ATTENTION: Aussie East Coast Bodysurf Competition

What: FLAT ROCK BODY SURFING INVITATIONAL
Where: Newcastle
When: August 11 (back up date Aug 25)
What Time: 7:30am.
Who: The invited few.

The Press Release for the 2012 Competition: all details here.

Press from the 2009 Invitational

Yes

yes yes... we want it. 

Though no complaints here.. with a fine easterly swell and the tides and stars aligned, the local points have been lit up.. I believe I saw one old codger at the Bower on the weekend, sliding locked in the curl for a good 50-100 metre ride, dry hair, and a hand made mega handplane providing a superlative, frictionless slide ...I felt weak and meek as I looked down at the log I'd dragged out with me thinking, "how could I compete with the hordes and their boards in such a competitive lineup?"

.... man up man

....next time nothing but the hand sled.  

Immersion

Tim Bonython makes films about surfing and surf stuff. They are good. They are worth watching. His latest is Immersion.

A wee smattering of bodysurfing in the trailer, including some seal like maritime tom foolery underwater dolphin bodysurfing upside down.. 

The whole thing is worth watching.. 

The Dunlop Hand Surfa - retro plastic

Not that they know it, but this is courtesy of the Surf City exhibition on at the muesum of Sydney at the moment. Surf City: Getting Radical in the 50's, 60's and 70's

The Bondi Warrior>>

Just look at that custom ply...


Theived from Uge at aquabumps. Go check out Aquabumps.

Shark Island>>>>>>>

Yesteryear...

Bodysurfing the notorious cheese grating, ridiculously heavy Shark Island in the 1970's..



From www.bodyboardmuseum.com.au (....the best source for all your flouro, hyper colour, zinc cream 70's and 80's magazine article needs. ..a sick little website.)

...This year

From last weeks uber-swell... the island again..


from www.leahmaclean.com

:::Spotted:::

Strike 2 !

A bodysurfer gets into the annals of Sprout Daily for the second time... more more more !

Sprout Daily...providing a daily chronicle of the surfing life around Manly.

:::Spotted:::

In the deep south of Sydney lies a beach called Bondi.

Snapped by the chronicler of these parts, Eugene of Aquabumps...

...a bodysurfer and his plywood.


Go see www.aquabumps.com... there are also recent photos of Slater who was in town sampling some local sydney 6-8ft slabs last week.

:::::One Picture:::

Two mates. Action. Beards. Fins. Hess Handplanes. Womp.


Borrowed (nicked) from the blog of Brett Caller.
photo by Duncan Mcfarlane, and you can see more on his blog which is full of hearty goodness. Great logging shots as well.

Considering the armada of bluebottles attacking the East Coast right now, I reckon you should check out his surreal series on bluebottles...he manages to make the nasty little f#$kers look sort of beautiful...

::Spotted::

So my local beach is a crowded place..sometimes you can walk from one end to the other across the surfboards without getting your feet wet... and yet bodysurfers are everywhere, shore dump womping, shooting straight down-head down-arms out...life savers training, and a bucket load of old buggers with handplanes shooting across the face...

Sprout Daily , a daily photo log of the goings-on along the beach delivers a daily snapshot of life on the beach...documenting life in the water on one of Sydneys busiest beaches...and there has been a glaring discrepancy so far! No bodysurfers!

Today is the day...finally, the cellophane people get their showing. Nothing spectacular, but its a start!. Come on Barnaby and Murray! More!



I encourage you to go check out their material. Just Bewdiful.

Empty Land

Mid North Coast of NSW, Paradise.

This is still empty land. Just you and the dolphins.

::Reef break Handplaning::

Some of the nicest handplane footage I've seen... bodysurfing a ledgey reef break on the northern beaches of Sydney called LA... I'm told that before body boards and shortboards swept onto the scene it was the old bellyboards/ paipos and bodysurfers that dominated this break...




Its a millpond out there today..but with a 4-6ft swell coming in from the south this week...its time to get limbered up...There is no better xmas present than a good swell...

::Surf - Shooting::

Tanna, Tommy (c1869- ?)
Tommy Tanna, a South Pacific Islander, is widely credited with introducing body surfing, or surf shooting, to Australia in Sydney around 1890. Little is known about Tanna, including his real name and his place of origin. ‘Tommy Tanna’ was a common nickname for any Kanaka male, derived from the fact that a significant proportion of indentured labourers in Australia came from the island of Tanna in the South Hebrides, now part of Vanuatu.
In his recollections, Arthur M Lowe says that Tommy Tanna was employed as a gardener for the Moore family of Manly around the late 1880s and 1890s, where he lived in well-kept quarters at the bottom of the garden at ‘Tramore’, corner of Addison Road and Darley Road. Tanna fished and swam at South Steyne daily before 7am, when beach inspectors enforced the by-laws prohibited daylight bathing. His routine was to check
his self-made, basket, fish traps, put in a rock pool any fish caught, rebait (with rump steak) and reset traps, and then dive from Rocks Point at South Steyne to swim and surf-shoot. Lowe met Tanna through his school friend Eric Moore when he was ten years old, in about 1889, and describes him as follows: ‘He was about 20 odd years of age [in 1889], with a good-looking Islander’s type of face, fairly tall, with an athletic figure, and close crinkly hair’. Tanna taught Lowe and Eric Moore how to shoot waves from the deep water at South Steyne. Lowe wrote that Tanna’s shooting style always involved a degree of swimming, unlike the ‘perfect shooting’ developed later in Manly. Tanna taught others to body surf, including, it is thought, Fred C Williams. Swimming identity Arthur Rosenthal wrote that a South Sea Islander
introduced surf shooting to Williams, who in turn taught a new generation.

Source: Biographical Dictionary for Manly

Wish you were Here

Shooting the Breakers, Manly, circa 1905.
Hall & Co.
Hall & Co. Postcard.

Body surfing at Manly Beach, circa 1905.
Postmarked February 1908.

Info and Photo from www.surfresearch.com.au One of the best websites ever.. go have a look around.

camera on board a handboard.

Killer footage from inside the tube, shot from a lipstick camera mounted on a handboard

>>See the full list of bodysurfing videos here<<

.....To see more on handboards or handplanes, click here.....