The Noosa Festival of Surfing begins this Saturday. The festival is an opportunity for surfers of all stripes to get together, relax and unwind. Except for the event director, that is. It's his job to get up early each morning of the festival and drink copious amounts of coffee just to give him enough energy to bark orders all day at gormless tradesman and food caterers.

Phil Jarratt is just that man. I had a quick word with him about the event...

Swellnet: How long has the festival been running? Phil Jarratt: The event, which was once called the Noosa Longboard Classic, is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. It's been a surf cultural festival since 1998 and that was the aspect that my partners and I came on board and developed in conjunction with the Noosa Malibu Club. It was originally a two day longboard get together and it evolved over several years to become quite a good international pro-am.

I got involved originally as a sponsor and saw the potential to create something. It's such a great atmosphere at this thing; the surf is frequently very good and people come from all over. The streets were full of all these famous people. So I decided that was a pretty good canvas to build a festival around. We started off very small in '98, but everybody loved it. In '99 we got big sponsorship, from Breaka in their last incarnation as a surfing sponsor, and it went from there.

I had to leave the event after the 2001 festival because I was working in Europe, and later America. It went back to the club to manage and because it was being run as an amateur thing it went small again but it still maintained the elements that we put into it. I came back in as a consultant in 2007 and then took it over again in 2008.

Got any big names coming this year? Yeah, we have Reno Abellira, whose been a couple of times in the past. He's been a fantastic asset to the event because he loves to play music every night and he shapes some boards while he's here. He embodies that Hawaiian culture that we like to have represented at the event every year. In the past we've had people like Clyde Aikau or Brian Keulana. Reno will be in that role as token Hawaiian this year (laughs).

Looking at this years schedule it seems there's more of a 'down home' feel celebrating the local talent. Has that been a focus? I think that's largely a factor of the economy and how much money I've got to throw at airline tickets. And this year money's tight, I haven't given tickets away willy-nilly. I am bringing a few people out though. Cyrus Sutton is one of them, he's a young filmmaker from San Diego with a great new movie called Stoked and Broke. He's coming out to premiere that. There's a younger appeal there and, as you know, there's a whole cool-school retro deal going on in surfing at the moment.

In the past we might have spent money to bring somebody like Greg Noll out, and Greg would sit there in the cafe and talk story all week. But we've kind of done that and I'd rather bring out people of different age groups and people of different sectors of the surf community and Cyrus is a classic example of that. Hopefully it'll help us broaden the appeal.

My time withing surfing is the first pro generation - MR, PT, Rabbit - and they're all good mates so they love to come every year. It's an old school reunion for us. They'll all be here. Layne Beachley is another one. She's from a different generation but she absolutely loves the event. Layne will be here surfing in the charity events and probably, like she did last year, surf right through the middle of heats that she's not in.

It's no wonder you had to drop the longboard moniker and call it a surfing festival cause youve got all sorts of surfcraft up there now. I think people everywhere, except for crusty old longbaorders like myself, have dropped the idea that longboards are over here in this little box and shortboards are over here in the other box. It's all about surfing. One of our sponsors, Golden Breed, has got the slogan, 'Ride 'em all', which I think is a fanstastic slogan 'cause it embodies what we try to do here.

This year we've got a finless pro event for the first time, in past years we've had retro events. We've only got a week to run everything so we cant have a finless and a retro and a noserider event and so on. But over the week we try to encompass every aspect of surfing except for straight-up, shortboard surfing. We're not about guys going whack, whack, whack on waves. That's what you get at every other surf event, ours is rooted in the present but admiring of the past, if you like.

The Noosa Festival of Surfing runs from the 12 - 20th March. Visit the website for more details.