All photos by Murray Taylor
For all the days that you turn up your local, only to be greeted with onshore slop, you’ll occasionally be rewarded with a session like the one North Stradbroke’s Lincoln Taylor had last weekend. Just you, your buddies, unlimited tubes and your old man behind the camera capturing every euphoric moment. Here is Linc’s account of his five hours of Island Nirvana.
“I hadn’t seen my family in a while, so I thought I’d go home and see everyone. The last three times I’ve been back over there, the waves have been pumping.”
“We all went down there with fishing rods thinking we were just going to have a cruisy day at the beach and then all of a sudden that wind changed and it was just the five of us out and peaks absolutely everywhere.”
“The wind was actually meant to be South West, so I wasn’t that excited got up in the morning. Then my dad, Murray took me down the beach with my mates and the wind ended up being North West for about five hours straight. It was sick. There wasn’t anyone else out, just me and four of my mates.”
“Pretty much every wave was a barrel. We all had sore throats from screaming at each other. I was probably more excited just watching the other guys get barrelled than getting barrelled myself. I think I did about three turns in five hours of surfing.”
“Unfortunately I had to stick the old man behind the lens, but he ended up getting out there himself after a couple of hours of shooting. He saw me get a little switch barrel and decided he’d had enough of shooting and came out and surfed with us.”
“I moved to the Gold Coast about a year ago. On Straddie, you’re basically a big fish in a small pond and no one sees you. After Bede [Durbidge] left the island, it was hard to find people to push my surfing. I got a scholarship at the HPC [Surfing Australia’s High Performance Centre] and decided to stay on the Gold Coast. It’s nice to go back there on weekends though.”
“The crowds on the Goldy are absolutely out of control! I’ve gotten used to it a lot more now though. I was surfing here with my dad the other day and he was getting so mad at the crowds!”
“I think when Bede left the Island, it gave people a little bit of a pathway to leave and compete. I want to be doing what Bede is doing – I want to qualify by the end of the year. I guess it’s like when Mick [Fanning] won his World Title after doing CHEK training, everyone else started training because they wanted to do what he was doing.”
“I’ve got the Brazil WQS coming up and that’s pretty much all that’s on my mind at the moment. There’s only been the one Prime event this year in WA and two ‘CT boys got first and second and took all the points. So the year hasn’t really even started.”
