Morn Pen surf report

MP seems to always be more fun when it’s peaky / chopped up... on too many occasions I’ve been amped up for prime conditions and there seems to be zero decent options

Anyone else remember the knucklehead who used to do the Flinders surf report? Always pumping always offshore even when the beaches were reported as mush.

Ted Bainbridge ( Radio 3XY ), or as we called him on the Surfcoast (for the same reasons mentioned) "Tidal Wave Ted" . Always 4+ ft , offshore & a good chance of gettin' a few waves if you heading down that way today !!!!.

ted was a mate of mine and we used to surf together a bit back in the day.let's say we were at portsea ,northerly,3-4 ft.in the car .find a public telephone booth and ring thru the report.now that was the report for mornington peninsula,phillip island and west coast.say we'd get back to portsea and sea breeze kicked in,stiff shit-no update those days.

I found Ted & Dan were pretty accurate with the reports

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
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Fuck'n surfees (not to be confused with surfers), ya gotta laugh, or ya'd fuckin' cry!!!!!??? In a nut shell?????!!!

'Exsthcuthe meee cann eneewun pweesthe tewll me if wun of vem waywve fingy's is vewre pweesthe...'

I've seen enough... no more, I'm begging you's please... my guts, please...

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Goofy, the ballina report says tune back in for the updated photo report at 8am every single morning.

I haven't seen a photo in 4 years of checking it.

Not that I want one, it just seems an odd thing to say.

I think I got an explanation when I asked before.
It might be an automatic template entrance in the dawn report so it just comes up in all of them.
Can't remember for sure though.

Good call GF, what's up?

Its where i get my slack for the heads

Don't quite understand the issue GF. No locations are mentioned (only broad regions), all of which have been extensively documented in daily online surf reports since at least 2001.

Should send em to the west coast instead hey, GF?

You're seeing thousands of people at Flinders?

The report did say "Flinders and the Bay", which is a generic description for "it's too big for the ocean beaches, so looks like you'll have to head around the corner". That ain't really much of a secret. As I said before that very suggestion has been a regular part of MP surf reports for a very long time, well before Swellnet came along. It was certainly a frequent inclusion in the early SurfShop.com.au surf reports I used to tune into daily.

I just find it hard to believe that there'd be punters who - being told that the open beaches were too big - suddenly decided "ah well then, looks like there can't be any kind of surfable wave around today. I'll have to wait until it halves in size". Every Victorian surfer knows there are waves in Western Port, the surf report is kinda stating the obvious in a broad sense.

C'mon mate, in seventeen years of providing this service we've never provided specific break info. All reporters get this brief when they come on board. Sure, sometimes there's a fine line to tread - trying to keep things fresh, day in day out is bloody hard, especially in the early morning - but in this case I think you're getting overly excited.

Ain't called the Hoax Coast for nothing. Haha!

Actually, I found lots of parallels between SA surf options (living in Adelaide) and MP surf options (living in Melbourne). Similar driving for similar waves: the Mid Coast is like Western Port: usually not much, occasionally good/fun, rarely fantastic. Closer to the CBD so gets hit hard when it's busy as it's an alternative to the West Coast.

Victor Harbor is like Flinders and the open beaches: fickle reefs that are always missing that one crucial ingredient (tide, wind, a little more/less size), and Waits and Parsons are like the open MP beaches between Gunna and Portsea: funky, weird sandbanks, occasionally epic but usually frustrating as hell. And always better when your mates were, and you weren't.

And both regions have a couple of mysto waves that are incredible when they turn on. 

I've done way more driving on both coasts looking for waves (in a single day) than anywhere else in the country. Back and forth, back and forth. 

Gotta love it.

..... well actually Ben, there was that very annoying period when SN hired Shane Waters to do daily reports of Flinders, always talked it up and named breaks.

Anyway, to GFs earlier point "Flinders" has 5 main breaks and 4 of the 5 have very small take off points. So, just a few guys out can make it a busy surf. Further, all 5 are heavily tide dependant, typical only working on one tide. The place has been picked dry by the hoards using the new freeways and the property spivs making it the place to be on a weekend for "the landed gentry and cashed up love birds". Property there is outrageous. Gone are the days when it was a little fishing village.

For these reasons and for those mentioned by GF not mentioning the place would be the honourable thing to do.

Never heard of a bloke called Shane Waters.

And we haven't had a Flinders/Western Port surf reporter for many years now.

Quiz time! See if you pick the surf spot, and the year the comment was made (bonus points for the website it was posted on).

"Weekend 'e-tag' surfers may as well stay home than surf this spot, it has got too crowded. You can surf at pines with the rest of the kooks. Thank-you."

Well, Ben SN did hire Shane, he ran Waters Retro Surf Shop at Balnarring for a period. Yes it was years ago.

No idea on who's report it is, but agree with the sentiment, that place is wall to wall kooks, non leggie wearing hipsters and fukn old fat bastards thinking its still the 1970s .... but apart from that it a great place.

Website is Wannasurf.
Surf spot is Cyrils.
The year is 2001.

That's eighteen years ago: one year before I registered the Swellnet website, and four years before we started Vic surf reports. And twelve years before the Frankston Bypass went in. Not sure what the property prices were back then though.

(BTW, I may be mistaken with Shane - we've got 30 surf report locations and so over the last 17 years we've rotated through a lot of different crew - the name doesn't ring bell but the shop at Balnarring does).

Gotta be a wannasurf comment so I'd say mid-late 00s

Pretty chilled where I was this morning.
That was before the report invited everyone along for the ride though!
I know it's no secret but do we need the break named on here?

What break was mentioned?

How many surfers were in the water?

have you not noticed that wannasurf has pretty much shut down?

The comments are years old.

I'd suggest shutdown due to surfers picking the fuck out of site because the site were a bunch of fuckwits.

Good job surfers.

Wannasurf blew everything open in one big arse disruption. It doesn't make it right.

Absolutely no need to say 'go to flinders for the high tide'.

There's loads of shit but good information out there. It's the putting it all together that's dangerous. That's what pisses people off. Absolutely no need foe that shit at all.

Nah, Wannasurf hasn’t been shut down. The owner has simply lost interest and hasn’t updated it in many, many years. Like a lot of websites that were popular back then.

Interesting the phases the internet has gone through.

Early days everything was just home made page type pages like fan pages of bands etc. (angel fire)

Then we had the commercial aspect develop and then sites like Wannasurf.

And then social media came in first my space then Facebook and instagram, and bang no one really uses those websites like wanna surf

Its almost like social media has created a bubble within the internet that people only escape when they really need to search for something.

You notice the comments, there all years old, and they are virtually useless for their intended purpose, because surfers basically sabotaged the site.

Good on surfers

How exactly did surfers sabotage the site? By writing nasty comments?

Things haven’t changed twenty years later.

I doubt they will in another twenty years either.

Funny, the comments really dry up around 08 when facebook started to take flight, sypkan.
Also, magic seaweed was on the rise around then too.

Yep, nasty comments.

But also comments with converse and inverse information to derail what the site guys were trying to do. You know the sharing economy or some shit....but the punters weren't buying it.

tbh I've only really looked at oz and indo spots on there but they were sabotaged big time by commenters.

Europe might be different.

Yeh, no doubt fb etc. had an impact, but it's's still a pretty useful concept for a surfing site, in theory, if surfers had a more cooperative nature that is.

You’re drawing conclusions from a long list of assumptions.

The Wannasurf website still works. It’s still operational. Why doesn’t anyone comment? Because it a terrible design that hasn’t been updated in fifteen or more years.

I mean, check this out: if you want to comment on the site, here’s the sign up page you have to fill out (make sure you fill in your fax number!):

https://www.wannasurf.com/community/index.php?option=com_comprofiler&tas...

Who’s gonna do that these days when the average website allows users to log in with their Facebook profile in one click? Wannasurf’s signup page is a brick wall, which most people can’t be bothered with, when they can now find the same info on a thousand other websites and Apps.

You may or may not remember, but around the same time - the early 00’s - the biggest surf report site in Australia was Realsurf.com. Take a look at the front page today, and it also hasn’t been updated in fifteen years or more, and consequently has gone from having fifty unpaid surf reporters to just one, the owner Don.

One of the problems with websites of this era was that they were prone to all kinds of malicious hacks, because website security was still in its infancy.

A great number of websites simply closed their doors because they didn’t have the resources to fix the problem, or had no revenue streams to justify a developer to patch it up. I can think of several dozen surf report websites that have come and gone over the last couple of decades, often because of this very problem.

So the idea that surfers banded together to ‘sabotage’ Wannasurf, and then wrote lots of nasty things, which ultimately led to an abrupt halt in users commenting on the website right around the world, is laughable at best.

But hey, keep up the commentary! It’s amusing to read.

The spot you mentioned in the thread.
Not so much the reports. That was more of dig at the report details raised which, however trivial, I tend to agree with.
Not many......

Geez thanks ben, I think.

I didn't say surfers banded together to bring the site down. I was saying they haphazardly, collectively, decided the site can get fucked.

Their concept worked for a short time, I used it myself, amazing information really, then the comments went feral. And fair enough.

I don't dispute the rest of your post

Fleazool - so, you were having a "pretty chilled" session (on your own?) this morning, and then the crowd increased to “not many” because Swellnet “invited everyone along for the ride”?

Righto.

As for typing the word ‘Cyrils’ in an obscure forum post, you may be concerned to find that a Google search for ‘Cyrils’, ‘Flinders’ and ‘Surf’ returns 105,000 website results.

https://www.google.com/search?q=cyrils+flinders+surf

Probably the Hawks fans favourite wave :p