It appears that the big O, as he's affectionately known, is retiring from surfski paddling at the top of his game. Unconfirmed reports suggest that he's tackling a much bigger challenge...
We have more details of the incident and some photos of the Fenn Millennium surfski that was chomped by a Great White Shark in Mossel Bay on 28th June.
Mossel Bay, South Africa, 28th June, 2008. Jan-Hendrik Barnard and his friend Kobus Maritz were paddling near Bay View when a shark hit Kobus' Fenn Mako Millennium surfski from underneath. "The shark bit the ski near where the Fenn Mako logo is," said Jan-Hendrik...
It's not every day that a 75m tall (23 storeys!), 345m long (54 ski lengths) ship comes to town... So the Durban Underwater Club Geriatskis got up early and went to welcome the Queen Mary 2 as she arrived for a one day visit...
What's the most popular brand of ski in the world? Where are the surfski.info readers from? How often do you paddle? The answers are revealed here - in the results of the 2008 Surfski.info Survey...
With the astonishing and frightening increases in the oil price, Lance O'Conner from Red7 Australia has come up with a brilliant idea: the paddle powered Ski-cart... Matt Carter sent us these photos.
[Editor: This feels weird - I knew nothing about this article until a few minutes ago - but it's a nice surprise! Thanks Al!]
Since you are reading this article on surfski.info, it is very likely you will come across the name 'Rob Mousley'. Rob is the joint founder of surfski.info and is a prolific writer and avid surf-skier. In the 3 years of surfski.info's existence, Rob has published over 600 articles which have generated nearly 5 million pageviews from readers all over the world.
Sunday 18th May is not only the day of surf-skiing's most famous race, the Molokai Crossing, but, by some huge co-incidence, it is also Rob's 45th birthday. Rob is currently in Hawaii and will be realising a dream of taking on the winds and ocean swells to make the 56km crossing from Molokai to Oahu. In the last few weeks Rob has written a number of articles profiling the world's top surfski paddlers, and I thought it would be a good idea to profile Rob himself!
Take the survey! C'mon, please - it'll just take a few minutes!
After some late nights and many emails to our service provider we are glad to report that Surfski.Info is up and running on our very own managed server. We were basically given final notice last week by our service provider to vacate the shared server or be shut down. We had outgrown the neighbourhood and were taking up more resources than was permissible.
With the new server we have plenty room to grow, in fact we are only taking up a third of the space that we are paying for. So if you would like to make use of that space to host your website (and help out with the cost of hosting surfski.info) then please let us know by emailing us on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. If you don't have a website yet then this is the ideal opportunity for us to help you build one.
Our story on New Zealander Brad Haye's wooden surfski, aroused plenty of interest including a comment that it was ‘great to see some "SOUL" in the sport'... Well, it seems there's plenty of "soul" down under - here's news of another timber-ski project, this time by Stephen Kelly of Brisbane, Australia.
Soul ski! (Pic: Stephen Kelly)