How much you gonna pay for a date with the Big Plunger?

I do admire the bullish, can-do attitude of Queensland wavepool company Surf Lakes.

Despite not having a functioning pool, 0r having created a wave over two feet, we’ve read the announcement of their first commercial pool (Gold Coast, opening 2020, waves with “eight-foot faces”) and, today, a charity auction where two people can join the licensees/shareholders at the testing tank in Yeppoon, Central Queensland.

There’s a catch.

You gotta be in the Wollongong area in two days time for the KidzWish annual barbecue, which will host the former world champion surfer Mark Occhilipo who is also a Surf Lakes ambassador and minor shareholder.

KidzWish is a charity in the area whose goal is “to provide support, love and laughter to children in our community who are sick, disadvantaged or have a disability.”

Tickets cost between one hundred and five hundred dollars to get into the Wiseman Park Bowling Club, Gwynneville, on March 1, where the Surf Lakes package will be auctioned.

Now tell me.

You’re at the barbecue, you got a little ink in your veins and you want to take on the Yeppoon Plunger.

Presuming it gets going again, how much you going to throw at a day there?

How much y'gonna pay to avoid the rip and the takeoff at Kirra?

Ain’t nothing Australians like more than blowing whistles, riding car horns and, if a uniform is involved, handing out fines.

And therefore, when surfers used jet skis to avoid the rip and the takeoff during Queensland’s recent cyclone swell called Oma, the cops thought Christmas had arrived early, photographing the ID numbers of jet skis and sending fines in the mail.

Other fineable rules include, not having an observer on the back when you tow or whip and if you’re in partially smooth waters, ie Kirra, not carrying drinking water, a map, a compass and a GPS.

Fines range range from $250 to a mandatory court appearance.

Perhaps this event, from last year, prompted the arrival of the police.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BfW9uGSDds0/?utm_source=ig_embed

Now, some questions.

Do you appreciate it when police officers execute their duties to the letter?

Or does it make your native contempt for authority and for anyone who picks up a badge flourish?

Do you identify as a woman? Do you shred? Do you Instagram?

In a month or thereabouts, the tour is back on the Gold Coast. And if you identify as a woman, or have a suitable pronoun, and you have an engaged gang of Instagram followers, you can be a part of it thanks to event sponsor Boost’s Search For a Wildcard Contest.

Real simple to enter. 

Upload a one-minute clip, surfing, to Instagram. The top ten most-voted clips go into the final. Boost-sponsored surfer Sally Fizgibbons chooses the winner.

Three or so days in and they’ve been four entries, with Isabella Caldow, a fifteen-year-old from Queensland’s Sunshine Coast leading the votes, 100 to 66, two and one.

The concept of giving away a tour event slot ain’t new.

In 1991, Coke offered a wildcard into the main event of the Coca-Cola Surf Classic at Narrabeen in 1991 as the prize for their Classic Wave Competition. The winner, Allan Willis, a bricklayer from surfless Bundaberg in North Queensland, had surfed twice in the previous six months and was recovering from distended vascular structures in his anal canal, which made sitting painful.

Willis lost his heat against Ross Clarke-Jones, although not after causing Ross immense worry, and was awarded a cheque for $1750 and free run of the VIP area.

Glory days.