Surfing and Exploring the Gold Coast, Australia

Point Danger Overlook

Myles and Jack going right

Catching the rush at Byron Beach

Heading south, leaving Brisbane behind

 Coolangata to Byron Bay
It was another 5ish am wake up for a morning surf sesh here in Coolangata. This town is home to a couple of Australia's finest waves, Kirra and Snapper Rocks. The world tour came through here and competed at these breaks a few months ago. What I didn't expect was just how many other waves this town could hold. The coastline here is beautiful and perfect for picking up wrapping swells from the south. Our room was on a big, rocky mount in between Kirra and Snapper rocks. We could walk out to the tip of the cliff and look both ways up and down the coast for a surf check. Things were looking pretty small, although surfable at snappers, but we decided to explore the coast a bit more to see if anything else looked better.
The next beach we drove to was just past Point Danger and we saw sets of bigger waves coming in and surfers out so we quickly made our way down to the beach parking area, grabbed our boards, and paddled out. We all caught a bunch of waves, finally getting out when our desire for breakfast outweighed our urge to catch more waves. Our big adventure during breakfast was getting Myles to try the local spread called Vegemite. He soon found out that there is nothing like some pure yeast extract to ruin a good breakfast. I think we'll be sticking to butter and jam the rest of the trip.
All packed up into our Nissan Dualis we headed south through some beautiful countryside to the popular surf town of Byron Bay. We have a family room at a hostel right on the beach. After getting some inside local knowledge we drove to a surf break at a nearby wildlife conservation park and scored some of the biggest waves of the trip. Besides having fun surf, Tallow Beach was the landing pad for hang gliders launching way up off the overlooking cliff. If that wasn't enough visual stimulation we had dolphins swim right next to us. The first we saw of them they were surfing in a wave that a surfer was also on! I had only seen this in movies and BBC specials before this day. They stuck around and surfed a few more waves before heading farther offshore. It was a very special encounter with nature's original surfers.
Myles and Jack had one more afternoon session in them back at Byron Beach with rented long boards which gave me time to work on some pictures and to go shoot their session. It was pretty fun watching them dropping in on each other, throwing water, and performing some pretty entertaining dismounts. I could really see the brotherly bond, no matter how far they ended up apart after a wave the two boards would always meet back up again to chat before the next set came in.
Bonding over traveling stories past, present, and future as well as a huge dessert calzone brought an end to another fine day in Australia.

Different angle, Dai Mar tucked in