One month ago, a little-known surfer from North Carolina shattered the 100-foot wave barrier at Portugal's Nazaré.
        View this post on Instagram            A post shared by Mason Hyce Barnes (@masonhycebarnes) 
In this episode of Dirty Water, Mason reveals to BeachGrit's Ben Mondy what it's like to be dragged into a wave that would be measured at 126.5 feet.

Breakthrough big-wave surfer Mason Barnes on riding a 126.5-foot wave, "When it came in it looked terrifying. I almost didn't go!"

Dirty Water is a one-hour hit of fruitless discourse where opinion is everything and facts rarely matter. Hosted by best-selling authors Chas Smith and Derek Rielly.

Sports

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.”

Kolohe Andino Hates Surfing

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

RE-AIR: World champ Barton Lynch on being outed as a “commie”, living on “stolen land” and the wild viral success of his Karl Marx beard “It was the most thoughtful and deliberate conversation I’ve ev

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.

RE-AIR: Dirty Water with eighties superstar Gary “Kong” Elkerton

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.

Is surfing really the hardest sport in the world?

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.

Breakthrough big-wave surfer Mason Barnes on riding a 126.5-foot wave, "When it came in it looked terrifying. I almost didn't go!"

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