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Wave of Nostalgia
Sunshine Coast Daily
BOB McTavish, the surfing pioneer who left Noosa in the 1960s to father the global shortboard revolution, yesterday returned to the coastal enclave he helped establish on the surfing map to relive the old times in a nostalgic evening at Noosa Longboards.
Touching on the way Noosa was back in the '60s with its "bitumen strip and two guest houses" the 62-year-old shaper showed video footage of his early days surfing the points on his classic Noosa '66 longboard, one of countless designs he's crafted in a ongoing process of board development beginning in his teens.
The Queensland-born McTavish has hand-shaped an estimated 30,000 boards in a lifetime of surfing right up and down Australia's coastline and overseas, and despite surfing every hotspot on the board-riding circuit, he admits an special affinity with Noosa.
"Pa Bendall drove me up here in '59 when I was 15-years-old, he grabbed me one day and said 'come on Bob we're going to surf somewhere different'," he said.
Bob on one of those early trips to Noosa
"We pulled up on the beach next to the surf club and you could see the three points were breaking perfectly, and there was nobody out there," he said.
"I met my wife here at the Noosa pub in '71 and we're still married 35 years later and we'd come here every year without a doubt. In the '70s we used to camp here with our kids and through the '70s we were surfing longboards in Noosa when everyone else was riding shortboards.
"There was a strip of bitumen down the middle with sand on both sides of it, two guest houses, one general store and a little post office, and that was Hastings Street."
