Ballina Information Blog

Southern Cross K-12 teacher Steve Watts, pictured, has been surfing for almost 40 years and has been instrumental in surfing becoming established as a legitimate school sport. He will be a key organiser of the Australian national schools championships to be held at Ballina later this month. Here he tells of his surfing life …

In the late 1960s at 12 years of age I was invited to have a go at surfing at Cronulla Beach by a relative of a relative. On that eventful Saturday I rode 30km on my push bike for the opportunity to be smashed and tumbled on the surging shore break.

With virtually no tuition I was at the mercy of the ocean and the elements. Despite this brutal initiation I fell in love with surfing and I vowed that one day I would learn to surf .

At 13, when in High School, I purchased a second-hand seven-foot Jackson surfboard for $20 to engage my passion to learn to surf.

Surfing in those days had a fairly negative social stigma attached to it and as a consequence nothing in surfing came easy for me or my friends. Just getting to the beach was an ordeal in itself.

Most weekend mornings I would rise early and walk the 1.6km to Allawah Railway Station with my board, surf gear and breakfast in hand. Once at the railway station other surfers and myself would board the all-stations train ride to Cronulla. Train fares were reasonable for school students in those days at 15 cents for the return journey. However, a surfboard was 60 cents each-way.

I received $1 from my father for the whole day — that was to include travel and food, so something had to give. Many a time I had to disembark a moving train at Cronulla Station, hitting the ground running, then over the fence and occasionally with Train Inspectors in hot pursuit.

The store-a-board concept was a popular option for board riders at Cronulla. This was where a surfer rented a space for their surf board in the back room of a surf shop. This would have been a great option though the cost was prohibitive for most of us who attended school.

An alternative to catching the train was the art of hitchhiking. It was an artform because not everyone could do it successfully. Lashing your board to all sorts of cars and trucks, while sweet-talking the driver, required dexterity and social skills — neither of which are abundant among 14-15 year old boys.

There was one guy, a truck driver, who would pick up as many as who were waiting at 6am on any Sunday morning on Rocky Point Road, Ramsgate. He drove this huge sandmining tip truck, heading for Kernnel. To get a lift the most agile guy among us would scramble up the side to get into the tipper and assist with getting bodies and boards up and over into the holding area. The truckie would drop us off a Wanda Beach car park and bodies and boards would just ooze over the side of the truck when he stopped.

On another day when I was hitching a ride from Cronulla I was picked up by a guy driving flat-top truck used for carrying steel rods. The guy didn’t say much, just pointed and drove off just as I got on my seat on the tray.

The truck had just a single little cabin for the driver and a huge flat tray. I sat in the middle of the tray holding onto a strong chain tied across the tray in one hand and the fin of my board in the other — all this whilst going over Captain Cook Bridge into a strong NE breeze. My board was flying horizontally off the wooden tray and I really thought I was going to get blown off.

I was sure glad to get off that truck.

I stood up on my board for the first time at the Alley, at Cronulla, after weeks of trying. At that moment when I stood up felt I was on top of the world as I screamed down a reforming wave and drove my board straight into the sand. I broke the fin and received second-degree sand burn but nothing could replace the exhilaration of that first surfing experience.

Surfing is a very physical sport. Back when I started there were no leg ropes, so every time you fell off your board there was a swim. An Eskimo roll was the only defence you had against a broken wave and you hung on for all you had.

In my first year I had no wetsuit. I surfed in a pair of sports shorts and a white T-shirt. Many a cold wet winter weekend was spent surfing when the only respite from the cold and wet weather was huddling in a shopfront, out of the wind, with a hot pie and a warm drink. Then it was back to surfing.

On any one weekend during 1969-1972 I would walk on average 16-20 km and surf for four-hour sessions. School holidays would see me at the beach every day doing the same thing.

When the surf was flat we would take our boards and gear and walk up to the sandhills and ride sand skis fashioned out of wooden palings. We would spend hours riding down and walking up the sand hills north of Wanda Beach. These naturally occurring sandhills which featured in the movie Lawrence of Arabia were huge and we had great fun playing on them. This was before the sandmining had taken its toll on them and reduced them to small heaps.

In the late sixties and early seventies the Public Education System had yet to embrace the concept of School Surfing. My friends and I desperately desired to go surfing for sport. We approached our school Sports Master about our ideas to have surfing included as a sports choice.

Unfortunately, he could do nothing and didn’t like the idea. A small group of diehard surfers including myself from my school decided that Wednesday afternoons, our normal sports afternoons, would be better spent surfing than undertaking conventional sporting choices.

During lunch on sports days we escaped past the prefects on guard at the school gate and run to Kogarah Railway Station in full school uniform, jump the train bound for Cronulla. Once on the train we would change into our ‘civies’ that we carried in our school bags. We would be full of expectant excitement.

Many times we were met with great waves and surfed happily knowing the punishment that greeted us at school the following day was well worth it. However, those days when we truanted sport and the weather and waves were less than desirable, the thought of being caned was not an appealing prospect.

The punishment for truanting sport was two cuts of the cane given by a burley Sports Master. Names were called out upon assembly first thing Thursday morning and the victims were mercilessly dealt with. We accepted our punishments like the young men we were told we were supposed to be, consoling each other as we discussed who had the biggest welts from the caning.

This procedure continued on and off from second form until the end of fourth form. By then we had received so many canings that the Sports Master just went through the motions of asking us how the surf was.

At the end of fourth form I left Sydney and moved 300km inland to a place called Gudgegong, some 30km east of Mudgee. I spent seven years in the bush doing all sorts of farm and station work .

In 1980 I left Mudgee to attend Teachers College in Newcastle. It is in Newcastle that I renewed my passion for surfing. I rode a 7’6″ spear for a few weeks at Merewether Beach before meeting Mark Richards and buying a twin fin that he had once owned.

The three years in Newcastle went quickly and then it was back to Sydney where I lived in the Eastern Suburbs at Kensington. I taught as a casual teacher for a year in seven different schools. I surfed Maroubra, Coogee, Bronte, Tamarama and Bondi in that year.

I was posted out west in early1984 and spent two more years in the bush. At the beginning of 1986 I started a degree course in Physical Education at the University of Western Australia. I had a couple of surfs while in WA at City Beach and a trip to Yallingup, although overall I had another three years out of surfing.

It was back to Sydney at the end of 1986 and a year of teaching in south-west Sydney. In 1987, I was again posted way out west to the town of Barham in the Western Riverina, some 820km from Sydney. Barham was on the Murray River and my wife and children moved into Victoria to live on a small Soldier Settlement property just outside of Cohuna.

We spent six years there. I played football, tennis and rode my horse recreationally — but no surfing.

In late 1993 I was posted to Southern Cross School K-12 at East Ballina as that school’s first PE teacher and Sports Organiser.

Back on the coast and with three small children I wondered whether I would, or could, surf again. I bought a board for $90 at a second-hand shop in the industrial estate at Ballina. It was a Nipper Williams single fin which I converted into a thruster. I slowly regained my fitness and confidence in the surf and realised that this is a great part of the world to go surfing.

As Southern Cross School K-12 started to grow there was an increasing desire among students and parents to have surfing offered as an elective activity for school sport. In 1996 School Surfing started at Southern Cross and it was so popular that not every student who wanted to surf was able to.

The competitive side of School Surfing was managed a that time by the Far North Association of Surfing NSW. This meant the FNC Regional Championships were held on Saturday and Sunday.

In 2001 I decided to take charge of the management of School Surfing on the FNC. The Far North Coast Regional School Surfing Championships were held in Ballina.

In 2002 I ran both the FNC Regional and the NSW State School Surfing Championships in Ballina and travelled to Western Australia in my first year as the NSW School Surfing Team Manager.

In that year NSW came second to Queensland in the National Championships.

When I returned from that first experience I changed the format of the Regional and State Championships to line up with how the National contest was run. Since 2002 I have been the convener for the FNC and State School Surfing Championships as well as NSW Team manager.

NSW has won the last three Australian School Surfing Championships.

It’s Thursday morning sport at Southern Cross. The students have left their boards for me to pack on to the surf trailer while they go to roll call.

I have pre-checked the surf and decide that North Wall is the venue.

We head to the beach in air-conditioned cars, students complaining about adolescent things. I reminisce about my experiences. The students haven’t got a clue about the hardships that my friends and I confronted during adolescence and at school in our bid to go surfing and I suppose they wouldn’t really care.

There will be no truanting today and no canings. This is good for all of us.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 4th, 2006 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Ballina, Education, Sport. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.