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

In the latest episode of Dirty Water, the celebrated author Chas Smith reacts to Kelia Moniz giving hell to Roxy’s parent company, the Authentic Brands Group.

“The stylish longboarder is a two-time champion, multiple-time cover girl and, most importantly, surf royalty, hailing from the revered Moniz family,” says Smith. “She is, in a word, indelible and has been a face of Roxy for nearly two decades.”

Via Instagram, Kelia Moniz explained how, after Covid, she signed a great contract, the best she had ever had. After ABG completed purchase of Roxy, however the contract was terminated and she was told she could come back but with her salary slashed by ninety percent.

Smith says Quiksilver, Billabong, RVCA, Hurley should be studiously avoided, if not burned to the ground, as surfers pivot to surfer-owned brands like Florence Marine X, TCSS etc.

And, anyone seen wearing Quiksilver, Billabong et al should be “publicly shamed.”

If you knew Chris Cote like I know Chris Cote, you’d find the sweetest Peewee Herman-esque lover of life, gags, tumbling, surf all day, no-alcohol parties all night, and positivity wherever he can find it.

Also a shill for the World Surf League, but we all gotta make a living, the truth be told.

The respect is mutual, as you might imagine, with Chris Cote describing Chas Smith as the Tucker Carlson of surf media and BeachGrit as the sport’s own Fox News. A heady double compliment!

Today’s guest Andy Lyon is the Malibu realtor and First Point surfer of fifty years who achieved a considerable notoriety recently when he threw a rock into another man’s surfboard following an entanglement, the video of the event going viral. 

He lost his job, had his address published and a beat down was suggested his four year old kid Glider. 

Lyon represents a vanishing era where lineups were harshly policed with a clearly defined pecking order, a limpid simplicity greased with the underlying threat of violence. 

The highlight, for me, of this interview is our guest’s reply to the posit that Malibu is a sissy wave for old men and girls, not sissy old men who beat up on girls.

Mel, who is fifty-three, no longer has the foaming jaws of a meth addict. Today he is the sort of man who loves his children with a passion, his parents with respect, his wife with generosity and his friends with loyalty.

He wears slightly too big flannel shirts and pants with stone washing applied at the factory.

On January 8 last year, Pete rode a thirty-foot tube at Mavs.

“Everyone on earth should see this ride,” said Kelly Slater.

In this interview, Pete talks about how he stuck his lance into that monster thirty-foot wave at Maverick's neck, how he was lucky to avoid jail during his meth years and the mysterious beauty of BeachGrit's below-the-line commentators.

This episode of Dirty Water hits a high-water mark as Ben Mondy peels layers from "the best surfer in his generation never to win a world title" Julian Wilson.

Many revelations, including Julian's arrest as a teen, the day he stared death in the face, not just his own, but Bruce Irons', Nathan Fletcher's and Maya Gaberia's, how he was forced to become the family breadwinner at fifteen after his mama got hit with breast cancer and why he wanted to beat hell out of a fellow competitor.

Essential.

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. 

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

The last time we saw Adam “Vaughan Dead” Blakey, director of hit surf film, one half of the long-running Ain’t That Swell podcast and frontman of the Goons of Doom, he was at last year’s Newcastle contest squawking ecstatically, as if he wanted to seize Ryan Callinan in his arms and pull him down between his thighs. 

Loves it but he don’t engage.

"I don’t feel smart enough to properly articulate myself in that way… I'm terrified to try and defend myself. When you love everything you open yourself to be torn down by some really smart people.”

A startlingly original and hard-boiled lover of surfing.

Essential.