Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 426 i Surfing World Magazine

The core of this group has been surfing together since they were kids… but then one day those kids surfed Shipstern Bluff and everything changed. Ever since, that group has chased Shippies on every serious swell, pioneering it and seeing every face of it. The wave has broken them all physically at times but also forged a friendship that led them to find other reefs around Tasmania, some even bigger, sketchier. Year after year they’ve layered these obscene adventures on top of each other. Now, in their thirties and forties, most of them with kids, a boat trip to Indo won’t really cut it. They’re still chasing. That brings us to the autumn just passed. The Tasman was unseasonably warm, which drove a run of swell onto Tasmania’s East Coast.…

Leigh Steven is sitting outside the cabin by the fire, considering the state of the canopy with his quiet, thousand-yard stare. A surf-household name down in Lutruwita/Tasmania, he’s more of an underground legend up here on the mainland. Eloquent, eccentric and formidable in the gentlest of ways, Leigh is a finder of beautiful, remote waves and the most prolific maker of surfboards that wild little island has ever seen — over the past 61 years, he’s shaped more than 15,000 of them, including, back in the day, the first-ever Tasmanian thruster. A true Renaissance bloke, he’s a landscape painter and three-time finalist in the prestigious Glover Prize, he’s lectured in graphic design and taught a generation of island teenagers the finer points of artmaking. He’s a big thinker and a…

JW Are you happy living in Victoria? WL Yes. JW Why? WL I just grew up there, and I guess I like it for that, probably because it’s far away from the “Where it’s happening” type of thing. It’s a place where there is time to think, time to act, and beautiful waves to have. You surf Bells or anywhere in that area through the week, and there are only four guys on the whole coast, you surf till you’re completely shattered, wave after perfect wave as the sun sets and those bold cliffs melt into the sunset. I suppose that’s why, couldn’t be much else. JW Why would living elsewhere restrict you? WL Iguess–the-race, yeah! That tempo that comes from surfing in crowds. It’s a competitive thing. I dislike…

SW I thought I’d start by getting you talking about birds. What do you like about birds and what about birdwatching got you hooked? BM I got introduced to birding at a very young age. I was like eight or nine years old, maybe a little older. My folks travelled around Australia on a bus tour with a bunch of older people and there were a couple of birdwatchers on the trip. There was nothing else to do on the trip because we were in the middle of Australia. It was pretty boring, so Dad bought me a field guidebook on birds, and then on one of the stops, he bought me a pair of binoculars. I got chatting to one of the older guys, and obviously there’s different bird…

Milla didn’t actually start surfing from birth, but she’s been in the water for as long as anyone in her family can remember, and her story, like many, begins with a memory that might not be entirely her own. “I reckon I was like two years old and we were at Tavarua. I was sitting on the front of my dad’s SUP, and it had, like, a little glass window at the bottom and I was sitting in that. That was the first time I’d actually caught waves.” Milla’s voice crackles through the car stereo. She’s driving from the Gold Coast to the Surfing Australia HPC, multitasking. There’s a bit going on in the car. Milla is gloriously unfiltered. Her debut edit, Odyssey featured her now-famous response when asked how…

Harro grew up at Wamberal on the NSW Central Coast, surfing The Bends and eventually the reefs of Forries, Banzai and Terrigal Haven. This was the early ’80s, an era when Ross and Sanga were just emerging, but the Central Coast remained far removed from the surf energy of Sydney and the Gold Coast. The Central Coast guys as a result were never afraid to jump in the car and travel. “You’d just hear the stories from all the older guys who were travelling,” remembers Harro. “Going to Indo or whatever they were getting up to – the waves, the drugs, sex, rock and roll.” Early trips up and down the coast for Harro were done on the smell of an oily rag. “Can you remember when you used to…

Being in rhythm with the ocean is the pinnacle of surfing. It is one of those things you can only know if you’ve experienced it. A connection is formed for a brief moment in time, where everything comes together to reach some sort of higher internal state. Midget Farrelly once wrote, “Well, it’s a kind of jubilation. It’s hard to explain, but that’s how it is. Sometimes you reach a point of being so coordinated, so completely balanced, that you feel you can do anything… anything at all.” He goes onto say, “Sometimes, if you are at the very peak of your form and the waves are right, you can go even further.” Our timing was good. I’d just switched on J-Bay as the semifinal between Filipe Toledo and Connor…

Creed McTaggart and I sit at a long table in the centre of the beer garden. Soft autumn sunlight filters through the gum tree canopy in the distance. Smoke from a controlled forest burn creates an atmospheric haze. There is an easiness to the afternoon, given by the tender, calm weather so rare for Margaret River. Rare because there is almost always some element of the weather out-of-place enough to make your skin itch. It’s always a little bit hot, a little bit cold, a little bit windy, a little bit dry, a little bit wet. The calm weather is not affecting Creed, however. He’s just calm. His younger half-sister Bella has recently given birth to her first child, and he’s come to the west to visit. At 30, he…

I’d hazard a guess that most surfers who feast on the bounty of the North Coast pointbreaks don’t give much of a thought to the volcano that created the beautifully shaped fingers of rock that reach out into the ocean. Millions of years after they were first created these headlands lined by smooth cobblestones have become etched into the collective consciousness of surfers across the world for the quality of the pointbreaks they’ve created. These places hold an integral place in the history of Australian surfing. Among them sits Lennox Point — a place that has captivated some of the most astute surfing minds. From Greenough and Brock to Rastovich and Glindeman, the quality of waves Lennox produces has informed decades of design and style in equal measure. Countless surfers…