Lose Speed and You’re Fucked

“If you lose speed, you’re fucked,” says master shaper / surfer / carpenter Luke Daniels, speaking from beneath the North End Boardriders tent on Burleigh Hill.

It’s a heatwave. Everyone is hiding under whatever scrap of shade they can find. Esky lids are snapping open. Ice-cold Gage Roads tins are disappearing at highline pace.

Whether you’d sworn allegiance to Dry January after the Christmas–New Year blur or not, cold beer has become a public health intervention. Doctor’s orders. They taste very good, too. 

There’s something about a two-beer buzz that feels exactly right when you’re watching a surf contest from one of the sport’s great natural amphitheatres, Burleigh Hill. The flagship venue of the Australian Boardriders Battle. Briefly, last year, a Championship Tour stop again, where Filipe Toledo and Julian Wilson blitzed the field before delivering one of the most electric finals in recent memory.

The path up its guts, “Cameltoe Highway,” in some uncouth dialects, was once again clogged with merch tents, groms flogging e-bikes, Australian surfing legends, and a healthy mix of rockered-out bombaclat. The full-rich tapestry. The most striking difference this weekend was what sat beside it. All pre-’81 single fins. Some well preserved. Collectors items wrapped in 8oz glass. Most not. Chipped. Yellowed. Browned. Sun-baked relics bearing the wrinkles of four sun bleached decades.

“That’s why they’re good for your surfing,” Luke continues, mid-sip. “They force you to link turns in one line. No side fins, no quick release. All the drive comes from the middle. But yeah, lose speed and they’re sluggish plugs.”

Two days of heat later, the 29th Single Fin Festival is done. And it was a hoot.

Congratulations to the winners: Kyuss King (Open Men), Sophie McCulloch (Women), Aidan Finn (Groms), and Occy (Masters), who somehow made pre-’81 antiquity look unfairly good.

For me, a first in-the-flesh Single Fin after years of watching the stream, it felt like a crash course in how these boards actually work, and a guided tour through the deep, rich cross-section of Australian surf culture.

This will show my age, or at least my naivety, to anyone who’s been coming longer than I have. But after 48 hours on the hill, a few things were impossible to ignore. First: the standard of surfing in Australia is absurd.

Creed McTaggart, Eithan Osborne, Soli Bailey, Adam Melling, Liam O’Brien—all gone before the final. Even on alien equipment, you’d expect that much collective wave intelligence to bulldoze the field. It didn’t. That’s not to diminish their surfing btw, which was excellent. It’s purely to credit the names I didn’t know and snapped me into attention.

Take Ryan “Turtle” Grey, Style Award winner. Big rig gouge in the quarters on a Phil Myers Free Flight that triggered a genuine dopamine event. Or Ed McGregor, an unassuming big unit from Lennox, with timing dialled to the millisecond on the sucky, encrypted inside bank. 

Good surfing comes in many flavours.

“Score that minus five,” Wispy deadpanned, watching one of the Changaz crew attempt a last-ditch air rev. “Some guys are trying to surf singles like thrusters. It’s impressive, sure. But you ride single fins to get feeling out of a wave. High lines. Floaters. Let it happen.”

The best surfing had restraint. Foresight. Wisdom. Less crypto cowboy, more Warren Buffett. Nothing greedy. Nothing desperate. Time in the market, not timing the market. What a wanky analogy.

Let it happen.

I won’t bore you with my own competitive derailment. The only real heartbreak was blowing my chance to surf again in waves that remained incredibly fun all weekend. The best surfers on the day won. They usually do. 

A huge thanks to Burleigh Boardriders for sharing the wave, running the BBQ, and scoring heats all day. No small task. And to Bong and Gage Roads for backing one of the most iconic grassroots events going. I’m cooked. Sunburnt. Slightly dehydrated. Completely sold.

“Next year’s the 30th,” said Bong marketing exec Beau Thomas. “We’ll go big. A proper musical act to headline it.”

See you on the hill.