Gossip Girl Hawaii Edition: Multiple Busted Limbs, A Lost $50k Bracelet, And Jaws Gets The Yellow Light

When producing content for a TV show/website around the happenings of Hawaii, it’s imperative to spend as much time as possible in the water.

Is that a thinly veiled excuse to increase our wave count and mitigate our screentime? Of course. But, there’s also a semi-legitimate reason behind it: the lineup is where all of the action and most of the noteworthy gossip occurs. 

Below you’ll find a handful of stories that have been seen and/or heard around North Shore sandbars and peaks, as reported by the always-listening Gossip Girl. 

Pipe trialists bust their wings

Tomorrow we’ll see the Pipe Invitational (otherwise known as the “trials”) run at sand-bottomed Backdoor. However, this event will take place without two of Hawaii’s biggest hole-hounds, Barron Mamiya and Ivan Florence, who have both injured themselves in the lead-up to the event. 

As reported on a recent episode of The Pick-Up, Nathan Fletcher and Ivan Florence recently hosted the Vans Duct Tape Skate Jam at the Banzai Skatepark, which has been a flat day savior for many a North Shore tyke. Unfortunately for Ivan, his event went awry when an off-kilter grind saw him hurdling toward the concrete floor. Ivan put out an arm to break his fall, which ended up breaking both his radius and ulna bones (see below).
 

This is what professionals refer to as a “clean break.”

Ivan now has two rods in his arm and is looking down the barrel of a six-week recovery process.

This is terrible news not just for the youngest Florence brother, who was in the middle of his break-out North Shore season, but also for surf fans who wanted to see Ivan retain his current form and make the Pipe Masters main event. 

If there’s a silver lining from the situation, it’s that Ivan’s trials slot has been given to Australia’s Harry Bryant, who admittedly hasn’t surfed a heat in over five years. Harry hopes to ride one of his seven-foot-plus tube shooters in the event, conditions depending. That should be fun. 

Next, we have the almost-Tour qualifier and Volcom Pipe Pro runner-up, Barron Mamiya.

Barron went down hard a few nights ago at Log Cabins while trying to knife under a doubling wedge. While known for being fearless, Barron’s attempt was ill-conceived according to some who saw it, as Barron was simply too deep and late to scoop under this ledge. Witnesses say that the wave’s lip landed on Barron’s head and drove him into the flats, where the impact separated Barron’s shoulder from its socket. 

Among other nearby surfers, Jordy Smith had to help get Barron to shore, which is no simple task at a turbulent zone like Logs.

After giving his shoulder a few days to rest, Barron has officially pulled out of the event, opening up another trials slot for past-CT surfer and Pipeline-head-injury-survivor Dusty Payne. 

We wish Ivan and Barron a speedy recovery and Dusty and Harry a blessed trials run. 

John Florence will surf Pipe

In other Florence-related news, we ran into John at Log Cabins today and asked him straight-up, “You surfing Pipe this week, or what?”

“Yeah, I think I will,” was John’s response.

With the forecast looking good-to-great and John’s tube comfort increasing by the day, there’s no reason he shouldn’t paddle out at Pipe and see if a perfect six-footer comes his way. After all, if you can surf its ugly step-cousin Log Cabins, you can definitely surf Backdoor. 

An in-water analysis of John’s surfing and psyche showed: he’s definitely a bit tender and tentative on maneuvers, going so far to say that he won’t be trying airs for a little while, but when an attractive peak swings his way, John goes. 

John also admitted that he was struggling to position himself deep enough on the peak and that his attempts at stalling were not extremely effective. Granted, this is coming from the best barrel-rider in the world, so his personal standards of inadequacy are probably on par with the rest of the Tour’s best day. 

If the waves are as good as for the event as the forecast looks, we can’t see him losing before the quarters.

We’ll let this video speak for itself: 

Jaws got the Yellow Alert

Also learned at Log Cabins from a well-respected big wave, medium wave, and recently air wave surfer, Jaws is officially on Yellow Alert for a Thursday start. The WSL Big Wave (Not Actually A Tour) Tour had a meeting with the competitors today and said that the developing will most likely be big and clean enough to run. 

If that holds true, the next week of competition looks like this: Pipe Monday-Wednesday, Jaws Thursday, Pipe Friday-Saturday (most likely). 

Get your incognito tabs ready, our office-bound brethren!

Cornball narrative aside, did you forget how mental Jaws is?

Evan Mock’s missing bracelet

At the Surfer Awards on Thursday, North Shore resident and professional skateboarder/photographer/Millennial Evan Mock arrived to Turtle Bay looking like an affluent Mad Max character, with bleached-out hair, short-cut jeans adorned with jewelry of all kinds, including a $50,000 bracelet from an undisclosed fashion brand, which Evan lost. 

It’s unclear whether the bracelet fell off Evan’s wrist when he wasn’t paying attention or if it was pilfered by a light-fingered thief, but at the end of the night, the 50k piece was gone without a trace.

According to a proximal source, Evan received the bracelet on a loan from an unnamed fashion brand. Apparently, this happens a lot in celebrity circles, as famous people want to wear different types of bling to different events (like the Surfer Awards) but they don’t want to buy dozens of expensive rings, necklaces, etc. 

While we’re not entirely sure of the insurance policy Evan and the brand agreed upon, we’ve heard that Evan will be expected to pay at least a portion of the bracelet’s price back to the jewelry manufacturer.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that Evan’s dad’s pick-up truck was apparently stolen from the Waialua Sugar Mill, so if you see someone driving an old, green Ford and wearing a shiny link on their wrist, do the right thing and pelt them with coconuts. 

Or pineapples. The pointy shell will inflict more damage.

That’s it from Gossip Girl, now back to the beach! 

For work, of course.