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Had a great time on the surf trip with the lads over the weekend, it was a right laugh. It was a great opportunity to go and surf some of the beaches in Northern NSW, which are renown for having excellent waves and low crowds.

The plan was basic. We were all going to meet on Thursday night at Sawtell, Coffs Harbour, NSW. Ryan has a mate down there with plenty of room for a bunch of wayward travellers to crash for a few nights. From Sawtell we planned on following the swell back up the coast, heading back home on Monday. Check out the travel map on the right for the general travel flow.

Tom and I (the two token mal-riders) left the Gold Coast on Thursday afternoon to meet up with the lads Thursday night. We first stopped at Hastings Point to check the surf, but it was a little too wind-affected for a decent surf. We high-tailed it to Sawtell.

We spent the Friday and Saturday morning in Sawtell. We saw a drastic increase in swell over these two days. Friday morning had clean, 2′-3′ waves. The ride was decently long, giving us plenty of time to muck about on the mals. Saturday morning was another story. The waves were easily 5′-6′. They were quick, straight and pitchy – arguably not the best waves to be out in on a mal.

For Saturday afternoon, we headed down to Valla Beach and Scotts Head to check the surf down there and to say hello to Father John. Unfortunately neither spot was picking up the swell effectively – it was small ‘n’ bumpy and fat ‘n’ slow respectively.

We decided that we should camp out at Iluka, just north of Yamba so we hightailed it up to there (after checking out The Big Banana – as an aside, I’m terribly allergic to bananas so this maybe wasn’t the best idea ). We also checked out Woolgoolwa just north of Coffs Harbour, which is an awesome little spot. In Iluka, the surf check the next morning was Sawtell all over again, but on steroids! The surf was absolutely enormous! 6′-7′ barrels that were pitching like Tiger Woods and heavier then sin.

After watching the massive surf in Yamba and Iluka for a few days, we headed up the coast to Byron Bay so that we could find up catchable waves on the way home. Tom was jealous of my run in with the oversized fiberglass banana, so we got him a nice and friendly shot with The Big Prawn in Ballina on the way (to which he has an allergy – we mightn’t have thought this through).

Byron had tiny surf but after a couple of days of too many drinks and not enough surfing, we decided to jump in anyway. It was okay on the mals, but only just!
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Filed under: surfing by Chris

I haven’t updated this blog for a few weeks, which is my bad. I’ve updated my project sites even less frequently, which is badder! I’m off on a surf trip this extended weekend starting after I hit submit, so I’ll have a lot of time to talk about what has been happening RE projects next week. I’m also going to take loads of photos with my Geo-tagging Blackberry (a cool feature I discovered it had) and see if I can use it to construct some sort of travel map. Especially hopefully using OSM (see below)

Lately, I’ve been in discovery mode and found a lot of ‘new’ toys. OpenStreetMap is probably my favourite new toy(guess why) and also openSUSE and the stable version of Processing is amazing.

I’m also really getting my hands dirty with techie things like Python, Javascript, JSON, AJAX, message digests, etc. Web development in the Web 2.0 world is damn fun.

Oh and I have a security patch looming, apparently.

Projects, in brief

Cognicology:

• I have a couple of articles in the pipeline for Cognicology, that will be up next week.

• Alborz is back from Europe in about nine or ten days, and we are finalising a really exciting product to coincide with the official launch of Cognicology, which is coming up soon… I’m pretty excited about this, and more to come about it as the due date impends…

WiFi in Australia:

• I have some really exciting and major developments with regards to WiFi in Australia… The key though is open = better. Always.

PhD:

• Tomorrow marks the first day of my final year… Or the beginning of the end of this saga. There is a bucket load of work to be done, but I am definitely on track and am confident about a timely completion.

• I have three 1st name peer-reviewed articles out there in the world now… You can find them on my publications page

Looks likely I will be heading to San Diego in January next year for the Plant and Animal Genome conference. Should be a great opportunity to drink coronas and meet greats in the field (probably not in that order). It will be my first trip to the states, and that will be ace.

I’ve noticed Alborz has a bit of a projects page on his blog, I think I am going to have to steal that idea…

Filed under: general by Chris

Yesterday was Australia Day, and I joined 1300-odd people in protest against the continued pumping of sand from Tweed to Kirra. The sand pumping was initially envisioned to solve the problem of sand-buildup in Tweed due to the north Tweed training walls, and to preserve the ailing beach at Kirra (I’ve been told that 10-15 years ago, the waves would crash against the Pizza Hut next to the Kirra surfclub in cyclonic swells). It was a unique joint initiative of both the NSW and QLD governments. Unfortunately, due to what appears to be a lack of planning, or ownership of responsibilty, what was once an amazing surf break and natural reef is now a barren and surfless zone. The sand has built up over the natural reef, killing it. It has filled in the sand banks, with only a ’superbank’ that works of the biggest of swells. It has also deposited so much sand in Kirra and north Coolangatta that you almost need a camel and a compass to find your way to the water’s edge.

But onto the paddle out. As I mentioned, over 1300 people turned up to paddle out to the former site of the Kirra break. There were a few big name surfers there (or at least, I think they were big names, I’m not very up-to-date with the whole pro-surfer thing). It wasn’t until everybody was marshalling on the shore for the paddle out that I realised how big this was going to be: 1300+ people at a single break is a fair few people! Once out there, all the surfers coordinated to form the outline of Australia. It didn’t really work out fantastically, but I guess we gave it a go! Perhaps we just need to live in a country with a simpler border.

Many people are campaigning for the government to reverse its actions, and pump sand back where it came from. My opinion is that perhaps we should leave it all alone. The sand-movement of coastal systems is dynamic and should be left to its own devices. Sand generally shifts from one location and builds up in another -  natural events such as cyclones and storm swells come along from time to time and reset the counter.

There was a fair bit of press coverage of the paddle-out too, including:

The Courier Mail
Australian Longboarding
Surfer Magazine

If you want to help save Kirra, there are heaps of groups out that are fighting to save the once world-class break in its current plight.

KirraPoint.org (SurfRider Foundation sub-committee)
Surfrider Foundation
Coastal Alliance
Save Kirra Myspace Profile

Anyway, click on more below for a few more pictures of the paddleout, some of the water images really give an idea to the scale of this thing!

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Filed under: surfing by Chris