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!

Here is a map with some of the choice cut pictures from the trip. Click on any of the pics to view the full album.

This trip was a great opportunity to try out the geotagging features of both my Blackberry Bold and iPhoto 09. For those who just said ‘Huh?’, that is how I created that map above. Geotagging is the annotation of image files with their GPS coordinates. The annotations are usually stored in the EXIF headers of a JPEG file. EXIF headers are where information such as the camera settings, exposure, datetime stamp, etc. are stored for a graphic file.

So, my method was to use the Geotagging capabilities of my mobile phone to keep track of where and when my photos were taken, with the intention of editing the geotag information for photos taken with my regular digital manually in iPhoto. This method worked OK, but it wasn’t the best. There were issues with my camera not timestamping some pictures incorrectly, mixing up the chronological order of photos in iPhoto. Also, iPhoto stores GPS info in the EXIF headers in a different way to how cameras do it, requiring me to write a python script to extract this information for use in blog geotagging (the markers on the above map were generated using this script).

This whole setup is a little tedious, so I think I have found the next gadget I want (its my birthday in a bit, hint, hint ). And this is it:

The Sony GPS-CS1 is a GPS tracking module that is designed to sync the timeline of your GPS location (as taken with this unit) with the timeline of your camera shots (as taken with your digital camera). I was thinking that I would need to get a new digital camera with a GPS chip in it, but the thing about this device is that it will work with my existing camera, as well as the cameras of anybody else I’m travelling with. Rad!

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…

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!