By Phil Jarratt
ANOTHER week, another road trip. This time down the coast last week for meetings in Sydney and to catch up with some old friends along the way.
My idea was to jump in for a surf wherever I found it along the way, so I dusted off the 3:2 steamer and threw it in the car.
So far I haven’t needed it, with beautiful spring weather and water temperatures surprisingly mild.
At Byron I scored a few fun beachies along the Belongil strip, but since then it’s been getting flatter the further south we go.
As compensation, Valla Beach turned on a spectacularly beautiful morning for a refreshing swim in the cool, clear, lake-like conditions.
At his nursing home in Coffs Harbour, we found pioneer surfboard manufacturer Scott Dillon as chipper as ever.
I smuggled a couple of beers in for us to drink while we watched some of our film, Men of Wood and Foam, which features Scotty in his glory days.
Sipping his beer in a comfy chair, Scotty stared in awe and amazement as this handsome stranger, his younger self, dropped down the face at the Bare Island bombora more than half a century ago.
In Sydney I am showing the film to all of the “grand old men of Brookvale” who star in it.
Surprisingly, given how much foam dust they’ve inhaled over the years, all of the original Brookvale Six are still soldiering on in their eighties and nineties.
When we started filming with some urgency just over a year ago, we never imagined that one of the younger interviewees would be the first to go.
Over a coffee with old mate Jack McCoy, high above Pittwater at his Clareville home, we discussed Midget Farrelly’s passing last month and his incredible send-off at Palm Beach a few weeks ago.
Like me, Jack drifted in and out of Midget’s favour, but never lost his respect for him as a surfer and surfboard designer.
Not at his best in crowds these days, Jack watched the memorial paddle-out from the Bible Garden, a little-known hideaway above Palmy, from which vantage point he took the accompanying photographs of a memorable farewell.
The caravan moves on. Now we’re in the ‘Gong, taking care of some family business, where I plan to rush out and surf one of my boyhood breaks as soon as I’ve pressed send on this, and then it’s back to Sydney for more meetings before the trip back up the coast in time for a 70th celebration. (Happy birthday, Rick Cooper, our business partner back in the Noosa Blue days of the previous century. Don’t look a day over 69!)
Frenchies take the gold
Meanwhile, on Sao Miguel Island in the Portuguese Azores (which sounds like a cue for a dirty joke, but isn’t), the surfing world has been tipped on its axis by France pipping Australia at the post to take out the gold medal at the 2016 ISA World Junior Surfing Championships.
The ISA announced: “The team gold medal is the first for France in the history of the ISA World Junior Surfing Championship and the first in the Olympic Surfing era.”
France overtook Australia in the overall team rankings on the second-last day of competition and didn’t let go on finals day. Team Australia finished with the silver medal, Team Hawaii with the bronze medal and Team Japan with the copper medal. And to rub salt into the wound, none of the Aussie young guns could manage an individual gold either.
Surfing has been hugely popular in France for 60 years, since the screenwriter Peter Viertel (actress Deborah Kerr’s husband) introduced it while filming The Sun Also Rises just across the Pays Basque border in San Sebastian, but the French have produced very few world class competitors over the years.
Of the bunch of kids that Gary “Kong” Elkerton and I used to cart around Europe to compete in junior events a dozen years ago, only Jeremy Flores has made a real mark on the world tour.
Maybe taking out the world juniors in such emphatic style will create a new impetus to succeed in the “Olympic surfing era”, which is, of course, a rather grand way of describing surfing’s recently-granted status as an exhibition sport at Tokyo 2020, where competitors from more than 50 countries might well find themselves competing in a Kelly Slater Wave Pool.
Incidentally, 39 countries – a new record – competed in the world juniors in the Azores, with that well-known surfing mecca Denmark finishing last. Land-locked Poland and Austria were only a couple of places higher, but Russia, whose surfers learn to surf by dropping in on each other in Bali, finished a creditable 31st.
