By Phil Jarratt
Well, another amazing eight days of pure stoke!
While the 2017 Laguna Real Estate Noosa Festival of Surfing didn’t enjoy quality surf throughout, there were enough good days on First Point for the visitors to get a taste of how good it gets, and the last couple of days of marginal surf on the beach breaks did nothing to stem the stoke.
The biggest surf party in the world – 900 competitors from 20 countries this year – created the best vibe on the beach we’ve seen in 26 editions of this event.
The camaraderie was evident everywhere you looked, and I guess the biggest plus for Noosa was that every first-timer I spoke to – and there were a lot this year – said they would be back next year with more family and friends.
For a community whose economy is largely dependent on selling beach lifestyle to the world, it doesn’t get much better than that.
Towards the end of the festival, the Noosa National Surfing Reserve hosted Nick Mucha, an environmentalist who is the programs manager at World Surfing Reserves and Save The Waves Coalition in Santa Cruz, California. Nick, who was a first-timer in Noosa and in Australia, watched the festival in progress, joined in Tom Wegener’s sustainable surfboards workshop, dined with NNSR committee members and Mayor Tony Wellington, and spent a full day exploring Noosa National Park with senior Parks and Wildlife ranger Omar Bakhach.
In an email to me as he was leaving town last Sunday, Nick thanked us for “revealing the Noosa magic”.
“Omar graciously took me on an eight-hour tour of Noosa yesterday which was a proper ‘crash course’ on Noosa’s coastal resources, the incredible Noosa National Park, and the community’s planning vision and activism that has managed the human impact while stewarding the natural environment. In short it was a very insightful visit (albeit exhausting!) and I am reluctant to leave!” Nick said.
Nick will now report to the World Surfing Reserves Vision Council and advise us on the timing and content of Noosa’s submission to become the ninth World Surfing Reserve. For our committee, this was a huge leap forward.
There were far too many highlights of the Laguna Real Estate Noosa Festival of Surfing to list here, but I will mention just a couple.
When I got back from an overseas trip a couple of months ago, my hard-working daughters told me they had signed a deal with a boat company to bring wake-surfing to the festival. I was both shocked and scared. Did we really want the Noosa Festival to be associated with gas-guzzling and noisy speedboats when our primary focus (outside of surfing) is on sustainability?
I didn’t think so, but I was wrong.
The Chaparral Boats Wake Surf Challenge was an absolute hoot, and its ambassador, world wake surfing and skim boarding champion, Austin Keen from Laguna Beach, California, was a star of the festival.
Under Austin’s tutelage, a cross-section of festival competitors, ranging in age from eight to late fifties, learnt the rudiments of this fast-paced satellite sport before competing in an invitational contest, held in Laguna Bay on a beautiful afternoon when the real waves had let us down.
Former world surfing champion Peter Townend and I had a ball commentating on the action out in the water from a packed beach bar.
All of the surfers performed well, including Noosa Malibu Club’s Wally Allan and Glen Gower and young Mitch Peterson, but the honours went to Hawaii’s Honolua Blomfield, who found yet another water sport to master.
The other highlight I’ll mention is the spirit in which the festival was conducted.
Over 30 divisions in longboard, mixed boards, body surfing and stand up paddle, held in conditions that varied from great to testing, and there was rarely a word spoken in anger. Of course, you get the odd blow-up – this is surfing after all. But to get through the biggest surfing event in the world with everyone happy and sharing the stoke, well it’s pretty damn amazing.
Well done surfers, well done sponsors and supporters, and well done hardworking Sam Smith and her staff, and all the volunteers.
Vale Bill Leak
Towards the end of the festival, I got word that Bill Leak had died at 61, just hours after making a great speech to launch a new book of cartoons and being interrupted by Sir Les Patterson. Barry Humphries’ little cameo was a mark of the respect that this great Australian had from so many in the creative community.
I didn’t always agree with the way Bill got his point across, but having known a few of our greatest cartoonists in my journalistic career, starting with Bruce Petty, I understood how edginess was his stock in trade.
I didn’t know Bill well, but we were introduced by a mutual friend, the News Corp journalist Fred Pawle, about 20 years ago, and we enjoyed a few beer and wine drinking sessions at the Evil Star, a journo’s gargle house just around the corner from the offices of The Australian. In person he was as funny and as outrageous as he was in print, a clever man who could cut to the chase with a pithy one-liner.
Bill was a Bondi longboarder whose sons, Jasper and Johannes, were just getting serious about surfing. I told him about the adventures I’d been having in the Mentawais with Captain Martin Daly on the Indies Trader, and he and the boys soon became surf trip regulars, until a fall from the balcony of John Singleton’s farm-house nearly took him out.
And now he’s gone, another good man taken far too early.
RIP Bill.
