Dirty Water, episode 50, with former world #2 Brad Gerlach

Today’s guest is the son of a Hungarian Olympian who later became a stuntman, and who became famous, in 1971, for jumping out of a hot air balloon and into a three-foot thick foam pad.

Our guest retired from the tour at twenty five to pursue the “the artistic side of surfing”. He was one of the first surfers to ride Cortes Bank, one hundred miles out to sea, and and, in 2005, won sixty-eight thousand dollars by riding a sixty-eight foot wave at Todos Santos.

He is even lovelier now than when he was at his professional surfing peak in the eighties and nineties.

He wears fiery little hats in bottle green, spectacles that shave years off his biological age and his lean body betrays a carnal fluency.

Today’s guest, Brad Gerlach.