Rob Mousley

Anton Fouche of Durban, South Africa was hurtling down a wave at 25-30kph off Umhlanga when his Fenn Mako6 ski came to an abrupt halt.  The sound of the impact was "really loud" - but what had he hit?

More accurately, the question is what hit him?  "I caught a glimpse of a large dark object & a big splash," he said, "and almost fell out trying to turn to evaluate the damage & whether I was going to sink or not."

Shark Bite Damage to Anton Fouche's Fenn Mako6 Surf Ski (Photo: Ant Fouche)

We've been sent a bunch of news by Aussies about paddling down under...  There's a lot going on with some major races set to take place in the second half of the year.  It seems that a large section of the Aussie paddling takes place in the form of Surf Lifesaving Events, but Ocean Racing is clearly taking off as series like the Gold Coast Desalination Project Winter Series demonstrate. 

Currumbin Creek Paddlers

From Oscar Chalupsky (currently in Germany) comes the news that multiple Olympic medal winner Birgit Fisher will be competing in the Dubai Shamaal race in November.

Fisher has had an incredible career in paddling...

Olympic silver medalist and former ace surf ski paddler Nathan Baggaley was arrested on Monday evening, July 2, 2007, when he attempted to return a ski allegedly stolen earlier in the evening from Byron Bay Surf Life Saving Club.

Just how many people visit www.surfski.info?  I have to confess that I go to pageview counter several times a day to see how we're doing...

And the last couple of months have been enormously exciting - we seem to be attracting more people from more places than ever before.  Here are some statistics that we'd like to share with you...

Welcome to the new and improved Surfski.info. After a few late nights working on getting it just right we are now happy to go live with the News Portal format. The previous sequential blog-type format served us well but it did not do justice to the over 400 articles which were hidden under layers of menus. This prompted us to spend some time and money implementing a professional news portal. 

This advanced news portal format is similar to that of top news websites like CNN.com and Foxnews.com and promises a number of advantages.

• Looks great
• Easy navigation
• Maximum use of the frontpage real estate
• Smooth article flow for easy surfing
• Smart image handling
• Section page and category page

We hope you like the new format, soon we will be reorganizing the Sections and Categories to improve the structure and we will be providing regional front pages for local content.

Let us know what you think... 

Imagine that little Johnny hands his essay in to his university lecturer.  "I've copied someone else's paper," he says, "but it's ok, I've only used 70% of it and I've improved some of the details."  "It's a great piece of work," he adds, "the original had very good reviews."

Unlikely?  This appears to be exactly what Damien Daley has done with his "70%" copy of the V10, the "XLR8 Odyssey" surf ski.

Sharks are a highly emotive topic, especially when combined with surfing or paddling, but here in Cape Town we have to face the fact that we share the water with them when we paddle. 

This incident is published to illustrate that an encounter even with an aggressive Great White need not end badly.  We also asked shark researcher Allison Kock what paddlers should do when faced with such a situation.

On Sunday, 4 March 2007, Gavin Searle sent me an email.  “Give me a call,” he said, “some guys got properly taken out on the Mound yesterday.  Today was cleaner – we got up to 37km/h down the face of a monster.”

“Huh?” I thought, “What’s the Mound?”

We're finally beginning to make progress in adding value to surfski.info again.  (We had an unfortunate experience upgrading the site and then have been battling with hackers for the last couple of weeks.)

We've started by launching an open events calendar - open that is to you, to put your events up.