By Phil Jarratt
While here in Noosa we’re gearing up for what looks like being an outstanding winter of waves, the nostalgia industry is starting to work itself into a frenzy about the upcoming 50th anniversary of the so-called “Summer of Love”, when Hendrix and Cream played the soundtrack to our naked frolics under the magical blue haze of marijuana smoke.
Already the “where were you?” articles are trickling into the media, designed to send us Baby Boomers into swoons of happy recall.
My own 50th anniversary memory, from my surfing memoir coming soon (August), is somewhat more innocent, but hopefully no less evocative of those golden years.
To my great surprise, my parents agreed to let me go on a surf trip to
Queensland with a group of school friends over the May school holidays.
I suppose at sixteen we were considered old enough to have
some degree of responsibility, but this trip, by train and thumb, offered
limitless opportunity for delinquent behaviour.
Five or six of us caught the train to Sydney with our backpacks and surfboards, then jumped onto the North Coast Mail to Byron Bay.
Our parents thought we were heading straight for Kirra, on the Gold Coast, where an uncle of one of the gang had a holiday apartment we could use, but first we made nuisances of ourselves in Byron, surfing The Pass all day then sleeping off our beer binge in the sandhills of Clark’s Beach until the police moved us on.
The flat at Kirra was a linoleum-floored dump behind the pub, but we didn’t care.
We had a choice of surfing the long rights or the pounding beach break left out in front – this was pre-groynes – and we could drink and play pool at the local, or walk ten minutes to the fleshpots of Coolangatta.
I had been to the Gold Coast only once before since I’d been a surfer, but that had been with my parents back in 1964 when I wouldn’t have known what to look for.
Now I saw endless peeling point breaks that were still relatively uncrowded. The other end of the coast bore the name, but this was the real surfer’s paradise.
I remember being astounded by the length of ride afforded by the points, and the speed with which we found ourselves skating over shallow sandbar sections of the paper-thin waves, so different from anything we had at home. At first I found it tricky to ride the points on my backhand, but by the end of our stay I had mastered the grab-rail, top-turn take-off, which wasn’t pretty,
but saved a lot of swims.
At the end our week at Kirra, the plan was to catch the train home, but Gary Fletcher and I had other ideas.
‘Fletch’ was a quietly spoken guy, but he had an adventurous spirit.
We decided to give Byron Bay another go, figuring that we could still get home at the same time as the others by cashing in our return train tickets and hitchhiking through the night.
The first part of the plan worked brilliantly – we scored great waves
again at The Pass.
The ticket office at the Byron Bay railway station wouldn’t refund our tickets, so we found ourselves sitting by the Pacific Highway at dusk, waiting for a ride with about $3 between us. The only people who seemed willing to pick us up were farmers with filthy utes or tray-back trucks.
It was bitterly cold sitting up there in the night air, and no-one seemed to be going more than a few miles.
By morning – the morning we were supposed to be home – we were sitting by the highway somewhere north of Coffs Harbour when our saviour crested a hill in the distance and slowed as he saw us.
I can’t remember his name, but he was a teacher at Keira Boys High
and a regular in the surf at Brandy’s and Bellambi.
His wife seemed a little uncertain about us as we strapped our boards onto the roof and piled into the back of the Mini Minor, but over the next twelve hours she came around.
Our teacher mate paid for all our pit-stops and dropped us each at our front door, only a day late.
I was immediately grounded for a month!
Tout le monde in Biarritz
My mate Peter “PT” Townend, who is the current coach of the Chinese national surfing team, reports from Biarritz, France that a record 47 nations are competing in this week’s ISA World Surfing Games, including representatives of such surfing hotspots as Turkey and Afghanistan.
In order to meet Olympic standards, there are now 100 member countries in the ISA, I guess that means the 53 members that aren’t fielding a team in France have even less of a chance than the above-mentioned duo.
Still, it made for a colourful opening ceremony, and as competition hots up at la Grande Plage, no doubt we’ll see Brazil, Australia, Hawaii and the USA dominate proceedings.
It was interesting to see officials choose the town beach as the Games venue, rather than the far superior options a short drive to the south or north, presumably so that the mayor and other dignitaries can watch the finals from the comfort of the casino terrace.
And in news just in, PT reports with considerable pride that, although the Chinese girls team was knocked out on the first day, it was not before the heroics of team member Yumo won the hearts of the French crowd.
Yumo needed to be helped from the water after getting smashed in the heavy shorebreak and never making it to the line-up in her first heat.
But undaunted, she managed five waves in her repechage, and came in to a standing ovation.
