By Phil Jarratt
The world’s longest book tour finally concluded last week, back in Sydney where it began three months ago.
Well, when I say concluded, I mean for the moment. There’s every chance we might rev up for another function or two locally before Christmas.
It’s been a wild and crazy ride these past few months, with three overseas trips squeezed into the mix while doing more than a dozen Life Of Brine launches and functions around the country and in New Zealand.
Over that time the book has sold out its first print run and is motoring through its second, far exceeding the expectations of its publishers, its author and many of his skeptical friends.
It was fitting that the tour should end with two events in Sydney that reflected the beginnings of a lifetime in surfing that started nearby.
In Cronulla I was absolutely thrilled at the turnout of local legends, including Terry Brown, whose brother, the late Bobby Brown, was my first surfing mentor.
Then a couple of nights later in Avalon, at the opposite end of Sydney’s long and wave-rich coastal strip, Kirk Willcox, one of my successors as editor of Tracks a long time ago, hosted a great evening in front of a packed house that started with a roast from Thruster guru Simon Anderson and ended with a 1975 2SM morning surf report reprised by Shane Stedman.
In the middle of all of this, I managed to squeeze in a longish lunch with old publishing cronies Philip Mason and David Dale, the former my publisher at Tracks and Playboy, the latter my editor at The Bulletin.
The scene for the debauch was a fabulous Turkish restaurant called Anason in Sydney’s new waterfront dining district, Barangaroo. Since Dale had just completed a book with the owner and chef, we just sat down in the spring sunlight and let food and wine absorb us. And it kept coming all afternoon!
Thank God I don’t do serious lunching too often these days, but this was a rare gourmet treat.
Noosa Festival of Surfing and SUPS
Unfortunately there’s been a lot of misinformation in some sections of local media about the Laguna Real Estate Noosa Festival of Surfing decision to leave stand up paddle surfing off the program for 2018. Let me set the record straight.
Over recent years SUPS has become dominated by paddle racing, an exciting sport that attracted many competitors and big crowds in 2017. But it is not surfing. The festival management took on board the sentiment expressed by many stakeholders that a derivative sport was taking over what has been, for 27 years, the world’s leading celebration of surfing’s roots and spirit, and decided to either cut it loose to create its own festival, or find an entrepreneur who could develop it independently as a stand-alone event under the umbrella of the surf festival.
The entrepreneur who put his hand up for that role entered into a development agreement with the festival with various milestones leading to a deadline for producing a business plan and proof of funding. The entrepreneur failed to deliver at any point and the deal was cancelled. Standard business practice.
The entrepreneur is now presenting himself in the media as a disappointed competitor who has lost his accommodation deposit. This is misleading, to say the least.
And, to correct more fake news from the same source, there will be dogs! The VetShop Australia Surfing Dog Championships will return in pride of place.
Bridge of Sighs
The renaming of the Sound Bridge to the Garth Prowd Bridge was a timely and fitting tribute to a fine man, gone too soon. I’ve written about Garth in this space before, so let me just say here that when I heard the news from Tony Wellington last week, my first thought was that Garth would forever be remembered by the thousands upon thousands of entrants in the Noosa Triathlon each year as they set out on their quests for glory, personal bests, or just the challenge of completing this iconic event.
Garth gave them that opportunity, and he will never be forgotten. Nice one! For me, long past entertaining any such aspirations, I’ll remember him with a sigh every time I ride my old cruiser bike over the hump, heading for the beach, where he should be swimming, surfing, sipping coffee and happily getting old like the rest of us.
