“Surfing is no longer a youth sport inextricably tied to youth culture.”

A landmark study just released by Bond University, Australia’s first private college and named after a notorious swindler, has revealed surfing ain’t the plaything of kids anymore. 

Craig Sims, who is a former South African pro surfer turned magazine publisher and university academic (he has a PHD in Media Studies from Bond), says the peak participation age for men is 45-to-49 (I added the bit about CIS and white in the headline…clickbait etc… you understand) and 35-to-44 for gals. 

“This clear and present aging trend forces us to accept an important and far-reaching statement: Surfing is no longer a youth sport inextricably tied to youth culture. Failing to accept this statement will result in surf brands missing out on forging a meaningful connection with a significant and growing segment of their market.”

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. 

A few  weeks back I went to the premiere of The Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe, the most significant thing to happen culturally in Australian surfing since Kai Neville’s films, and the cinema was a sea of polished skulls and silver manes, paunches harnessed by Quiksilver tees. So many wizened winter apples. The median age, at a guess, would’ve been sixty.

In lineups, there’s a few kids here and there, mostly tweenies getting pushed into waves by their daddies, but the absence of teens marauding the surf is stark. 

The ageing of the sport next to the influx of late-starting kooks ’cause of COVID and the rise of the murfer has enormous implications for the surf industry, says Sims. 

“There’s…potential for surf tourism operators to tap into a whole new breed of customer by accommodating travel demand from unskilled surfers who don’t have the proficiency to handle the hollow and shallow reef breaks typically associated with remote or exotic surf locations.”

Even wave pool operators have to cool their jets ’cause their customers are either old, incapable or both.

 “Most wave parks have the capacity to create technically challenging waves, yet they tend to only offer these settings in the very early and late part of their operating hours and the bulk of their day is dedicated to novice and intermediate settings.”

You’ll remember a couple of years back when the organisers of a surfing contest in New Zealand were been forced to add a new age-group after an eighty-year-old kneeboarder signed up. To accommodate older surfers, those aged seventy-five to seventy-nine, there now exists the division, “Immortals”.

All very interesting, of course, although I doubt I would go near surfing if I was twelve again, such is its decline from wild, atavistic man-against-the-elements lifestyle to its current Surfline Man goes to Surf Ranch incarnation.

Where do you stand? Is surfing a declining sport for old men and relatively aged gals or does it stand on the precipice of a great renaissance, rebirth etc?

"I was sent straight to the trauma ward. My ribs were badly broken, one lung was partially collapsed, the other wasn't working."

Last Saturday, the shaper and former pro Dylan Longbottom was gifted a front-row seat to his mortality after being driven chest-first into a limestone pinnacle at a wave he, and others, describe as the heaviest in Australia. 

Longbottom, who is forty-nine, is, or at least was, on a slab-hunting tour of the world with his preternaturally talented twenty-year-old daughter Summa. A few weeks back they were at Shipsterns in Tasmania, which was followed by Victoria and, last week, a detour to South Australia.

It was Dylan’s hard-charging brother Daz, who busted his neck on an Indo trip fifteen years ago and wound up in a chair, who let me know his little bro was in hozzy.

So I call Dylan, who’s in fine spirits, despite being surrounded by people in ICU who’ll never make it out of hospital alive, to hear his wild story.

“Well, first,” he says, “it was a big day. Huge period. Eighteen seconds. The biggest slabs. The gnarliest slab in Australia. I was with Kip Caddy, Nathan Florence and (Moroccan big-waver) Jerome Sahyoun and they all agreed. It was six-to-ten feet, some twelve, maybe fifteen-footers. I towed Jerome into a bunch, then Noa Deane and Harry Bryant who were down there. Then it was my turn. I got one and it turned into a mutant. I was already committed, I had my line, going for it, and it gurgled out and I fell right at the bottom. Worst spot. On the biggest wave of the day. I got sucked over the falls and then first impact I didn’t hit but on the second impact I got impaled on a limestone pinnacle. It’s not flat there, it’s like Pipeline. I landed right on my chest and, through my impact suit, I blew out my ribcage and punctured my lung. I didn’t know, I was just out of breath. I was… struggling… for breath and in a world of pain. Kip and Jerome came and saved me. That was it, one and done.”

Even so, Dylan didn’t wanna end the sesh and it was only an intervention from Sahyoun that kept him out of the water. The sight of her old boy on the sidelines wheezing didn’t deter his little gal Summa who told him, “I’ll be sweet Dad”,  but Sayhoun told her, “You’re not surfing today.” 

Blown lung, ribs shattered. What’d Dylan do? Busted the necks of a few coldies and gulped a handful of the anti-inflammatory Nurofen he found in a kitchen draw at their rental. 

“You’d never know he was so injured,” says the filmmaker Tim Bonython, “After the wipeout the painkillers and beers were  making him feel okay.” 

That night, he “woke up in a world of pain. I struggled. I took my painkillers, had a few more beers” and sat in a lounge chair until dawn when they went back to the wave and Summer got her desired bombs. 

What followed was an overnight twelve-hour drive to the South Australian capital Adelaide, which included a brief chase by the cops with Moroccan Sahyoun unsure of what to do when police lights are flashed, and a two-hour flight to Sydney.

Dylan’s been belted around in big waves before so he knows injuries. And he figured, busted ribs, maybe a cracked sternum, nothing a doctor can do, just gotta ride it out.

Still, he went to his local GP who sent him for x-rays where the extent of his injuries were revealed.

“I was sent straight to the trauma ward, my ribs were badly broken like in a car crash, and tubes were put in my lungs to drain ’em. One lung was partially collapsed, the other wasn’t working. Doc said I was lucky to survive the flight ’cause of the pressure. I could’ve gone into cardiac arrest.”

After surgery on Friday, Dylan spent the weekend in ICU but today he’s been released to recuperate at home, two months or thereabouts out of the water, but he reckons he’ll be able to shape, slowly, maybe two sleds a day.

The obvious question to ask, I suppose, is if this can happen to him, does he worry about his kid pushing not only her own limits but the boundaries of the sport?

“It’s heavy, bro,” he says. “It’s worrying but then it’s rewarding at the same thing. It’s hard to explain. People ask me, how do you do it, but the week before this, we were at Shipsterns and she got the craziest one and she was actually smiling while she was on the wave. She loves it. She has no fear. I always try to drop her right on the edge, not too deep, not in a bad zone and I get her in early. But she’s been doing it for a long time now, she surfed Nazaré when she was thirteen. She knows how to take a beating. She’s the only girl chasing class. She towed Teahupoo three weeks ago on a big swell.”

Still, a daddy is a daddy.

“It’s your daughter and you don’t want anything to go wrong but at the same time when you see how much enjoyment and fulfilment she gets from her adventuring it’s so good. It’s living life to the max and you’re doing with your daughter. She loves it and I love it. We’re going on adventures around the world, and it’s not just about the waves, the ride’s the bonus, but having fun in between. It’s the best time.”

“This ’v’ of water came streaming towards us and this tiger shark leapt at the boat and bit huge holes in it."

Almost an ironic end, I suppose, for a film crew shooting the latest instalment of Only Planet, the four-part documentary series narrated by the great biologist Davey Attenborough, still kicking, remarkably, at almost one hundred. 

The Netflix crew were set upon by two fifteen-foot tiger sharks while filming in Laysan, one of the northwestern Hawaiian islands and almost one thousand miles from Honolulu.

“This ’v’ of water came streaming towards us and this tiger shark leapt at the boat and bit huge holes in it,” the nature show’s director Toby Nowland told the Radio Times. “The whole boat exploded. We were trying to get it away and it wasn’t having any of it. It was horrific. That was the second shark that day to attack us.”

The little inflatable boats the crew were using to film from had just enough air left in ‘em to get back to the beach. 

“They were incredibly hungry, so there might not have been enough natural food and they were just trying anything they came across in the water,” said Nowland. 

The original plan was to shoot the tigers from underwater but, as series producer Huw Cordey told Forbes, “It was like something out of Jaws. The crew was panicked, and basically made an emergency landing on the sand.”

Tigers have been getting wild in Hawaii over the past few years, with four attacks so far in 2023 including a surfer whose right foot was bitten off and the death of a snorkeler from Washington State in December.

Not all encounters with tigers end in catastrophic injury.

You must remember the moment last November when marine biologist Ocean Ramsey almost climbed into the mouth of a feisty tiger. The optics, as they say, were spectacular though the risk of injury, as it turned out, was low. 

“I was actually overjoyed to see her, especially that particular individual shark. We call her Queen Nikki and I have grown up with her, we were teenagers at the same time,” Ramsey said at the time. “We have had so many beautiful interactions with her over the years and sharks are so important. They are wild animals. They are apex predators, but they’re not monsters.”