Barry Regan: Saltwater man
Ballina’s Barry Regan is a true saltwater man.
The 78-year-old who has twice beaten leukaemia had his first surf at Curl Curl in Sydney in about 1943.
These days he’s still surfing — and what’s more, he’s still making his own surfboards.
But they’re not your usual foam and fibreglass boards: These boards are the old 16-foot (about 5m) long timber boards which were ridden in the period from 1935 until 1958, and Barry has been making them since 1957.
It was on one of these boards that Barry surfed Lennox Point way back in March 1958 on his way home from the national surf lifesaving championships at Mooloolaba, where he made the final of the board-riding event. That day at The Point puts him among the first to surf the now-famous break.
Barry had his first surf on an eight-foot solid pineboard ’slab’ in about 1942 or ‘43. There was no sealant on it, and it took two people to carry it.
That first surf led to a love of the water, and he started surfing ‘anything I could get a lend of’. He was a member of Cronulla Surf Club, and there were surfboards left in storage there by men who had gone overseas to serve in World War II.
”There were a lot of men in the Army then and a lot of cadets and juniors were in the club. There were about six of us riding boards then,” he told Ballina.Info.
And how were those old boards to ride? “They gathered so much momentum,” he says, although they were pretty much ridden ’straight in’. That was to change a little over a decade later.
Barry recalls how the Australian surfing fraternity got a taste of things to come when, in 1956, Australia hosted the world surf lifesaving championships.
The visiting US and Hawaiian teams had ’short’ boards: 10-foot long (about 3m) balsa boards.
“It was the first time we saw short boards being ridden,” Barry says.
“We used to just ride straight in.”
But when the visiting Yanks surfed in 2-foot waves on October 17, 1956, at Cronulla Point, the locals were blown away by the manoeuvrability of the new short boards. “We went ‘gee whiz’, look at that,” Barry recalls.
As well as shorter boards, Barry credits the motor car as something which led to the rise in popularity of surfing. Increased mobility meant that surfers could travel to faraway and unsurfed locations, hence Barry’s detour to Lennox Point on his way home from the national titles at Mooloolaba in 1958.
He recalls that there had been a cyclone around the time of the titles. On the way back to Sydney he and his mate Peter Banister surfed at Alexandra Headland, then at Coolangatta, and then at Byron Bay.
Somebody had mentioned Lennox Head to them, and they decided they’d go and check it out.
“The road (from Byron to Lennox) was horrible,” he says. “We were questioning whether we had done the right thing.”
They pulled up where the Lennox Point Hotel now stands, and there was ‘a beautiful surf rolling in’.
Hot and in need of cooling down after the rugged road trip, Barry and Peter paddled out, intending to surf the beach break.
But then they saw the long lines of the waves at The Point, and paddled over to it and surfed it for about an hour-and-a-half.
“How big was it?” we asked Barry.
“About eight foot,” he said.
“That’s big,” we replied.
“To me, eight foot wasn’t that big in those days,” said Barry, adding that in his younger days, ‘big’ for him was when you went ’shit, look at that!’.
Barry didn’t surf Lennox Point again until he came to live in Ballina in 1971.
In that period from 1958 until moving here, Barry continued to travel up and down the coast, surf and make boards while living in Sydney, where he worked as a photo engraver, working on magazines such as Women’s Day.
Then, in the mid-1960s, he saw something that made him realise it might be time to find a new profession.
What he saw was one of the first picture scanners being used. It wasn’t the compact model that almost all homes with a computer now have, but an almost room-size contraption.
Despite its size, Barry knew that ‘this was the beginning of the end’ for his trade.
He had friends who were involved in oyster farming, and, after looking into the trade, in 1971 he found himself in Ballina as an oyster farmer, working out of the shed which still stands in North Creek off The Serpentine.
(The shed, says Barry, was part of the old nurses’ quarters at Ballina hospital, and is made from redwood and yellow teak).
Oyster farming allowed him to sneak off for the occasional surf, so the move from Sydney was a good one for Barry and his wife Fran.
But his life received a jolt in 1981 when he was diagnosed with leukaemia. The discovery of the drug Interferon ‘got him out of the woods’, he says, but he was warned that the disease could return.
It did, in 1998, but again ‘medical science helped me’.
Barry says he hasn’t beaten the disease. Instead, it’s’dormant’, he says.
Leukaemia forced him out of the oyster business in 1984, but these days Barry is kept busy making and restoring surfboards — and surfing, of course.
He says he spends between 40 and 50 hours making a board, which he sells for about $1600. But you get the impression it’s not so much a money-making venture for him — rather, the continuance of a life-long passion.
Although he has never ridden a modern short board, he did switch from timber to foam and fibreglass.
Barry says that following the US and Hawaiian surf teams’ visit in 1956, boards changed from 16-foot timber models to timber mals in about 1957, followed by balsa boards in 1958 and 1959, and then foam and fibreglass in about 1959.
“That’s when the industry really took off,” he says of the method of making boards which is still in use today.
It’s commonly believed that the short-board revolution began in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when 10-foot mals soon became 6-foot single fins and so on.
But that’s not quite true, says Barry.
He remembers — and has pictures of — a 6-foot 6-inch balsa board being made in the 1950s.
“Graham Ferris made it and ripped the (Cronulla) point apart,” he said.
The board that Barry surfed Lennox Point on in March 1958 was 16-foot long and made of coachwood with marante sides.
He did surf the Point again when he moved to Ballina, but he finds it a difficult place to surf. In fact, he says The Point’s rocky shore makes it ‘one of the worst entry and exit surfs that I’ve been in’.
But he still can be seen cruising across the waves at Wategos or other local beaches, and still takes regular surfaris up and down the coast … just like a true saltwater man.
PICTURES: Barry Regan at Cronulla in the 1950s, and in Ballina with some of the boards he has made.
