By PHIL JARRATT
Creek to river
We’ve moved from the creek to the river, from backwoods suburbia to front row resort town, and it’s taking a bit of getting used to.
Over by the creek it was mostly very quiet, apart from the occasional squawking of bats as they flew in formation over the house at sunset.
Here, in holiday season at least, the air is alive with the sound of people having fun, families splashing in the pools of adjacent apartment blocks or playing noisy ball games while backpackers laugh loudly over beers in the cafe across the street.
It’s been more than 15 years since we lived in this street and, unless my memory is deceiving me, it’s a lot noisier than it used to be, or maybe it’s that we’re a lot less noisy than we used to be!
Certainly the daily soundtrack of construction work on new apartments is more intense and I don’t remember having to look both ways as I left the house to avoid being skittled by break of dawn athletes.
But I think I like it again.
The neighbours, old and new, are friendly and welcoming, you can’t beat the position, a hop, step and a jump from the river, and I feel a bit like I’m on holiday. Or retired!
Our friend Patrick Roach even bought us matching his and hers, pink and blue spinning rods, so as soon as the Easter crowd has thinned out, no doubt we’ll be down the end of the street at sunset, casting for our dinner.
Hobie lives on
The missus is learning to stand up paddle (thanks Rick and Donalee) so we braved the crowd on Good Friday and did some laps of Munna Point on the beaten-up old NSP.
We were both struck by the size of the flotilla of fun craft on the water, everything from SUPs to floating gin palaces bobbing up and down in the brown water.
And everywhere you looked, the familiar H of the Hobie logo.
It suddenly occurred to me that it was Good Friday last year when we took our places at the lookout on the mesa above Capistrano Beach in Southern California to watch an even bigger assortment of boats and boards form a huge circle off Doheny Beach in honour of Hobie Alter, dead of cancer at 80.
I wrote at the time: “It was a day for honouring a true surfing hero, when more than 1000 surfers paddled out to join a flotilla of small boats and, of course, Hobie Cats, to celebrate the life of the pioneer surfboard and catamaran designer Hobie Alter.
“Hobie started his surfboard building career about 60 years ago underneath a house on the cliffs above Laguna Beach, about 200 metres from where I’m sitting now as I write this.
“He went on to open Southern California’s first surf shop at Dana Point, and subsequently to revolutionize sailing with the Hobie Cat.
“I had goose bumps (or chicken skin, as they say over here) when the sad sounds of Aloha Oe drifted across the beach from Dana Point, and people said their final farewells to Hobie.”
I had chicken skin all over again, watching the Hobie Cats sail past on the Noosa River a year later. Hobie, gone but never forgotten.
Gotcha! Kelly’s April Fool’s Day trick
He’s such a trickster, the greatest surfer who ever lived!
The last time Kelly Slater pulled an April Fool’s Day stunt it was to announce that he and long-time sponsor Quiksilver had parted ways (an unthinkable split in the world of surf) and it turned out to be true.
So it was perhaps understandable that a lot of people took it seriously (your columnist included) last week when Slater announced on his Instagram account that the event he is currently surfing in – the Rip Curl Pro at Bells Beach – would be his last, that he was calling it a day, hanging up the quiver, leaving the tour.
There was something in the wording of it – too flippant perhaps, Kelly being a guy who often wears his heart on his sleeve – that didn’t ring true, and so it turned out.
Some one (not me) looked at the calendar and noted the date and went, “aha!” And in a few hours the hum of social media had dropped a level or three. Gotcha!
But one day soon the great man will make that announcement and it won’t be a hoax.
At 43, his days at the top of pro surfing are numbered, and even though he has been on the world tour for most of his adult life, there is a lot more stuff going on for Kelly, and I’m sure he’s looking forward to the next great adventure.
But I just watched him give the young rookie wildcard Keanu Asing a tactical 101 in round three at Bells, continuing his self-assured tilt at a fifth bell, and I hope like hell he’s got another year or two left in him.
We’ll still have Julian Wilson to barrack for, of course, but pro surfing will be the poorer for Kelly’s leaving it.
