By Phil Jarratt
“I like to live and think like a dog,” former Noosa all-round waterman and businessman Chris De Aboitiz recently told the ABC’s Back Roads program.
For many of the one-time Waikiki beach boy’s old friends, this admission explained a lot, but in fact Chris was referring to a life-long passion for our four-legged friends which, in the eight years since he moved to Agnes Water, has blossomed into an all-consuming business empire.
Chris, Australian-born but raised in Hawaii, rolled into Noosa in the late 1980s and immediately became a force to be reckoned with, both for his uncanny skills on all forms of surfboard and for his business acumen. With what often seemed like reckless abandon, he moved from an ice cream van parked at the beach to establishing one of Noosa’s most successful and long-lasting surf shops with Noosa Longboards, to becoming the world tandem surfing champion and touring the world, demonstrating his ability to pick up girls, to introducing stand up paddling and kite-surfing to Noosa and beyond. (Chris’s son, Keahi, helped out with the kite-surf lessons and went on to become multiple world champion.)
But it wasn’t until he decided to combine his love of dogs with the increased volume of stand up paddle boards and virtually invent a new sport that you could share with man’s best friend, that Chris became world famous. Videos of him surfing with one, two or even three of the well-trained dogs from his growing pack went viral on social media.
Then he teamed up with Sunshine Coast success story VetshopAustralia in 2012 to introduce the Surfing Dogs Championships to the Noosa Festival of Surfing. Celebrating its 10th anniversary at the festival next month, the Surfing Dogs event was a runaway success from the start, with thousands of dog owners and lovers packing the beach and barking their approval as the dogs and their masters performed tricks as they rode to shore.
As the event director at the time, this writer can well remember the delight of six former world champions, surfing in a celebrity demonstration event, as the crowd swelled at First Point, only to discover that the huge crowd was there to watch the dogs, not the superannuated surf stars.
But, it should be noted, this was not the first surfing dogs event. Owners had been pushing their dogs into waves at surf festivals in California for several years, with the cameras clicking wildly as the frightened animals careened shoreward solo, usually wearing an aloha print onesie, or something even sillier. It was Chris who showed the world how to surf “with” your dog.
After many successful years with surf hire operations in Noosa, Chris made the decision to move his operations to Agnes Water and 1770, on the beautiful but remote Discovery Coast. He recalls: “I arrived thinking I’d set up a SUP hire and surf school, but then buying acreage just kind of fell into my lap. I guess I’ve become a surfer trying to be a farmer, although maybe cultivating tourists instead of crops!”
The 40 acres he bought just outside Agnes Water boasted a 360-degree view from what has become The Summit 1770, with smart, dog-friendly accommodations to suit all budgets, but we’ll get to that in a minute. First, he smashed it out of the park with his SUP hire and lessons.
Says Chris: “With the SUPs, coming up here was a bit of a no-brainer. 1770 is a great location, very user friendly for the clients and easy for me to park the van with all the equipment, and you’re protected from the prevailing wind, so for me that’s a 10 out of 10. And for quite a while that was the backbone of my working life here. Then I became an owner-builder, and everything else kind of stopped.”
As a frequent visitor to Agnes, I’ve watched every step of Chris’s development of The Summit property and his philosophy of the management of dog behaviour with nothing short of amazement. The term dog whisperer began as a joke, based on an American reality TV star, but when Chris gets started on something, he really is like a, ahem, dog with a bone, and he truly is a dog whisperer now, with the ability to change the behaviour of dozens of dogs at a time while minding them and letting their owners have a holiday.
The property has been the scene of frenetic tradie activity for years, but things really moved ahead last year when Covid struck and Chris saw Agnes filling with caravan and motorhome tourists. He says: “When C-19 hit, I thought, I’m going to develop a dog-friendly caravan park down on the lower slopes of the property, put in an amenities block and just let it happen organically. It’s been a year now since we started turning the idea into a reality and it’s been a real mission, but we’re on the home stretch.”
Now in his late fifties, Chris admits that doing everything from project managing to digging drainage trenches has taken a toll on him. “I wear all sorts of hats and my surfing has definitely suffered through all of this, but now I’m getting back into it. For too long now when I get up in the morning I’m not thinking about a sunrise surf, I’m thinking about how much work I can get done around the place before it gets too hot.
“It’s time for me to become the top dog again, and look at everything through a dog’s eyes. Dogs live in the now, they’re not worried about mortgage payments or having three legs, they’re not playing the bully or the victim. If they have a problem with another dog, they move on, whereas we carry it. So I’m not going to worry about any of it – I’m gonna go surfing with my pack!”
And a lot of dog lovers will be relieved to hear that Chris, his partner Jacqui and his faithful pack will be back at the Noosa Festival of Surfing next month, headlining the VetShop Australia Surfing Dog Championships on opening day, Saturday May 15 from 1.30pm at First Point Noosa. Organisers are also hopeful they’ll be able to include at least one of Chris’s popular dog surfing clinics.
I asked Chris what he had in store for the festival. Had he taught his old dogs new tricks?
“I haven’t had a lot of time to practise for the festival, but this old dog still has a couple of tricks up his sleeve. And I’ve got a new member of the pack named Foil. He’s a year-old cross between a Jack Russell and a cattle dog. When I got him his name was Disco, so that had to go, and he likes to surf on the foil with me, so that was that. He’s a very confident little dog and he gives a lot of bang for his buck.
“Old favourite Rama’s still on the team. In fact every morning when I wake up, he and Max will be running circles around the van, waiting to get in and go to the SUP office at the beach. They’ll sit in the van all day long waiting for the chance to go for a surf. Well, we’ll all be doing plenty of that next month in Noosa.”
For more information about The Summit 1770, visit thesummit1770.com.au
