Although I’m sure it barely rates a blip on the Tracks reader radar, the recently-held Noosa Festival of Surfing has more competitors than just about any surfing event in the world. And when it is held in optimum swell conditions – as it has been for the last three years – it tends to create the most perfect crowd storm seen outside of Snapper Rocks.
The confluence of competitors from around the world (more than 600), recreational surfers drawn by the swell, and those folks (let’s not call them groupies) who are drawn like moths to a light globe to places where it’s cool to be seen, together create havoc in and out of the water.
From where I sit, it is a kind of happy havoc, and when long-time locals complain about it, I usually respond, well it only lasts for a week. But in fact, the “8 days of pure stoke”, as some advertising wizard dubbed it, starts to gather momentum at least a week before the festival and continues at least another week after it, or until the swell dies.
For those not familiar with the festival, and I’m assuming that’s most of you, while traditional longboarding is its heart and soul, it incorporates just about every alt.surfing activity you could think of, including bad-ass drinking games. Retro single fins and dapper logs abound, and on the five points every surfcraft from hand-planes and alaias to tandem boards compete for wave space.
Into this melee, in recent years we have had an influx of ubercool filmers with bushranger beards and funny bumcrack shorts wheeling their camera trolleys out along the coast trail, followed by hordes of this year’s heroes, usually lithe girls and hirsute chaps who weigh less than their surfboards.
Noosa has been targeted as a make-believe Nirvana where the truly photogenic frolic in a bucolic wonderland between sessions riding their logs at perfect point breaks no one else knows about. This was a fairy tale in the 1960s when Paul Witzig covered Noosa in Hot Generation, and it is a fairy tale today. Only the drugs have changed. But if you check out any of the last half dozen or so “cool” surf movies, you will see the same story (and many of the same faces). These little fantasies are made on the smell of an oily rag, so not surprisingly the filmers come to Noosa at festival time to take advantage of the fact that all of the best traditional surfers in the world are already in town.
This is simply film-maker economics in the Youtube era, but it’s been getting right up the nose of many recreational surfers, some of whose complaints have reached my desk. “Maybe the festival organisers need to remind these guys and girls to show respect to other surfers,” said one irate old-timer. “Just because they are professionals photographed for magazines or have been in surf movies does not exempt them from surfing etiquette…”
Wrote another: “I am forced to send you this after my experience at National Park this morning…We were repeatedly dropped in on by a bunch of young blokes who were having photos taken. They were blokes who had surfed in the contest and should have displayed a little more of the spirit of surfing than they did. Not only did they drop in, they waited until we were well involved in sections and still went, thus spoiling the wave. This is just disrespect…”
The issue that both surfers raise is that the offenders were being photographed and filmed and therefore seemed to assume that others should vacate their “studio” or suffer the consequences. This is not new. When places like Noosa and Crescent were actually relatively “undiscovered”, can you imagine the reception Evo, Paul and Albe got when they set up their cameras while Nat went out to “share” a few with the locals! And today, no matter how much you paid for your resort room or boat ride, the same thing can happen from HTs to Sultans and beyond.
In my experience, most film crews are polite and genial, but there are exceptions. And as my correspondents found, there are no bit parts for old fart recreational surfers.