One of the abiding pleasures of surf festival time in Noosa is catching up with old friends and making new ones.
Last week I did a bit of both.
First up my old pal Takuji Masuda messaged me a couple of days beforehand to tell me that he and 13-year-old son Ryjii were jumping on a plane from Los Angeles so that Ryjii could spend a week training at the Surfing Australia High Performance Centre on the Tweed Coast with super-coach Andy King. But first they were going to sneak up to Noosa and see what all the fuss was about.
It’s often funny to gauge reactions of first-time visitors but Tak and Ryjii took the cake.
Stoked doesn’t even begin to tell you how happy they were, and since they live just up the hill overlooking the immaculate waves of Malibu’s Surfrider Beach, that’s saying something.
“It’s like you got the whole world visiting,” Ryjii said excitedly as he settled himself into a booth at Café Le Monde.
“Since we got here we’ve heard German, French, Dutch, Portuguese and Japanese.”
I asked him how he could tell the difference between all those European languages.
“He understands all of them, plus a couple more,” said Tak, flicking his skateboard into his spare hand, having ridden up from Hotel Laguna to join us.
“He has Belgian citizenship because his mother was born in Antwerp, and he was born in Zurich where my father lives, so he has a Swiss birth certificate. For Japanese, we’re very European.”
I first met Tak nearly 30 years ago at the Biarritz Surf Festival in France where he was a leading longboard competitor (later to win a Japanese national title) and just starting out as a publisher in California. Along with collaborators Craig Stecyk and Art Brewer, he occasionally published a tri-lingual and extremely avant garde arthouse surf-skate-music magazine called Super X Media. But he was also into film, and developing an obsession with the surfer/shaper/hedonist Bunker Spreckels, the stepson of movie star Clark Gable and heir to the Spreckels sugar fortune.
Tak did a lot of other stuff in his life, like collecting university degrees and for a time running his family’s international real estate development empire, but the Bunker movie idea lurked in the shadows for decades.
Because I did the last interview with Bunker in Hawaii at the end of 1976 a couple of weeks before he died of a drug overdose at 27, Tak flew me back there to film segments about a decade ago, and in 2017 we both screened our surfing lifestyle documentaries at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
But back to Noosa, where Tak and Ryjii can’t quite believe that so many volunteers are out on the beach with trash bags, cleaning it up.
“It’s not dirty!” says Ryjii.
Tak: “I think it’s amazing that they care enough to clean it anyway. That wouldn’t have happened 20 years ago.”
Father and son are also amazed at how nice we are!
Ryjii:“One big difference between Noosa and Malibu is there are much better surfers here, people that can ride a wave and get out of the way. In Malibu it’s like speed bumps.”
Tak: “This is generalising, but I think there’s better etiquette in the surf here, and people seem to care more about each other. In LA we’ve lost that a little bit. There’s so much bad stuff going on, like homelessness, that you have to put the blinders on. Once you start caring, there’s so much to care about you can’t get on with your daily life. So instead you become a complacent nihilist, and that carries into the surf.
Ryjii: “Everyone I’ve seen in the surf seems to be having fun. They don’t seem so weighed down by city life. I like that.”
A couple of nights after the Masudas had departed, I had the pleasure of meeting Hunter Williams, who stood up in the audience at a book launch and thanked the authors for creating such a lovely testament to the spirit of surfing. Hunter said he hoped it would inspire everyone to look after their beach.
Not bad for a nine-year-old!
But Hunter’s self-assurance and perfect manners, not to mention his fast-developing skills on a longboard, have already made him a surfing celebrity, whose travel journal features in the current issue of Pacific Longboarder. He made himself right at home on the footpath in front of Annie’s Books, chatting to the old surf dogs, even sharing board design ideas from his work book.
From Phillip Island, Victoria, the Williams family are on an extended caravan road trip along the east coast, taking in the surf festival, but mum Briony says they’re pretty hooked on Noosa and are hoping to become residents soon.
