to go ham on!!! This thing is only half built people, wait till I get double the power.”

It’s the same pool that was used in the opening sequences of North Shore, a film from 1987 that tells the fictional tale of Rick Kane, a boy who learns to surf in a wave pool and then attempts to transpose his skills to Pipeline with mostly good results.

Here Eithan Osborne, Parker Coffin and Ian Crane play while Cheyne furiously tweaks his knobs.

(* As as since been pointed out in the commentary section, Palm Springs is actually east of Los Angeles not west.)

As always on these things punch the volume right up…

Jumping off rocks into the drink ain’t hard in the same way as backside tuberiding ain’t rocket science.

Pick a line, steel your nerve, don’t panic. Easy to say, hard to do.

I learned my lesson real young when I tried to follow shaping great Darren Handley off Kirra’s big groyne during a cyclone-fuelled swell.

Where Darren danced, quickly, over a well-trodden route, done it a million times etc, and didn’t blink as he threw himself into the ocean, I tip-toed, turned around, went back, stood there, jumped into a set, panicked, untied my leash, tried to climb back up the rocks, and finished my rock-jump campaign clinging to bolts on a rock like a limpet, my little Rusty wedged somewhere below.

A good lesson.

And apart from a one-foot day at Whale Beach when I slipped down a hole, and after a dozen years habitually surfing Burleigh, it’s never happened again.

In this lovely film captured by Still Stoked during this week’s monster swell in Sydney, we see a timid but tenacious VAL refuse to accept defeat as he breaks every rule in the rock-jump playbook.

I see half-a-dozen mistakes.

Tell me what you see, yes?

As always in those things, the commentary complements the actin wonderfully.