It’s a wrap – and while not exactly enjoying epic surf, with the first few days being blessed with pretty good First Point, and the remainder having quite contestable beachies, the 2025 Noosa Festival of Surfing made the grade again.
From a personal perspective, surfing first heat of the morning the early rounds of the over 70s in glassy, fun conditions at First Point, almost back to its old form, even though your columnist may not have been, with just a few mates two days in a row was a pure pleasure.
Unfortunately other commitments meant that I didn’t spend as much time on the beach this year as I would have liked, but I did manage to catch a few great performances, including a spectacular final minutes comeback from Tully White to take out a see-sawing women’s logger final at Sunrise Beach from Bali’s Dhea Natasha and locals Emily Lethbridge and Kirra Molnar. Emily was particularly unlucky after having led for most of the heat with some very stylish surfing.
The men’s logger also produced a last-minute turn-around, going against another local in Nic Brewer, but Kai Ellice-Flint has been on fire this year, and as soon as he took off on a sizey left and started walking to the nose, you knew he would produce the goods. But my favourite performance of the week was without doubt that of the youngest and lightest competitor at the festival, everyone’s favourite grom Hunter Williams, who may have had a distinct size advantage in the Golden Breed Noserider, held in the tiniest First Point peelers imaginable, but boy did he milk it with some spectacular long tens and clever footwork to finish a solid fourth behind former world champ Josh Constable, world tour competitor Clinton Guest and up-and-coming Jive Constable. Oh and Hunter also took out the Lions Club Rising Star award alongside Ramona Haddrell.
I’m going to let these amazing photos by Fenna De King (@fenna.deking) and the surf festival’s Melissa Hoareau tell the story of the nine days of pure stoke, and instead look at a couple of intriguing aspects of the event’s history. Although this year was billed as the 34th Noosa Festival of Surfing, for its first six years it was the relatively small Noosa Longboard Classic, developed by the Noosa Malibu Club. In 1998, as a sponsor of the event for the previous four years, I joined with partners John Brasen and Johnny Lee in building a surf culture festival around the club’s existing core events.
Over the next few years we threw everything at it, including the kitchen sink and a lot of global promotion, and it paid off. The festival grew exponentially as we added more and more events on and off the beach and promoted it to all the major surfing markets. Family groups became our bread and butter, adding to the tourist revenue of the town because they often stayed for a fortnight, or even a month. A sidebar effect of this was that our competitor demographic began to widen, from the littlest kids to their grandparents.
When we started, the oldest age division was over 40s. Now it’s over 75s and it should be over 80s because there is now a demand, at least on the men’s side, and the women aren’t far behind. Who knew? When I started surfing in the early 1960s, it was assumed you would have moved on before hitting the grand old age of 30. Now, well, how long is a piece of sinew?
Baby boomers were the heart and soul of the golden age of longboarding (1957-1969) and also, not surprisingly, the stimulus for the longboarding renaissance (1984 to the present). Although I rode longboards several times in California in the 1970s, in the ‘80s as I was entering middle age I was very pleased to see them become cool again, even though it took me a few years to get over riding a thing called a mini mal as a soft segue into the grim realities of thicker waistbands and slower pop-ups.
Strictly speaking, a baby boomer was born between 1946 and 1964, meaning that Midget Farrelly wasn’t one but Nat Young is. Moreover, it meant that baby boomers like me who were born within the first decade, started surfing on longboards, and therefore felt comfortable going back to them. But now what it means is that the youngest baby boomers are surfing in the over 60s and the eldest are in the over 75s. What this means for the Noosa surf festival is that the older age divisions are growing while the younger ones are diminishing. The over 55s, for example, were down to six competitors this year as opposed to 12 in 2023. Meanwhile the over 70s has remained steady in the mid-teens over the same period. The over 75s, held for the first time last year, went up from five to six this year, which may not be much but watch this space!
And while senior surfing might not be as pretty to watch as the younger versions, it sure feels good when you get a good one, even though you know you’ll be reaching for the Panadol later.
