"Hey, you should go be with all the cool guys..."

Our World Surf League leadership has done an absolutely incredible job mocking the pastime it seeks to promote.

Who could forget the money, and co-Waterperson of the Year Dirk Ziff coined the phrase “grumpy locals,” his co-Waterperson of the Year, and wife, Natasha, calling the same group “grumpy traditionalists.”

Then there was the legendary Beth Greve, the League’s Chief Commercial Officer, who made herself a household name by innovating by somehow inserting her surfboard fins backwards.

Backward Fin Beth, lauded by dairy ranch hands and Pulitzer Prize winners alike.

Now, of course, we have Chief Executive Officer Erik “ELo” Logan who rides a standup paddle board, singlehandedly destroyed the just-re-launched 2020/21 Championship Tour by contracting Covid-19 in Hawaii but also used to put his wetsuit on backwards too.

He was recently a guest on the Health Gig podcast where he said, “Moved to Manhattan Beach (California) and bought a house five blocks away from the beach. Now, go back in time, Chuck the Duck, landlocked kid from Oklahoma who wouldn’t even go into a lake if I couldn’t see my feet. It’s like, ‘If I can’t see the bottom, I’m not going in.’ And so, my wife at the time bought me a wetsuit when I was 41, for my 41st birthday as kind of a joke. It was sort of like, ‘Hey, you should go be with all the cool guys…’ so I put the wetsuit on, put it on backwards of course like most people do, zipper goes in the back, not in the front, it’s a great picture. So I put the wetsuit on and walked into the ocean…”

Fabulous but is it really true that most people put on wetsuits backwards for the first time?

Is this a truism of our little world?

I saw a frustrated younger 20ish boy sitting on the beach, two years ago, with his wetsuit on backwards but this is the only example in-the-wild I can recall.

Are there more at your local?

Most at Manhattan Beach?

Much to ponder.

Slice of history to be bulldozed to make way for "standout family home."

In 1920, a modest wooden house was built at number 10 Goodwin Terrace, Burleigh Heads, a joint typical of the period, elevated to snatch northerly breezes, a covered wrap-around balcony to shelter from the pretty damn relentless Gold Coast sun.

Six decades later, as man-on-man surfing was being debuted at the Stubbies Pro by Peter Drouyn, the house was sold for $48,936 and occupied thereafter, and for many years, by the winner of the 1980 Stubbies, Burleigh Heads local and the town’s postman, Peter Harris.

(Correction: An overnight email from John Lambert, the great-grandson of the man who built the house, reveals Stubbies winner Harris actually lived in the joint next door and that the house wasn’t sold in 1977, despite records suggesting otherwise, but was bequeathed to his dad from his great aunt that year. Lambert writes, “Because of our ongoing Burleigh connections & friends, this article hits all my family’s social media and its pretty insulting to read something so woefully researched and ludicrous in its sloppy facts. We have to deal with the fact its being knocked down and then also deal with your fiction! C’est la vie!”)

Now, a little after the hundredth anniversary of the house’s build, the iconic surf shack has traded for seven-million dollars, almost two-and-a-half mill more than it sold for in 2016.

The couple who bought the joint had been trying to buy it for the past three years. After the last refusal by the owner to sell, the pair bought a six-mill penthouse a little further down the street.

The agent that sold ‘em the penthouse then  convinced the owner of 10 Goodwin to sell ‘em the house, too, for seven mill.

A nice little pair of boltholes, although the historic house is gonna be bulldozed to make way for a “standout family home.”

Once one of the grittier parts of the Gold Coast, third in shittiness behind Coolangatta and perennial winner Palm Beach, has been transformed into a paradise for investors, including the Chinese man who bought the Old Burleigh Theatre Arcade, the former home of Surfing Life magazine, for eighteen-mill.

A slice of bucolic heaven.

The Western Australian surf great Taj Burrow is one of the few high-profile shredders from the nineties who didn’t invest his formidable bankroll in hookers, Balinese bars and coke.

Instead, Burrow, who will turn forty-three in June, has squandered his fortune building a property portfolio that includes a Tuscan-inspired villa overlooking Mackenzies Bay in Tamarama, Sydney, bought for 2.3 mill and valued six years later at four-mill and, now, eleven acres of bucolic loveliness fifteen minutes from Yallingup’s white-sand beaches and unforgiving reefs.

The property, bought in November for a million dollars, was marketed as the “perfect blank canvas for your new dream home.” 

Right now, the joint has a shed that’s been converted to a house as well as a small dam. 

Burrow’s principal residence is the award-winning “nautilus shell” house in Wardanup Crescent, Yalls, aka “millionaire’s row” by architect Dane Richardson. The property was bought for two-milll in 2004 and the new place was built in 2011, winning the overall Design Excellence Award at the 2012 Building Designers Australia WA.

“I pushed through with many questions but the owner travels most of the year and was young without family so it was hard to pin down exactly what was required. The brief then developed to include a small pool, a lot of storage space, small home office, games room large enough for pool table and a large open fire place for ambiance,” Richardson told Architect and Design.  “The master bathtub was positioned to have a commanding view of the clients favourite surf break. This was managed by loading our 3D model into Google Earth and tweaking the alignment of this particular window to the surf break. Another nice touch was to include a roof top deck; this is a small space sitting high on the concrete roof deck, fully exposed but an incredibly dramatic space for the old glass of wine.”

Neighbours still recall, fondly, the demolition of the old place.

“He had a pretty nice place before, but he knocked that one down. He had a demolition party and everyone came around with sledgehammers and knocked the walls down,” neighbour Candice McKiernan said.