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

This interview with Jodie Cooper was the last podcast the surf writer and commentator Ben Mondy recorded for us and took place around eighteen months ago. 

BeachGrit had employed the Mondy, who lives in England, to make a few Dirty Water podcasts while Charlie and I busied ourselves with leisure.

Mondy and I had worked together at a Sydney publishing house in the real early two thousands, he Tracks, me Waves. And while...

Almost one decade ago, while filming for Strange Rumblings, Dion Agius and other Globe surfers including Creed McTaggart, sought out the circles of Greenbush in Sumatra, Indonesia. Greenbush is one of those waves where tuberiding to the death is preferable to opening the cat-flap or proning straight.

For surfers such as Craig Anderson and, in our case, Damien Hobgood, it is where their courage and their skills are most visible. I’d...

In a little under a year, Brazil is going to field two-time world champion Filipe Toledo as part of its two-man team to the Olympics, the surf event being held at Teahupoo.

It ain’t no secret that Filipe Toledo is scared of the place. He is the only surfer to score a zero-point heat there. A moment in 2015 that was subsequently dubbed “A brave act of cowardice.”

Last year, Filipe Toledo reprised his brave act of cowardice when he r...

In the latest episode of Dirty Water, Chas Smith picks apart Bev Hills 90210 star Ian Ziering’s wild street brawl with a gang of “chubby teenage Latinx girls”.

“No actor is more surf adjacent than Ian Ziering (save Keanu Reeves and Matthew Perry),” Smith wrote when news broke of the melee.

“The now 58-year-old got his start on the 90s program Beverly Hills 90210, which was, itself, entirely surf adjacent. After a ten season run, Zi...

ll that heat about the new Palm Springs Surf Club wavepool, featuring the tech of wavepool king Tom Lochtefeld, has been entirely warranted despite earlier fears it was a modern incarnation of the old Disney Typhoon Lagoon.

The Tom Lochtefeld tech, which is called Surf Loch, is diff to Kelly Slater’s Surf Ranch, Wavegarden, American Wave Machines and Surf Lakes. It uses a combo of vacuum and pressure to make waves.

The pint-sized p...

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 exp...

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 th...

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 p...

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 Slat...

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 ca...

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 la...

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, rea...

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. 
 
When his hind legs aren’t quivering and he’s easin...

If you were in Sydney at the end of March, y’would’ve thrown yourself into the dreamiest of four-to-six-foot barrels, pretty wedges wiped smooth by an all-day north-west wind. 

Day of the year at most places, one of the best days ever at my local etc.

At Cronulla, home to some of the city’s finest reefs including but not limited to Voodoo and Shark Island, spectators were thrilled when local legend Ronnie “Skull” Hill ...