“It’s often swift, savage, brutal. Surf rage (is) an ugly plague on our city’s beaches!”

A few weeks back, we thrilled to a wild melee at Snapper Rocks when a surfer rained hellfire on a kid bodyboarder who dropped in on him only to get a beatdown from a former pro booger who dispensed a righteous right hook, a difficult manoeuvre while prone.

Now, following the incident, and a few thousand others like it, the Gold Coast City Council, which runs the beaches from Coolangatta through to the Spit, is considering implementing draconian measures, including segregated surf zones, as a circuit breaker ‘tween kook and experienced surfer.

“If you don’t know how to surf, you’re just learning, here’s an area for learners,” Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate told 7News. “Different zones for different surfers.”

Many challenges for council, howevs.

Who assesses the surfer’s skill before he paddles out at Snapper? And is the expert given free reign behind the rock while the beginner sits near a buoy at Little Marley? And, most waves on the GC are pretty dang easy to surf. Hawaii or Tahiti, it ain’t.

Crucially, is the Australian temperament unsuited to such a measure? 

“I don’t know if there’s a way to stop it,” says one wise teen surfer. “It’s Australia. There’s a lot of angry people.”

Surf police are unlikely, reports 7, although signs may be affixed along the coast advising learners which beaches to avoid or enjoy etc.

Watch report here. 

"The first heat Kelly and I ever surfed against each other was 38 years ago, when were 12 years old!"

To the surprise of no-one, Kelly Slater has dominated the opening stanza of the invitation-only Four Seasons Maldives Surfing Champions Trophy 2022, stomping former tour buddies Taylor Knox, Rob Machado, Ross Willims and local wildcard Hussain “Iboo” Areef in the single fin division.

The contest runs over three days. Single fins. Twins. Thrusters. Twenty-five gees to the winner.

Fifty-year-old Slater, who finished third at the Outerknown Tahiti Pro in ten-foot waves last week and who is the current world number fifteen, made short work of the Momentum Gen, including one-time arch-rival Rob Machado.

“I feel like I learned a lot about how to place my turns better and more subtly, and not try to force things,” Slater said. “Whereas on a high-performance board you’re always trying to force the most radical change of direction you can. I think a single-fin is great for your style and your flow.”

Shane Dorian, also fifty, said, “This year is extra special because we all have been best friends for three decades, almost four decades. The first heat Kelly and I ever surfed against each other was 38 years ago, when were 12 years old! It’s cool to have grown up together and surfed a bunch of heats together and travelled the world with each other. It’s just so cool to be here with our little group of friends, and to be here with Iboo as well, surfing with and against each other.”

"I kinda wish…the Phil Perrys of the world, the Perry Danes, the Johnny Boys would come back and sort that lineup out, man." 

One of the better stories of modern surfing is the relationship of Kelly Slater, a preternaturally talented kid from the little waves of Florida, with Oahu’s North Shore, the fabled seven-mile miracle.

Faced with the choice of becoming a world champion who shied away from big waves, Slater bit down on every fear he ever had to become the greatest surfer ever, a three-time Triple Crown winner, Eddie winner, a seven-time Pipe Master, if you include last December’s Pipeline Pro.

In the final episode of Slater’s 11-part Lost Tapes series, filmed over the course of the 2019 tour, we’re in Hawaii, where Slater has been spending every December since he was fourteen, and where he now keeps two houses, one of which you can rent for $US46,000 per month.

He doesn’t win Pipe in this instance, that goes to the world champ Italo Ferreira, but he does scoop up the Triple Crown.

The episode warms up when Slater talks about the crumbling of Pipeline’s infamous hierarchy.

“My biggest goal was to have a prominent spot in the lineup at Pipeline,” he says. “I never felt like I deserved a wave. There was a hierarchy out there you didn’t just break into. Nowadays you go out there and it’s four foot and there’s sixty guys. When I was a kid out there, you really had to put your time in there. Guys were getting kicked out of the water, fins broken, guys were getting slapped in the head. I kinda wish that hierarchy, the Phil Perrys of the world, the Perry Danes, the Johnny Boys would come back and sort that lineup out, man.”