ISOBEL COLEMAN
Cricks Noosa Festival of Surfing, presented by Jeep, is heading for its biggest ever event, with more than 500 entries spread over 30 divisions, including full-house fields in all the headline pro events.
Festival director Phil Jarratt said this week that more than 40 per cent of entries were from overseas, with half of those coming from continental USA and Hawaii, but with 11 countries represented overall, including Mexico, Portugal, France, Canada, Indonesia, Japan and New Zealand. “When only one in three of our competitors is a Queenslander, you can see that the festival is really breaking new ground in bringing visitors to Noosa,” he said. “And the economic impact is considerable when you consider that the average length of stay is more than one week. One of our internationals has booked into a Hastings Street hotel for six weeks!” Phil said the strong US dollar had made Noosa more affordable for the Americans. “We’ve always enjoyed great support from the Californian clubs, like Malibu and Windansea, but this year they’re coming from all over, from the Pacific Northwest to Montauk, Long Island. And on top of this, we’ve got a bus-load of European backpackers coming to compete in the Mojo Backpacker Challenge! “We’ve put the hard yards in with international and on-line marketing, plus we’re on the back of a couple of very good years for surf, so we’re reaping the benefits of that, but I think it’s also the fact that there has been a lot of positive word of mouth from those who have been to previous Noosa festivals.” The eight-day festival will be held at First Point, Noosa, when conditions allow, and as this story went to print, organisers were licking their lips as two major Coral Sea low pressure systems looked set to dominate swell conditions over the first two weeks of March. A secondary site at Access 11, Noosa West, can be used if First Point is not breaking, but Australia’s leading swell forecaster, Ben Matson of Swellnet, was confident that the computer models were in agreement and that goof surf, ranging between a metre and two metres, was very likely. Mr Matson will be in Noosa for the festival, co-producing the first-ever live webcast of the event with Noosa production house Panga. The four-hours-a-day live webcast, streamed via Swellnet.com, visitnoosa.com, and noosafestivalofsurfing.com, is expected to further raise the international profile of the festival, with it being exposed to over 400,000 unique browsers. Zinc 96.1 will again broadcast its breakfast show with Nugget and Al from the Zinc Shack at First Point throughout the event, with Nugget tipped to be taking to the water on a stand up paddle board for some interviews this year, while ABC Coast FM will broadcast an afternoon drive time show from the beach. Other surfing legends who will be in town include world champions Layne Beachley, Tom Carroll, Rabbit Bartholomew and Wendy Botha, shaping gurus Bob McTavish and Simon Anderson, and Hawaii’s 1970s superstar Nancy Emerson.
