SYDNEY (dpa) – Tourists watching surfers cavorting in the surf off Australia’s famous Bondi Beach often wonder how they avoid slamming into each other.
The etiquette is that the surfer farthest out, or closest to the breaking part of the wave, has right of way.
To just drop-in on someone else’s wave would be as rude as nipping into someone else’s space in the supermarket car park. You have to give way. You have to wait your turn.
At least, that’s the code that used to rule the surf from the benign breakers at Bondi to the behemoths on the north shore of Oahu in Hawaii.
But with ever more surfers chasing a finite number of waves, the code is breaking down. On beaches from Bali to Brazil there are more and more punch ups as the business of catching a wave degenerates into an ugly free-for-all.
A particularly nasty case of surf rage engulfed Australia’s five- time world surfing champion Nat Young in November when he was on his board at the popular New South Wales surfing resort of Angourie Point.
Recollections differ but what’s clear – apart from Young getting his eye sockets and cheekbones broken – is that someone was persistently stealing someone else’s wave.
Young has now written Surf Rage, both a catalogue of violent incidents at surf beaches around the world and a plea for fellow surfers to agree a code of conduct and stick to it.
Young said of his book that “if this just makes people stop and think how they behave in the water and elsewhere, then we will have achieved something”.
The Angourie incident prompted Australia’s Surfrider Foundation to release a code of ethics it hopes will be adopted here and abroad.
They are the same old rules – but this time they have the imprimatur of a surfing legend and a respected surfing lobby group.
Surfrider Foundation code co-ordinator Neil Lazarow said thousands of posters proclaiming the code would be posted at beaches across Australia. There will also be postcards in foreign languages festooned in the backpackers hostels where overseas surfies congregate.
But will the blizzard of brochures change bad habits?
Surfer Derek Rielly, who helped Young with his book, is honest enough to admit that surf rage is growing exponentially along with the number of people chasing waves.
“There has always been violence in surfing,” Rielly says. “It is atavistic, difficult to excel at and adrenaline spurts through the body at the sight of a good wave.”
It’s not a minority sport anymore. Cheap, easy-to-ride boards have inducted hundreds of thousands into the fraternity.
And the archetypal surfer has changed from a happy-go-lucky youngster in boardshorts with a “bushy-bushy blond hairdo” to a self-obsessed yuppie in designer neoprene who has scheduled exactly an hour of surfing into his diary.
There isn’t a brotherhood of surfers anymore. It’s a sport that has turned professional and often quite nasty. And there are already warnings that if self-regulation doesn’t work governments will have to step in and sort out the wave hogs behind the fights in the foam.
