This Week In Webclips

Kai challenges Pe’ahi, Jarrod White tames Cloudbreak, Clay Marzo trunks Baja, and moreNovember 19, 2016

He may have not won the Pe’ahi Challenge, but when super freak Kai Lenny went back out after the contest, and put on this insane display of tow surfing, he won our hearts for good. With those hacks, barrels, and airs, does he think he’s surfing a head-high day at Hookipa?
.Frank Solomon, Daniel Redman, and Josh Redman recently spent a month on the northwest coast of Ireland, exploring potential setups, firing lineups, beautiful countryside, and the occasional pub. Meeting and hanging out with local “shams” (the Irish equivalent of ‘bro’ or ‘bru’), including Conner Maguire, Dylan Stott, Barry Mottershead, and Noah Lane, definitely helped to keep the good times rolling, both in and out of the water. The result? An edgy surf edit saturated in laid-back Irish lifestyle and culture. Or is that the other way around?Ever caught a wave so long, did so many turns, and felt so winded by the end of it, that your legs start to shake? Welcome, pointbreak virgin. Truth is, even the most-grizzled of hooded pointbreak veterans will still feel that burn at the end of a lengthy one. Just remember that it’s a good burn, and that Rincon has been known to deliver its fair share of scorched legs.The life of a Tavarua boatman yields just as many barrels as you think it would – a lot. Those lineups become home. Those barrels become your living room. The rest of the boatmen become your neighbors. It all starts to get comfortable. Doesn’t sound like too bad of a life, eh?Clay Marzo will be the first to tell you that he hates neoprene – so much so that he opted to wear trunks in Baja this past week for the moonage daydream swell. If you are unaware of what that’s like, imagine paddling out in howling offshore winds in 59-degree water. Luckily, the air temps were abnormally high, around 90 degrees, and Marzo can’t sit still if his life depended on it. Surely, the freesurfing savant did Baja his way, and damn, did he do it well.Bondi native Pamatatua “Pama” Davies bears no relation to Jay Davies, nor his mirror image, Craig Anderson. But his instinctual mix of power and tube time will have you thinking differently. His latest short, filmed along Australia’s southeastern coastline and New Zealand by Dane Singleton, is all solo exploration, and we’d be lying if we said we in California weren’t jealous watching him park himself deep in empty right tunnels all to himself.In 2001, when Thomas Campbell took his genre-defining film Sprout, you could count the number of top tier open-minded surfers getting any sort of mainstream attention on one hand, maybe two. Paddle out at your local standout spot, and you might have found one renegade soul daddy on something other than a thruster. So when this section closed, crowds at the premieres went nuts, blown away by the radical lines being drawn on a variety of unconventional sleds. Enjoy this throwback clip of the week, and give thanks for the broadened design horizons each and every one of us enjoys today.Staying warm in parts of Baja on a day of howling offshores requires a good wetsuit (typically), or a spell of unusually warm ocean water. You could also follow the lead of Creed McTaggart, Colin Moran, and Tanner Rozunko and paddle into overhead tubes until your body circulation is pumping like a train engine. Filmed by Metal Neck’s Matt Tromberg, their edit is the latest to come out of a newsworthy November. Odds are good that the borderline will be at a standstill for the next few weekends to come.Mick Fanning’s out of office reply has been on for months and months now. The three-time world champ took a selective break from the 2016 Tour, where he’s mixed in a stretch of coldwater travel between the five events he’s surfed, including an inspiring win at J-Bay. Now, back at home with full bars on his phone, Mick sat down with Mark Occhilupo for Occ’s podcast. Here are two of the Gold Coast’s celebrated champs trading questions on Fanning’s past and his plans for the future, the final chapter of which – competitively, at least – will end at Bells, according to Mick.