Table of contents for Issue 592 in Tracks

We left the courtyard as the full moon descended over Casa do Correira and the church clock pealed six. Polished cobblestones reflected the moonlight back into the pre-dawn air as we sat on a bench, waited for our lift to the coast and ate the bread rolls we had bought at the airport the night before. Headlights round the bend announcing the arrival of fellow Cornishman, Patch Wilson, who deftly navigates his large campervan into the narrow lanes of the Portuguese village of Raposeira. A niggling knee injury had laid rest to his big wave aspirations for the season back in his adopted home in West Ireland. Freed from his self-imposed expectations of what a winter surf season should be, Patch decided to swerve the Irish winter’s unremitting darkness. Instead,…

On March 9th, I caught a late flight to Bali, where I was to launch the book ‘Grajagan – Surfing in the Tiger’s Lair’ by Mike Ritter (‘Thai Stick’) and Jack McCoy. Arriving at the greatly expanded Ngurah Rai around midnight, I cleared Customs and loaded two bags bulging with books into a taxi and headed off into the night towards Bingin. My last visit to the Bukit (meaning ‘hill’ in Indonesian) was in 1980 so I was expecting change. The endless line of shops and houses passing in the monochrome gloom was my first clue. Daylight confirmed that the Bukit I remembered had virtually disappeared. Forty years ago, this large 140-square-kilometre limestone peninsula dangling off Bali’s southern extremity, was a world of its own. Only a sliver of land…

It is 9 am, the 20 May 2010 and Damien ‘Damo’ Pears should be at work as a Customs Border Protection officer. Instead, he is staring at an all-white ceiling, blaring theatre lights and four pairs of eyes in protective glasses. The room is alive with moving caps, gowns and booties. A new mask arrives at the operating table, pauses and then peers down at him. The mask asks a couple of questions and utters words of encouragement, “You’ll feel a small prick and fall asleep…” Three days earlier, Damo was on holiday chasing 3-5’ waves with four unknown surfers at an isolated beach north of Newcastle. The weather was less than inviting; cold, dark, overcast and squawly. After a two-hour session, Damo caught his last ride and the whitewash…

I FIRST SAW PHOTOS OF WAVE ROCK, LOCATED AT HYDEN, WA, ABOUT 300 KM EAST OF PERTH, WHEN I WAS JUST A KID. IT BLEW MY MIND, BUT IT WASN’T UNTIL 2013 THAT I FINALLY SAW IT IN THE FLESH. MY WIFE, TRACEY, AND ME WERE IN THE MIDDLE OF OUR BIG LAP OF OZ, AND ONCE WE WERE IN WA I INSISTED WE MAKE THE DRIVE OUT THERE FROM THE COAST. It didn’t disappoint, in fact it is more awesome than I’d ever imagined. At 15 metres high and 110 metres long, the wave is immense, looming over you with its thick granite lip that has been just about to barrel for 2700 million years. As a surfer, it is impossible not to chuck a tube stance at the…

01 LIGHTBOX SURFER: CROSBY COLAPINTO PHOTO: JOLI It’s one of the time-honoured traditions of pro-surfing. Having failed to make it through to the finals you proceed to upstage anyone left in the event by pulling into throaty barrels on the bank adjacent to the contest site. On this occasion it’s Crosby Colapinto playing limelight thief as he stands tall beneath a baseball-bat-shaped barrel at Narrabeen’s Carpark Rights. It was finals day at the GWM Sydney Pro Challenger series event and although Crosby had been eliminated from the contest he was determined to leave an impression. When this shot was taken the event organisers were still oscillating over the decision to green-light the contest. While the administrators mulled over their predicament, Crosby, and a handful of surfers including local tube hounds,…

Bob Cooper was a celebrated and well-liked surfing beatnik, known for his free thinking approach to shaping, his fabulously full beard and Mormon convictions. Cooper was originally from California, but moved to Australia in 1969 and set up shop in Coffs Harbour for the next quarter of a century. The ad copy here from the very first issue of Tracks – October of 1970. There were half a dozen different ads for board makers in the first issue of Tracks and each label strived to come up with a novel way of capturing the fleeting attention of surfers. Here we see Cooper applying a typically lateral approach to his operations in an attempt to snag a few surfers driving past his Coffs shaping Bay as they headed up the east…

AS AN EMERGING ROCK BAND YOU NEVER KNOW WHEN FATE MIGHT TAKE A PROMISING TURN. Gully Days had just played an eventful gig at a subterranean bar on Sydney’s city fringes. Things had gotten a little raucous – crowd-surfing band members, slam dancing friends, and fans screaming the band’s catchy lyrics – regular sort of stuff. Anyway, by the time the gig finished the floor was covered in glass and the joint was a mess. Not that the band had encouraged any kind of bad behaviour, this was just a young crowd letting off a little post-pandemic steam. But shortly after the show, the manager told the salt-riddled quartet they’d never play at the club again. The four Sydney surfers were bummed but then a couple of weeks later, after…

Legends, Heroes, Gods or Monsters? The Bad-Boys of Australian Surfing and Why They Self-Destruct. This issue: Bobby Brown, Kevin Brennan and Keith Paull. When Chris Davidson died last year, after being punched out and smashing his head on the pavement outside the South West Rocks Country Club, he joined a prestigious lineage of brilliant but cursed Australian male surfers who have self-destructed. Although not everyone in this ‘club’ has died, they have all been shooting stars, if even for only a brief moment in time. The role they play in the vast narrative of the Australian surfing world is that of the archetypal rebel, crossbred with an Icarusian man-child. They live their lives at full throttle and often die tragically. Australian surfers love an out-of-control rebel. Particularly if they surf…

What would you name as the most significant event in the history of surfing? The move from prone to upright? The addition of the fin? Gidget? Kelly Slater’s Baywatch cameo? For shaper Tom Wegener, PhD and author of ‘Surfboard Artisans’, it was a farm animal-named design that changed the game. I interviewed Tom at length, along with a handful of other shapers, surfers and physicists, during the making of my short film ‘The Physics of Noseriding’. To understand how noseriding is physically possible, which is the central question of the film, it felt essential to also ask: Why? Why do we walk forward on longboards? Who got us to this point in design and performance? As both a renowned shaper and noseriding aficionado of ‘Siestas & Olas’ and ‘Sprout’ fame,…

WHEN BILL DELANEY AND HIS WIFE VICTORIA WERE FILMING THEIR ICONIC FILM, ‘FREERIDE’, IN THE MID-LATE 70S, THE NORTH SHORE BECAME THE SETTING FOR DAILY SURF DUELS. CONTEST VICTORIES WERE VALUED BUT BRAGGING RIGHTS IN THE FREE SURFS WERE EVEN MORE PRIZED. BELOW, SHAUN TOMSON REFLECTS ON THOSE HEADY TIMES. “On the North Shore, you wanted to be the hottest guy, you wanted to have the word out like, ‘He’s the hottest dude. He’s the hottest surfer out there’”. And we were all gunning for that – MR and Rabbit and Ian Cairns – And then the Hawaiians were amazing. I mean Dane Kealoha was one of the greatest of all time and Michael Ho. It was like the power group, you know what I mean? Yeah, the power guys.…

Scan to watch Nathan Oldfield in Artisans Nathan Oldfield hasn’t stopped gazing at the ocean since he first set eyes on it as a boy. After spending his early childhood in the Blue Mountains, his family’s decision to move to the Central Coast in pursuit of new beginnings set the course for an award-winning filmmaking career that has spanned two decades. Growing up watching his dad and uncles shape and surf their own boards, Oldfield was spellbound by their backyard quests and immediately knew he was destined to be a surfer. It wasn’t long before Nathan was on the same DIY trajectory, shaping boards and fixing dings. Always a keen observer of his environment, Nathan soon picked up a camera and elected to look at subjects from the frame of…

In the early 1980s, when professional surfing was just starting to grow, Billabong founder, Gordon Merchant, made a special pair of board shorts for Gold Coast surfing legend Michael Peterson. He wanted MP to showcase this new ‘old style’ of boardies. These were a blast from the past and very different than Tom Carroll’s modern tight-fitted Quiksilver shorts. They were looser and much longer in the leg than what everyone else was wearing at the time. Gordon Merchant was re-inventing old fashion. But MP never wore those long black board shorts gifted to him. Instead, he handed this custom-made garment to me, brand new. I wore them proudly every day, and not long after something really nice happened in the waves for which I am forever thankful. This story of…

It was a risky proposition. Skipper of the Mangalui, Matt Cruden, looked at the Mentawai forecast and spied a bump in swell some four days into the future. His all-star crew included Dave Rastovich, OzzieWright, Craig Anderson, Ry Craike, Dean Morrison, Chris ‘Morat’ Del Moro and Ben Godwin. Captain Cruden had always wanted to explore the setups on one, particular distant island. He’d been there before but never in optimal conditions and he sensed his well-seasoned posse of pros might be inclined to take a punt on his hunch. And so began a four-day quest into unchartered surfing waters on the whim of a captain who’d garnered the support of a confederacy of world-class surfers. By the time they reached their destination, they’d played bongos and ukuleles, practised yoga, snorkled…