Quiksilver’s two past films, Repeater and Saturn, are proof that a mainstream surf brand can still produce the best films in 2025.

Trips, team salaries, filmers, editors, music licenses — it all adds up to…. a lot.

At the end of the day, all we as surf fans care about is if a brand invests its cash into creating films. Make the films, and the T-shirt purchases will follow.

And though “Washed” is similar to Quik’s past films, it’s different for one key reason: they ditched the format of different sections based on location, and instead separated the film into surfer-specific sections, à la throwback movies like Innersection or the Momentum movies.

This creates a different energy to the movie and creates star-making moments, like Microdose star Lungi Slabb’s breakout section, which garnered the most claps, shouts, and guttural “wows” in the theatre, despite featuring near-zero airs.

The format also makes it possible to highlight surfers who simply do not have the time for freesurf trips, like Kanoa Igarashi, Griffin Colapinto, and Rio Waida. This is Kanoa’s first proper freesurf section since the Young Gun films of yore.

“Washed” also features bespoke sections from cult favorites and still-risings surfers like: Hughie Vaughan, Andy Nieblas, Mikey Wright, Kael Walsh, and more.

All in all, it’s 30 minutes of A+ footage from some of surfing’s favorite sons.

The public release date for “Washed” is still TBD. We’ll keep you posted when it’s on the airwaves. See the full gallery below:

Everything Mikey February produces is concept rich.

It’s what makes him so good at this job and why MF’s contracts are still iron-clad, despite being in the post-surf industry explosion age where there’s never been so many good surfers — and while other talented waveriders, particularly freesurfers, are finding themselves out of work.

Mikey’s a masterful storyteller, and his latest offering – a timeless, elegant signature Raen shade (Kwela), a curated run at a larger line (Zafrique), and an effortlessly stylish editorial shoot, powered by Mikey’s agency Spearhead Collective and shot by fellow South African Kent Andreasen – is no exception. In fact, if you’re sick to death of the servo sunnies (gas/petrol station, for all our non-Antipodean readers) movement that’s over-run surfdom in recent years, it’s damn refreshing. 

Let’s start with Mikey’s signature shade – the Kwela. It’s no mean feat to conjure a pair of men’s shades that stand out, fit in enough to wear daily, and also universally suit most faces of either sex. The Kwela are simultaneously modern yet classic, and – taking into account the variety of shades (as in, of colour): recycled black with an agave lens; negroni with a green lens; sage opal with an agave lens; sencha with an aria lens – you’ve got something for literally all occasions. Furthermore, at USD $170 a pop, they’re solid value for a pair of shades whose hinges open and close like the door of a German car.

Now it has to be pointed out that Mikey’s blessed with the ineffable talent of making anything look good – especially when his signature silhouette is pared with with tweed, pleated slacks and fuzzy jumpers (bravo stylist Isabella Peerutin) – but such is the wearability of the Kwelas that you can even be relatively confident gifting them to a significant other. Which is a sure sign of a sunglasses winner. In our humble opinion, the sencha/aria combo is particularly nice. 

Moving through Mikey’s ‘Zafrique’ display case, there’s a couple of big, bold silhouettes straight off the beak of some jazz greats — seen in the ‘Mystiq’ and the ‘Zouk’ (if cutting a strong figure is your thing), and also the Zelti. Which is a more quintessentially classic, round-lensed piece that’ll look sleek and on-trend from the moment you slip them on your beak ’til the day that you die. 

Raen have long been a Stab favourite – like, 20 years plus! – as has Mikey Feb. Unsurprisingly, when the two combine in thoughtful fashion then it’s a sartorial home run.

Sleek shades in a multitude of tasteful colours live here.

Before the mid-year cut comes around to ruin peoples’ days/entire livelihoods, each CT event features a total of 54 surfers.

The average coach bus seats 50 – 60 people. So, we are talking about an actual busload of the world’s best and fittest surfers descending upon a location for about two weeks, usually with one wave in their crosshairs. 

You might imagine it’d be hard to pick off a few corners during such times. So what happens when you throw 23 junior surfers into the mix? 

Apparently, everyone still gets a fuckload of waves. 

Billabong has a long history of upskilling their junior team via coaching and sheer exposure to quality waves and surfing at their Bloodlines camps. 

The Euro crew identified the Peniche comp as an opportunity to keep the Bloodlines flowing, and you can watch the results above — though we already spoiled the results. 

Remember when we said everyone gets a fuckload of waves? 

Supertubos steals the show — despite appearing incapable of doing that when ‘the show’ is the one the WSL has been trying to put on in recent years — and the team backs it up with some HP surfing at HP beachbreaks north of the comp site. 

It’s also worth noting that Billabong was calculated and considered while rolling with such a deep crew. They chose emptier stretches of sand and made sure the kids surfed in different groups so as not to flood the lineup all at once.

In other words, they did it right. 

Few pastimes expose you to the brutal truth of politics and economics like surfing. Anyone who has been on the end of a shovel, a hammer, a keyboard, a steering wheel or a till on a day of pumping waves will have developed the purest distillation of the system failures that prevent him or her from getting barrelled. It’s really not that hard to figure out. We live in an age of artificial scarcity and withheld abundance because the forces that run the world are terrified of the global working class having too much time, freedom and money on their hands. Their power relies on our subservience, and in a democracy this is best achieved this through crippling debt bondage and a series of other financial scams aimed at robbing you of your time and money. For in capitalism, time is money, money is time, and if the powerbrokers can rid you of either, or both, they’re one step closer to maintaining hegemony. 

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A healthy addiction to good waves forces you to confront these system failures and for over 50 years surfers have been trying to figure out a way around them. A quick look at the history of surfing reveals countless pivotal figures in the culture who were hell bent on avoiding the crushing vice of debt and working class drudgery. Not because they didn’t want to contribute but because they didn’t want to contribute their precious time on earth to the mindless, material excesses of a morbidly decadent consumerist, capitalist elite, who, despite having everything you could have in this material reality were still leading loveless, miserable lives couldn’t do a fucking bottom turn to save their life. 

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Take the Morning of the Earth crew, who built treehouses and moved into dilapidated farm shacks to grow their own food, make their own boards, and live a largely subsistence lifestyle that allowed them to surf when they wanted to. Despite being viewed with fear, loathing and suspicion by the establishment at the time, the regions popularised by that film and those surfers are today amongst the most expensive in the world to buy real estate. The many surfers that do live in these areas are forced to work obscene hours to service their mortgage debt, to the point their often too stiff and out of synch to surf to at a passable level when the waves do turn on. Money and security? Or surfing ability? For the average working person, it’s generally a choice between the two. 

Other surfers trafficked drugs, built surf brands out of the back of their cars (often funded by trafficking drugs), or set up surf camps or charters at their favourite waves thereby killing the goose that laid the golden egg. 

In an age in which the richest man on earth (Jeff Bezos) makes $USD4.5 million an hour; when CEO pay has increased 937% versus ten percent for average workers; when automation has created obscene gains in abundance and productivity that have not been passed back to the worker; a time when we were supposed to be working 15-20 hours a week, which, in the words of a report by the New Economics Foundation in London, “would address a range of interlinked problems (that) include overwork, unemployment, over consumption, high carbon emissions, low wellbeing, entrenched inequalities and the lack of time to live sustainably…” at this time we continue to find ourselves bogged down in the grind, barely able to find the time to care for our families and get to the ocean when it’s pumping. There has to be a better way. There is a better way. 

It was with this in mind that Vaughan Dead and myself hit the campaign trail in the lead up to the Federal Election, banging a gong and ripping a bong for anyone posing a threat to the entrenched political and media elites. 

In the seat of Cowper, on the mid-north coast, we met the working class hero, nurse, mother and Independent candidate Caz Heise, who was fully on board with shaking down the billionaires, oligarchs, and no-tax paying mining companies for a better deal on behalf of the people. 

Then it was off to McKellar, the seat adjacent to Warringah, which kicked off the Teal rout in 2019. There we met Sophie Scamps, a former elite sportswoman with all the appetite for truth and accountability you’d expect from someone who spent decades analysing biomechanics, time splits, nutrition, preparation, psychology and performance. Sports legends make sick politicians. They hail from a culture built on brutal truth telling, accountability and performing well for the team or having your career immediately brought to an end. Just ask David Pocock or former Labor candidate, Rabbit Bartholomew, who met next in the seat of Mcpherson, better known as the Gold Coast. 

There we also found the ultra marathon runner, Erchana Murray-Bartlett preparing to try and unseat a slick-haired corporate-backed reptile. Finally we headed to Lyne, the home of Forster and a host of fun albeit sharky beach breaks. Here we found small business owner and independent candidate, Jeremy Miller, who called on workers to realise their combined power and rise up against the nihilistic, parasitic bourgeois elite. 

“The trick they play is they make you think you have no power. They make you think there is no difference, it’s all boring, politics is boring, I have having to vote. So you turn up that day and because you think you have no power, you draw a penus on the ballot paper and you get out of there,” he says. 

“But you do have power. Surfers for Climate have shown us that. Getting rid of PEP11 was impossible. There was no way that was going to happen. But they showed people they had the power, people turned up because they could see they could make a difference, and they bloody well stopped it. That’s what happens when join together. So don’t fall for the trick that you don’t have power,” he says. 

The Australian Federal Election is on this weekend, May 3rd. 

Buy tix here.

Jack McCoy’s Australian tour, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Blue Horizon, places one of surfing’s greatest biopics back on the big screen where it belongs. Investigative journo Nathan Lynch went on tour in WA with the greatest surf filmmaker of our generation to find out what drove Jack McCoy — and Andy Irons — to shoot for the impossible.

On stage, Jack McCoy is ageless. He might be in a wheelchair with a busted femur, nursing a nasty chest infection. He might be knackered from days of travel across Australia and back-to-back economy flights. But with the aquamarine backdrop of a full-size cinema screen rippling behind him, Jack’s just as stoked as the line of sun-bleached groms peering up at him from the front row. 

You see, Jack’s 77 years young these days. He’s been a surfer for seven decades, since his family made the fortuitous carve from Mainland America down to Hawaii in 1954. But during the opening moments of a surf film in a packed theatre, time is imaginary. As Dave Grohl’s muted guitars chunk in, and the screen fades from rippling blue to a rifling Mentawai right-hander, Blue Horizon is screening. By the look on his face, Jack might as well be 8 years old, getting pushed into his first wave by Pops in Waikiki …

“Since that moment, I’ve dedicated my professional life to being a waterman. Taking movies from the water is one of my greatest joys,” Jack says.

Today, Jack can’t get in the water and film. But nothing enlivens him as much as the pure sound of stoke; the hoots coming from a packed cinema as his vision plays out in film. Real film. Film with grain, grit and rolling at 24 frames per second. Film that was shot in some of the world’s most remote locations, on a 20 kilogram WW2 camera, and then muled in great spools back to a lab in Sydney, eschewing light and X-ray machines, where it was dumped in chemical baths to reveal an invisible magic. In the age of 4k phone cameras, it’s hard to imagine the mix of stoke, fear and anticipation that filmmakers lugged around in the pre-digital age.

Jack remembers it all too well — the whiff of chemicals and the thrill of feeding freshly processed film into a projector. There’s nothing like it. The feeling’s etched on his face, as he sits in the third row at the Margaret River theatre where Blue Horizon is being screened to a packed house ranging from groms through to their parents and an array of flannelette-clad surf addicts.

“I’ve counted it up and I’ve probably shot close to 500,000 feet of film,” Jack says. “You actually had to put the film in, shoot it, process it, work on it, and create it. When you make a movie like Blue Horizon, for one foot of final film, you’d probably have shot 15 to 20 feet.”

As Andy comes on screen, grinding his way through a ten-second tube, the room erupts. There are children in the theatre for whom Andy Irons is a mythical figure, gone before they were born. To these kids, AI is a legend in the purest sense of the word.

His Hawaiian Island Creations (HIC) gun stands as a symbol on stage, alongside the aluminium-wrapped “Silver Bullet” that Rasta rode in the film. Later in the film, Andy will stand tall on that same board as he takes down Slater at Pipe, smashes Jake Paterson’s hopes of a Triple Crown, and snatches his first world title from under Kelly’s nose. The film will cut to Kelly spilling tears in the shower at Jack Johnson’s house, followed by Andy being chaired up the beach on jubilant Hawaiian shoulders.

The hoots from the Margaret River groms, who’ll only ever see Andy surf on celluloid, drown out the remastered audio that’s pumping through 5.1 surround sound speakers.

The other thing Jack loves, almost as much as the ocean, is the music. The ocean is the dominant character in all of his films. But the songs are crucial; the supporting lead. His soundtracks are painstakingly sourced and curated, cajoled for a pittance from the claws of record labels and music publishers. When overlaid with the deep bassy oceanic rumble coming through the rear speakers, it’s a powerful experience.

“Half of it is in the music,” muses Jack, with a shutterbug’s humility. The serendipity of securing the right tracks is almost as incredible as the luck of getting Andy Irons and Dave Rastovich in their prime. To get songs, Jack always had to bypass the agents and the labels and go straight to the musicians.

For Blue Horizon, he swapped a surfboard for a song with Chris Martin of Coldplay. He got Robbie Williams via 1 Giant Leap. He took Dave Grohl surfing in return for two of the greatest tracks to ever grace a surf film.

The music and the footage work together in a kind of synesthesia, where only a surf filmmaker and his audience truly know the feeling.

The idea behind Blue Horizon found its genesis in Hawaii, way back in the 1960s, when Jack was competing in surf contests in an effort to win a trip to Australia. He recalls feeling deeply confused when he won the trip to Oz, but discovered his friends were pissed and bummed that they had missed out. Is this side of surfing really the aloha spirit, he wondered?

“I wasn’t competitive. And I thought, is that the result of competitive surfing? It really upset me. So it’s an open secret here that I’m prejudiced in favour of free surfers versus competition,” Jack tells his audience before the film.

The commercial genius was to secure funding for a surf film, from a major clothing label, and then drive the audience back towards the sheer expressive joy of free-surfing. This is the guerrilla theme that runs through all of McCoy’s work. In doing so, he single-handedly opened up a pathway for the vagabonding “free surfer” as a profession. Without Jack’s films, there would be no Margo, Rasta and Billabong Challenge series.

For Blue Horizon he pitched an idea to Billabong’s Gordon Merchant of running the two stories in parallel, seeing where the serendipity of surfing led them. He had no idea Andy would go on to win three world titles during filming. Meanwhile, Rasta put in some of the most soulful and inspiring performances of his career. When the duo first met in Tahiti, it was Rasta who pushed Andy to take off under the peak, ditch the rail, and stand tall. By the end of the day, of course, Andy had the best ride in Jack’s can…

One of the complexities of Jack’s films — as for many of us in the wavesliding game — is the love-hate relationship with competitive surfing. It drives absolute performance excellence, but often at the expense of stoke and aloha. This has been a puzzle that McCoy has wrangled since his brief foray with competition in Hawaii in the 60s.  

Never has this conflict been more evident than in Blue Horizon. The cracks in Andy’s mental state are evident just days after his first world title, as he drives around the island of Kauai questioning why he’s unhappy. With the passage of two decades, that footage is rawer than ever, taking on a new tragedy with our awareness of the demons Andy wrestled. He had everything he thought he needed in life. He was standing on top of the pro surfing mountain, unassailed. He had taken Kelly’s pretty picture and just crushed it. Yet he still didn’t feel right.

What was it all for?

Meanwhile, Rastovich is drawing his own lines, on wave faces as in life. 

Rasta says in the film: “I wanted to really love my surfing — my entire life. I went to Billabong, very, very nervously, and asked them if I could please become a free surfer. They said: ‘Sure, we’d prefer you to do that!’ And this amazing golden path opened up in front of me.” 

For Andy, meanwhile, the money and the success was all-consuming. Irresistible. He had no choice but to grind towards the summit, whatever personal price the piper demanded.

Jake Paterson recalls watching this world title drama play out in Hawaii in 2003 with a mix of awe and amazement. As the shoe-in for the Triple Crown that year, he had a front row seat in the battle between Kelly and AI. One scene at Sunset that year was pivotal in Andy delivering an axe blow to Kelly’s run of world titles.

“The world title was pretty much decided. The last two events were Sunset and Pipeline and Kelly had a huge lead for the world title race,” Jake Paterson recalls from his home in Dunsborough.

“Sunset was a WCT event that year … in Round Three I had Kalani Robb and we knocked out Kelly. I remember Andy was in the next heat and Kelly was paddling in while he was paddling out. He says: ‘You just left the door open for the world title.’ Kelly’s eyes went wide open — ‘Wow’. And that’s exactly what happened. Mathematically, Andy pretty much had to win the last two events to win the world title.” 

And Andy went ahead and did it: second place at Sunset and a win at Pipe. History was made. The footage of Kelly crying in the shower after losing to Andy, supported by his brother Sean, is one of the defining images of that epochal surfing rivalry, as captured in Blue Horizon.

The whole movie could have had a very different ending if it wasn’t for Jake Patto and Kalani, McCoy says, laughing.

“Andy just had to push everything to the limit no matter what he was doing. Surfing big waves, surfing small waves, his tuberiding, big airs. Everything just had to be pedal to the metal. That was what I admired about Andy. He wasn’t waiting for anyone,” Jack recalls.

“He wanted to be the best. He wanted to put the best performances in, and he was gonna do anything he possibly could to get that done. We miss you, Andy. We love you. AI forever.”

Time and waves are both relentless, unforgiving mistresses. While Jack still feels like a stoked kid being pushed into waves in Waikiki, his body tells another story. On his neck is a scar from where the camera water housing smashed his helmet while filming Blue Horizon, driving a blade of plastic just millimetres from his jugular vein. The doctor who sewed him up said he was very lucky not to bleed out in the water. He was, of course, back out filming the next day with stitches and a munted jaw.

Jack’s femur is still recovering from a nasty break, relegating him to a wheelchair for the Blue Horizon tour. And the hayfever that drove him out of Yallingup in the 1990s is back with a vengeance, a wry welcome home to the wilds of South-West Oz. 

Jack is well aware that the hands of time are as persistent as winter groundswell. And he wants to spend that most precious of commodities doing what he loves most: projecting his visual artworks onto a big screen, redlining the needle on his inner ‘hootometer’. 

This tour has turned into a gruelling journey for Jack and his son-in-law Luke Campbell, who’s running the show, but it’s where he wants to be … travelling from one surfing town to another armed with his celluloid stoke generator.

“Right now I can’t shoot any more, but I’m going through all of my old film and finding gold that never made the cut. I’m making clips and little bits and pieces with these clips that I have. It’s a trip. It’s a souvenir of my life, that’s how I look at my movies,” McCoy says. “They’re great memories, and I get to share them with you guys.”

For anyone who surfs, this film tour is a piece of history, a piece of nostalgia, a piece of art, and an opportunity to talk story with one of the greatest surf filmmakers we will ever experience.

“I always set myself a goal with the start of each movie, so I wasn’t making the same film over and over again. I wanted to test myself and learn. My objective for Blue Horizon was to tell a great story, and this was after the Occumentary, which inspired me to tell that story,” McCoy says, a grin on his water-weathered face and his eyes lighting up like a pair of old-school film projectors. 

“But to be able to touch, move, and inspire people in that manner is what I live for. That’s the reward that I get in my life — to be able to share.”

After the Fremantle show, Jack and I have a great rave about the film. As I go to leave, McCoy digs into his black puffer jacket and pulls out a card.

The world’s greatest surf filmmaker don’t need no business card, I think.

“Have you heard about the Duke’s cards?” he asks.

Despite an embarrassingly encyclopaedic memory for surf trivia, I’m stumped.

“No.”

He passes it with Japanese reverence: two hands. It’s a replica of the “creed” cards that Duke Kahanamoku gave out as he travelled the world sharing the art of surfing. The Ambassador of Aloha. Jack still carries one wherever he goes.

On one side, the dog-eared card has a picture of Kahanamoku standing in front of a 12-foot board emblazoned with the iconic letters DUKE.

On the back, the cards featured the Duke’s philosophy on what it means to be a waterman. 

“In Hawaii we greet friends, loved ones or strangers with ALOHA, which means with love. ALOHA is the key word to the universal spirit of real hospitality, which made Hawaii renowned as the world’s centre of understanding and fellowship. Try meeting or leaving your brother nobles with ALOHA, you’ll be surprised by their reaction of ALOHA of LOVE. I believe it, and it is my creed. ALOHA TO YOU, Duke.”

Jack had the card printed as a reminder of what the true spirit of surfing means, in practice.

As McCoy leaves me with the Duke’s creed, his eyes twinkle. 

“When I grew up in Hawaii, that’s who you wanted to be. A waterman. A gentleman,” he says. “Aloha!”

The “creed card” is a piece of surf history I never knew about. A symbol of stoke. An invitation to embrace and amplify the great spirit of aloha. In the context of the film we’d just watched, perhaps it was a missing link in our culture? Something we had forgotten in the relentless urge to shred?

As I walk away, buzzing, it hits me that Jack’s films are a “creed card” borne of his own imagination. A modern, cinematic version of the Duke’s simple poetry. Wherever he goes, McCoy shares his stoke, celebrates the spirit of the ocean, and carries on the tradition of the great Hawaiian watermen. 

And like the Duke himself, Jack plans to see out his days on earth travelling, sharing the stoke, spreading the aloha, and luxuriating in the simple joy that a life in the brine has bestowed upon him.

Buy tix here.

An estimated 300 exabytes of new information hits the internet each day. 

What’s an exabyte? Who the fuck cares — it’s 1,000,000,000 gigs if you do actually care — just trust that 300 of ’em is a lot. 

As we go about our days, we should calmly and strategically choose which of that information we should consume. But we rarely do. Instead, we decide on rabid impulses stemming from deep insecurity to sexual fever. 

Life, eh? 

At least we’ve got an easy one today. Jordy on (mostly) righthand points? Yep, we’re in. 

The world #5 just fed his nascent YT channel with roughly eight minutes of freesurf footage from around Bells. 

Come for the dipslaced water, stay for the piano session. 

A seaplane is an aircraft designed to take off from and land on water using floats or a boat-like fuselage.

Around 2005, Paul Naude spent three million dollars buying two of them on behalf of Billabong. Meanwhile, Quiksilver got wind of it and rented their own seaplane and planned a surf/content mission to compete with their rival.

This type of aircraft is no longer considered a reasonable investment for surf brands. 

But how much altitude has the surf industry lost in the last 20 years?

Caio Ibelli — who just turned 31 and finished 8th in the world in 2022 — recently announced that he’s going to walk from the WSL due to financial inviability. 

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Where to begin? Hmmmm… Lets talk surfing. Surfing grows, it’s an Olympic sport, Brazilian athletes dominate the world circuit and we’ve become a reference on the international scene, but where is our financial incentive? Being a pro surfer is being able to live off surfing. 31 years old today, I cannot put my future on the line to reinvest in something so uncertain. I’m giving up the CS position for now… you can’t invest more than 100 thousand reais to “try” to live from it again, we have bills and commitments. Guess it’s wrong to pay to work. Finally cycles open, cycles close. Will it be that time? I don’t know if this will be goodbye or see ya later but something has to change! In this time I will reconnect with my essence and find my path 🙏

Last year, Caio got bounced by the mid-year cut. He was just behind Sammy Pupo and Ian Gentil, meaning he was one spot away from getting consistent wildcards this year. 

The last time we ran the numbers on the CS, it wasn’t pretty. Only one guy broke even via prize money. And there ain’t too many surfers left getting enough sponsorship dime to foot the bill. 

2016 was Caio’s first year on tour, and his best result was a Finals finish at Bells in 2017.

He will be missed by many, just not John or Gabe, whom he defeated in some crucial heats. 

“I turned the joy of riding waves into a numbers game — clicks and views, performance and accomplishment. I couldn’t surf for fun anymore.”

It’s a familiar pattern. From a distance, the dream looks intact — especially to anyone staring down an afternoon of emails and fluorescent light. But inside the bubble: disillusionment. 

Brett Barley had enviable employment, and he knew it. Which only made it worse. The guilt of not loving it anymore. The awkward shame of being deeply sad while doing something most people would trade their life for. Add a pressure to provide, a dash of unrewarded vulnerability, and you’ve got the recipe: burnout, tied with a bow and served with a smile.

“I kept telling myself I shouldn’t feel lost and sad, but I did. I felt like a liar — making videos full of joy while editing them in sorrow. If I didn’t love it anymore, why was I breaking myself to keep doing it?”

Turns out, being on the clock all the time — even when you “love what you do”— isn’t great for mental health. Especially when your livelihood is tied to algorithms, feedback loops, and an audience that expects joy on demand. The film doesn’t over-explain it, but there’s a thread running through: questions about masculinity, self-worth, and the invisible pressure to hold it all together when money’s tight and eyes are watching.

It took Brett turning the cameras off completely — chasing a swell to Skeleton Bay without a crew, without the pressure to film, without the looming obligation to “make content.” Something he hadn’t done in close to a decade. Just a surf trip, for surfing’s sake. A radical act.

“It took showing up to the beach without a camera to find joy again. At home, I stopped zoning out. Stopped obsessing over edits and metrics and meaningless dopamine hits.”

Yes, the film leans heavily on scripture. Barley’s escape hatch was faith — which might land sideways if Bible verses aren’t usually your thing. If that’s not your lane, skip over em’ and stay for the surfing. 

Getting out of a dark place is rarely graceful. People reach for whatever’s in arm’s length — God, therapy, a hut in the woods, a carefully calibrated cocktail of pharmaceuticals. The method matters less than the momentum. Whatever floats your boat, or saves your life. 

The point is: he made it out. And that, at the very least, deserves a few medium-to-firm pats on the back.