Dirty Water: The BeachGrit Podcast featuring Chas Smith and Derek Rielly

  A couple of weeks before the Olympic surf event at Teahupoo, a teenage Australian photographer was found floating face-down during a heavy eight-foot Teahupoo swell. Nineeten-year-old Byron Mclouhglin, who was shooting the action from an inflatable bodyboard, had been sucked over the falls on an earlier set and had ended up in the lagoon. The former tour surfer Michel Bourez went in to pick him up and brought him back to the channel. Thirty minutes later he was found face down in the water by American photographer Ryan Craig and Tahitian bodyboarder Angelo Faraire. Mcloughlin had blue lips and foam pouring out of his mouth If it wasn't for the courage of the fearless Tahitian crew, this minnow would be out! Over the course of this forty-minute episode of the very occasional Dirty Water podcast, Byron Mcloughlin recounts his Teahupoo brush with death, as well as his almost fatal encounter with Padang Padang in Bali two years ago. Compelling!

BeachGrit has always held Kolohe Andino close to our hearts. I knew his daddy Dino during his wild nineties epoch and first met the boy prodigy, then sixteen, on a holiday to the Canary Islands where he exhibited what were then exotic flavours of aerials. A perfect fit for Chas Smith Hates Surfing to discuss life off tour, the rise of the San Clemente squad, Griff, Cole, Crosby, Kade, at the expense of the Brazilian Storm and the death of the old school surf industry. “Chas hates surfing less than me,” Kolohe wrote to me during preliminary discussions. And, later, “I know I’m crazy but I might be delusional.”

Rarely do I get as much pleasure as when the telephone connects to the 1988 world champion Barton Lynch, who cinched his title at perfect eight-to-twelve-foot Pipeline but is now more famous for his oratorical gymkhanas on WSL broadcasts. A few days ago, BeachGrit outed Barton as a filthy communist bastard,  which you can read here, and which was swiftly refuted, here.  A very good time to pick up the telephone, I figured. And, reader, I do wish this was a video broadcast, just so you could see the way his three-month beard twitches and his body quivers with excitement when points are made. You may not always, or ever, agree with Barton, but he makes for great company. And, it’s a pantomime I was thrilled to be a part of. – Derek Rielly

Today’s guest on Dirty Water brought a brutal, but beautiful, savagery to professional surfing.  His fav tee featured a skull and the slogan Kill Em All God Will Sort Em Out and he was the star of the Quiksilver ad If You Can’t Rock and Roll Don’t Fucken Come.  He’s a three-time runner up to the world title, two of ‘em in excruciatingly controversial circumstances, although he evened the ledger a little later in his career by winning three Masters world titles. He was the King of Sunset, a Pipeline Master and had the extraordinary ability to gain fifteen pounds for added ballast during the Hawaiian season, then shred thirty prior to hitting the small wave events.  But as my old friend Rob Bain told me recently, as the legend fades, and  real life starts to stare back at you it’s a challenge to navigate the autumn years in peaceful contentment.

Recently, Kelly Slater responded to an online poll asking which sport was harder, soccer or surfing, with a bombshell…neither. “I wouldn’t rate soccer but I don’t play,” writes Kelly Slater. “I would say skating, free soloing, F1, MMA, gymnastics etc are all at the cutting edge of ability for humans.” Kelly Slater’s comment came just after ESPN had released their definitive list of “sports ranked by degree of difficulty” with surfing filling the lowly twenty-third position barely beating badminton and well behind tennis, volleyball and squash. According to ESPN, the results were compiled by “our panel of experts, a group made up of sports scientists from the United States Olympic Committee, of academicians who study the science of muscles and movement, of a star two-sport athlete, and of journalists who spend their professional lives watching athletes succeed and fail." In today's episode, Chas Smith, the noted author of the North Shore epic Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell, as well as the best-selling Blessed Are the Bank Robbers, "a rollicking true story of Bibles and bank robberies in Southern California", examines the difficulty of surfing, or not, and the surprise coming to of retirement of current world surfing champ Filipe Toledo.

This interview with Jodie Cooper was the last podcast the surf writer and commentator Ben Mondy recorded for us and took place around eighteen months ago.  BeachGrit had employed the Mondy, who lives in England, to make a few Dirty Water podcasts while Charlie and I busied ourselves with leisure. Mondy and I had worked together at a Sydney publishing house in the real early two thousands, he Tracks, me Waves. And while my surfer connections withered to nothing after Andy died and Bruce fled the scene, Mondy’s had flourished as he pivoted hard into surf commentary.  It never ran ‘cause I asked Mondy to call back Jodie Cooper and lean a little more into her famous, and successful, assault case against surf mat aficionado Mark Thomson. In the interview, Joe Cooper touched on the assault and her reasons for pressing charges.  “I wasn’t his first victim. Hopefully, I was his last. He picked the wrong person as you know. He picks on women, he picks on young kids, that’s the type of species that guy is and there’s a lot of them out there still.” Initially, Jodie was gonna avoid any police action and wait for her moment to strike back.  “I was going to suck it up. It was traumatic fore sure. I didn’t need the attention. I didn’t want the attention and I knew it was going to draw a lot of attention. I was thinking, ‘Don’t worry, mate, I’ll wait and bide my time…an eye for an eye.”  But,  “I got so much feedback, people contacted me who he had attacked pleading with me to do something. That’s why I decided to press charges.” It’s a good interview, but I wanted more! The revenge fantasy! What hell would’ve rained upon her assailant?  Anyway, the files just appeared on my desktop, had a re-listen, though it’s a story worth re-telling.  “There isn’t much about Jodie Cooper that I don’t love,” Matt Warshaw told me back in 2020. “Jodie seems indomitable in a way, unbreakable, but there’s something kind of hard-luck about her too. I don’t quite know why. Maybe I’m just still pissed on her behalf because that geezer Thompson who assaulted her basically walked, which seemed like a pretty grievous miscarriage of justice.

Almost one decade ago, while filming for Strange Rumblings, Dion Agius and other Globe surfers including Creed McTaggart, sought out the circles of Greenbush in Sumatra, Indonesia. Greenbush is one of those waves where tuberiding to the death is preferable to opening the cat-flap or proning straight. For surfers such as Craig Anderson and, in our case, Damien Hobgood, it is where their courage and their skills are most visible. I’d heard about Damien Hobgood’s solo session at 12-foot at Greenbush from Dion Agius and Creed McTaggart. As I swooped on their drinks cabinet they mimicked what they believed had transpired. Giant drops beyond the vertical axis! Circles that were so big that even if a camera had been there it wouldn’t have been able to translate its enormity to pixels. Damien, see, was in Bali and had heard the wave was going to be good and, short of partners, flew, drove and hopped a boat until he was sitting in the channel of an Indonesia version of Teahupoo, ready to surf solo. And solo he did. The following day, when the swell had dropped but was still a respectable, even horrifying, eight foot, Dion and Creed and the rest of the Globe gang arrived. And Damien, hardened from the previous day, owned it. “Damo acted like an animal out there, like a man possessed. It was the most insane performance of talent and courage I’ve ever seen,” said Dion Agius. “He did not give one fuck and was getting bounced off the reef and bleeding everywhere and just kept charging.” In this wide-ranging interview, Damien Hobgood talks hunting Black Death waves, the Teahupoo wave that nearly killed him, culture wars and the true meaning of Christmas.

In a little under a year, Brazil is going to field two-time world champion Filipe Toledo as part of its two-man team to the Olympics, the surf event being held at Teahupoo. It ain’t no secret that Filipe Toledo is scared of the place. He is the only surfer to score a zero-point heat there. A moment in 2015 that was subsequently dubbed “A brave act of cowardice.” Last year, Filipe Toledo reprised his brave act of cowardice when he refused to paddle for a set wave in his heat against old-timers Kelly Slater and Nathan Hedge.  As Chas Smith wrote, Filipe Toledo, with reputation for not enjoying the Teahupo’o battle, would certainly spear naysayers in the throat by dropping in to infamy, no?  Apparently no. Kelly Slater and Nathan Hedge traded waves, big and perfect, one after the other after the other with Toledo holding priority well out the back, refusing to paddle, one after the other after the other. Kelly Slater, barreled, unable to contain smile. Nathan Hedge, barreled, unable to contain smile or beat, smartly, boss. Filipe Toledo, un-barreled, holding priority for fifteen-odd minutes while Slater and Hedge swapped beneath him. In the dying seconds, the King of Saquarema swung on a baby tube then punched board in channel. It also ain’t no secret that the Brazil’s best Teahupoo surfers are Gabriel Medina and Italo Ferreira. But they ain’t going. And, yet, what if? What if Filipe Toledo is playing a game of rope-a-dope with the world; what if Filipe’s masterplan is to make the world think he is too scared to paddle into a set at Teahupoo and then, with Olympic gold on the line, create one of the most unlikely wins in Games history? Chas Smith, who hates surfing, explores this topic over the course of five minutes.

In the latest episode of Dirty Water, Chas Smith picks apart Bev Hills 90210 star Ian Ziering’s wild street brawl with a gang of “chubby teenage Latinx girls”. “No actor is more surf adjacent than Ian Ziering (save Keanu Reeves and Matthew Perry),” Smith wrote when news broke of the melee. “The now 58-year-old got his start on the 90s program Beverly Hills 90210, which was, itself, entirely surf adjacent. After a ten season run, Ziering, who played Steve Sanders, went into C-list purgatory until 2013 when the absurdist Sharknado became a surprise hit. Again, very surf adjacent. “For some reason, Ziering decided to address fighting a gang of chubby fifteen-year-old Latinx girls on miniature motorbikes by taking the offensive instead of burying his head in shame. “‘In an attempt to assess any damage I exited my car,” he wrote. ‘This action, unfortunately, escalated into a physical altercation, which I navigated to protect myself.’ “Unstated ‘from a gang of chubby fifteen-year-old Latinx girls on miniature motorbikes.’” “He continued without shame or irony, ‘I am relieved to report that my daughter and I are both completely unscathed, but the incident has left me deeply concerned about the growing boldness of such groups who disrupt public safety and peace. This situation highlights a larger issue of hooliganism on our streets and the need for effective law enforcement responses to such behavior.’ “Shocking and embarrassing,” says Smith. “And, thanks to Ian Ziering, a gift. We will never as surfers beat groms, no matter how much you want to. Bad look all round.” Smith also bids the WSL sayonara after yet another WSL-created program gets iced and examines the likelihood of an executive from Old Spice (via Logitech) being able to get Vans back its long-lost cool.

ll that heat about the new Palm Springs Surf Club wavepool, featuring the tech of wavepool king Tom Lochtefeld, has been entirely warranted despite earlier fears it was a modern incarnation of the old Disney Typhoon Lagoon. The Tom Lochtefeld tech, which is called Surf Loch, is diff to Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch, Wavegarden, American Wave Machines and Surf Lakes. It uses a combo of vacuum and pressure to make waves. The pint-sized proto was built and surfers, including Mason Ho, Jackson Dorian etc, came from all over the world, flared and made clips. The pool was then demolished to make way for the full-sized tank, which opens to the public on January 1, 2024.  Tom Lochtefeld is a long-time friend of BeachGrit and its co-master Charlie Smith. In this long-form interview Lochtefeld reveals the secrets behind creating better-than-perfect waves, why Surf Lakes is gonna self-destruct and why the Slater plough is destined for the junkyard.