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, reader, I do wish this was a video broadcast, just so you could see the way his three-month beard twitches and his body quivers with excitement when points are made.

You may not always, or ever, agree with Barton, but he makes for great company.

And, it’s a pantomime I was thrilled to be a part of. – Derek Rielly

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 later in his career by winning three Masters world titles.

He was the King of Sunset, a Pipeline Master and had the extraordinary ability to gain fifteen pounds for added ballast during the Hawaiian season, then shred thirty prior to hitting the small wave events.

But as my old friend Rob Bain told me recently, as the legend fades, and real life starts to stare back at you it’s a challenge to navigate the autumn years in peaceful contentment.

Recently, Kelly Slater responded to an online poll asking which sport was harder, soccer or surfing, with a bombshell…neither. “I wouldn’t rate soccer but I don’t play,” writes Kelly Slater. “I would say skating, free soloing, F1, MMA, gymnastics etc are all at the cutting edge of ability for humans.”

Kelly Slater’s comment came just after ESPN had released their definitive list of “sports ranked by degree of difficulty” with surfing filling the lowly twenty-third position barely beating badminton and well behind tennis, volleyball and squash. According to ESPN, the results were compiled by “our panel of experts, a group made up of sports scientists from the United States Olympic Committee, of academicians who study the science of muscles and movement, of a star two-sport athlete, and of journalists who spend their professional lives watching athletes succeed and fail."

In today's episode, Chas Smith, the noted author of the North Shore epic Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell, as well as the best-selling Blessed Are the Bank Robbers, "a rollicking true story of Bibles and bank robberies in Southern California", examines the difficulty of surfing, or not, and the surprise coming to of retirement of current world surfing champ Filipe Toledo.