NIPPLEGATE v.2.0

Frank convinced me it was the perfect publicity shot but I have a sneaking suspicion he was taking the piss. Well the chickens came home to roost today when the above shot was plastered across page 24 of The Geelong Advertiser. The phone ran hot, and not all of the comments were complimentary. They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, and the accompanying article by Noel Murphy certainly made up for the “wardrobe malfunction”. “McAloon plumbs the drive behind the nomadic surf addict… the romance, the giants, the characters, the behind-the-scenes image-and-myth builders of surfing,” Murphy wrote. “He’s catalogued his travels amid observations and musings drawn from such disparate sources as James Cook, Charles Darwin and Bruce Chatwin. Even Ireland’s legendary Finn MacCool enters the fray.”

The Geelong Addy are out of the blocks with the first newspaper article about Deep Water, but Australasian Surf Business (ASB) magazine has beaten them to the punch with the first review. ASB ran a review in issue #30 (June/July), describing Deep Water as “beautifully crafted yarn-spinning”. “McAloon also shows himself to be an avid reader of surfing lore and literature, quoting everyone from Jack Finlay to Daniel Duane, Bunker Spreckels and even Alain de Botton, as he takes a good-humoured tilt at the impossible task – a wide-angle portrait of surfing and everyone in it.”

But possibly the strangest by-product of Nipplegate v.2.0 was an unsolicited approach from Ralph magazine (and I thought I looked flat-chested!) asking me to compile a list of “the 10 best unknown international surf breaks”. Cactus, Port Campbell, Kauai… I decided that maybe that there was such a thing as bad publicity.

JOE RODDY RIDES AGAIN

SurferMag.com has posted a story by Taylor Soppe about "Ireland's first surfer" Joe Roddy returning to the water on a replica of his original board as part of T-Bay Surf Club's annual Legends dinner dance in Tramore, County Waterford. It's a pretty remarkable addendum to a story I originally heard on my first visit to Ireland in 2006 and retold in Deep Water - that in 1949 the then 14-year-old made a paddleboard from an American woodwork manual using discarded tea chests and took to the waves at Dundalk in County Louth, becoming the first man to surf in Ireland. When he came ashore Roddy recalled "the whites of their eyes and their gobs wide open", which probably wasn't too far from the reaction when the third generation lighthouse keeper took to the waves at Tramore in June this year, some 57 years since he'd last been on a surfboard!

Roddy's first ride caused barely a ripple back in 1949, consigned to historical footnotes - I originally thought it nothing more than Guinness-induced blarney, almost too good to be true - and surfing didn't really gain any traction in Ireland until the 1960's, by which time Joe had turned his attention to developing his own scuba equipment. So it's fantastic that this historic and poetically Irish surfing moment is finally being celebrated.

THE CAMPAIGN BEGINS

A few weeks ago I spent a cold & wet Victorian afternoon chasing the shorebreak at Jan Juc with local photographer Drew Ryan, trying to capture a moment of magic for the Deep Water ad campaign. Drew and I floated books through the dumping shorey at Juc to get 'the shot', while Jon Frank and Drew's daughter Tanna stood on the steps laughing at us prancing around in our wetsuits, dodging the foaming clean-up sets smashing into the cliff. We lost two books to King Neptune and although Drew conjured some esoteric beauty (see below), we settled on the first photo he took. A Melbourne Bitter or six later and Frank was teaching himself InDesign. A few tips from his design savvy sister and hey presto, we had an ad! Check it out in the latest issue of Surfing World magazine (issue# 295), which also features Frankology with Sally Fitzgibbons, another cover shot by the hardest working surf photographer in the world (Andrew 'Shorty' Buckley) and an interesting yarn about Torquay by Jock Serong. And while you're locked into cyberspace check out Drew's web site: www.drewryanphotography.com.au/

The campaign has kicked off... watch out for more media hits coming to a magazine, web site, newspaper, radio soon!