By Phil Jarratt
When this issue lands on your lawn (we live in hope) none of us will yet know who has won the prestigious open men’s title at the 30th anniversary Noosa Festival of Surfing.
But this rather sentimental old writer is hoping like hell that Kingscliff’s Ray Gleave will be sipping champagne from the winner’s cup, just like he didn’t do 30 years ago, when he won the main event at the rather more humble inaugural Noosa Malibu Classic in 1992. Although Ray went on to win many titles at Noosa, he hasn’t competed here in several years but was brought back by the organisers as a special guest at the 30th anniversary.
Is the 62-year-old aged carer ready to do battle with young surfers less than half his age? You bet.
Ray was a late starter on a surfboard, spending his formative years inland at Uki, near Murwillumbah, on the family’s dairy farm. But when he was 14, dad decided to sell up and move to the coast at Kingscliff. As soon as Ray saw what was happening on the waves at Kingy, he decided to become a surfer. This was the very early 1970s, the start of the shortboard era, and longboards had all but disappeared. Ray borrowed a neighbour’s Joe Larkin pintail and taught himself to surf, soon moving on to a shortboard he got cheaply at the local dive shop.
In a flight of unpredictability that would become his trademark, soon after he was old enough to drive Ray took a weekend surf trip to Coolum and saw an old Pacific Star Dunlop longboard for sale at the surf shop for $60. The old D-fin log would have been more than 15 years old when he bought it, and Dunlops were considered “kook” boards even when they first hit the market, but Ray mastered it, and surfed it for years.
By the mid-1980s, when longboards started to come back into fashion and the first events were held, Ray Gleave had a decided competitive advantage – years of experience on an old-fashioned log while the others had graduated from shortboards and were on a steep learning curve. The advantage became even more pronounced when he signed on with shaper Richard Harvey who built him a board just like his old Dunlop – complete with D-fin – only along more modern lines. Now Ray was unstoppable.
By the time of the first Noosa Malibu Classic in 1992, his soulful and stylish surfing had earned him the moniker “godfather of soul”, even though he was barely in his 30s. The Deane brothers, Wayne and Robbye, were tough opposition, but Ray blitzed the field at Noosa, utilising his now-trademark drop-knee turn.
This week in Noosa I asked him how he developed that classic and beautiful move: “Everyone would say I’d been watching (1966 world champion) Nat Young, but in fact I just worked out my style by myself. I never saw longboarderss in the movies or bought the magazines. I’d just go to work and go surfing. Then one day at Cabarita, a Byron guy named Anthony Stroud-Watts went straight past me and did this beautiful drop knee turn and I saw how he had his back foot, so I took that and perfected it my way. Of all the surfers doing drop knee turns now, I reckon only half of them are doing them technically correctly.”
You’re never too old to learn, so I cheekily asked Ray to explain his technique: “The trick is you don’t put your knee on the deck, but you move your back foot far enough back that your knee is where your foot normally would be. Your toes are at two o’clock and your knee is above the deck. That’s how you get your turn in and come out of it with drive. I’ve never really told anyone that before, so keep it to yourself please.”
The godfather let out one of his chuckles.
Ray enjoyed huge competitive success in longboarding through the ‘90s and into the new century, culminating in getting very close to two amateur world titles – second at Lacanau, France in 2002, and fifth in Brazil in 2004 – and also developed his own top-selling “Godfather Model” with Bob McTavish at Byron Bay, an association that continues after 28 years. But Ray also maintained a career in nursing that is now 35 years old.
He says: “I started with Blue Care (or Blue Nurses, now Uniting) as an assistant cook and a cleaner, but they saw how well I interacted with the elderly and they put me into nursing. It’s not so much nursing as caring. I’m an aged carer and I just love my job. I was doing a TV interview here for the festival this week, so I rang work and made sure that they told all the old folk that I was going to be on so they could watch. They just loved it. Yes, it can be depressing sometimes, not so much when people just fade away, but when you’re talking to them one moment and the next moment they’ve gone. But the highs outnumber the lows, by far.”
Ray has been with second wife Linda for 14 years now, and together they have five children and five children and two grandchildren. He still surfs every day there is a wave, and stays as fit as a fiddle not by working out in a gym but through mowing lawns as a lucrative sideline when he’s finished his caring shifts each afternoon.
He’s a humble man but he’s still proud of his competitive career, even though he’s given away his 364 trophies to various surfing clubs. And he’s still ripping!
His tip for aspiring longboard competitors? “Surf to please yourself, not the judges.”
