Scratched an itch... built a site... surftourist.com

[steve shearer]

The Outsider will be covering Snapper Skip.

Should be a prologue up next week.

Yeah, that cold and isolation isn't for the faint of heart.

Headless penguin on the beach doesn't exactly fill you with courage either.

[DylanFM]

Hi, this is Dylan, one of the people who made surftourist.

We're not adding the surf spots now - it's not our goal to go and make an atlas. There are other people that have been doing that for longer than us, and anyway, that's not what we're interested in doing. We want somewhere to log our surf trips and share them with our friends and family. I also want to be able to go to a site and see other people's trips to France etc. and see how it was when they went.

When people make a trip on surftourist they check in at spots - it's like recording a session on your trip. If the spot they're checking in at doesn't exist on the site they can choose to add it. This includes geotagging it on a map. This is how spots get added to the site.
What I'd like to do is make it so you can say the spot you're checking in at is secret. That way you can still put up photos about your session and say how it was, but no one will be able to see where it was because we won't ask you for the spot's details. Does that sound OK?

Furthermore, how does would it be if we added a way for users to flag a spot as secret. For example, let's say you saw [insert your fav secret spot here] on the site and you flagged it as secret. We'd get notified and if we received, let's say, 5 notifications within a month we'd remove the spot from the site.

[daryl]

fcuck me

[jimmy]

fcuck me

[Skipper]

fcuck me

that's his sense of relief from finding this thread. nein!?

[Skipper]

The Outsider will be covering Snapper Skip.

Should be a prologue up next week.

Yeah, that cold and isolation isn't for the faint of heart.

Headless penguin on the beach doesn't exactly fill you with courage either.

Sheesh.

Look fwd to Snapper tales as always.
But. Meant any plans to write about KI.

[localbogan]

[quote="steve shearer"]I know we've been through all this before Boges but just for the record.

I'm not privvy to any more detailed knowledge than the "rest of us".

What I know in regard to swells and weather is what I write about.

What I know in regard to specific surf spots and what conditions they work under is what I learnt through experience and what I keep to myself.
That is the real gold and the secret to scoring uncrowded surf.

The forecast I give (NENSW/SEQLD) covers over 500 k's of surfable coastline.

My ethics are simple: I don't name spots.

You can use modern forecasting info to score more uncrowded surf than ever.

FACT. I do it every day.

If you rock up to the Superbank with a 4ft east swell running and SE winds and see a human zoo and then blame that on the Internet then you're a fcuking idiot.

FACT.

Greenough stopped surfing the Points around here in 1982 because they were getting too crowded. That was about 20 years before internet f/casting.

Crowds are the future if you live near major population centres.
Get used to it or move away, like people did in the 60's when they had more balls.


I just spent 5 days on a small island in Bass Strait. Despite some of the best surf in Oz I didn't see another surfer the whole time I was there.
Not one.

It was fcukking lonely.

I'm not getting rich doing this. I do it because I love it and I want to stay connected to the Ocean evry single day.
Every penny I make goes straight into the local community here, including Headlander and his mates.[/quote]


Thanks for pointing out a few facts for me Steve.
You are missing my point this time, just as you did last time.
The guys who have devised the surftourist website probably think they are doing no harm and somewhere in their motivations are hopefully trying to make a buck.
However, having flags on surf locations for the whole world to see can only be bad. ie if one of those guys was a local at golf course or dum dums would they want these spots identified on a website seen by British, German, French, Brazilian etc etc surfers thinking about organising a surf holiday in Australia?
Of course not.
By the same token, how would you feel if you turned up to your semi-secret spot only to find 6 other good surfers there who you have not seen before and over heard one of them say "swellnet said places like this would be good today"?
When this happens then you might realise that long range forecasting with very accurate predictions of what type of surf spots will be working in what type of conditions is ultimately, overall BAD for surfing.
Ironically, I find the best days are when these forecasters have got it wrong and there is actually swell when there was predicted to be none.
This is when my tried and true (yet rudimentary and sometimes ridiculed) system of actually going down to the beach and having a look comes into it's own

[Toby Wan]

By the same token, how would you feel if you turned up to your semi-secret spot only to find 6 other good surfers there who you have not seen before and over heard one of them say "swellnet said places like this would be good today"?

If you've ever been to a surf spot outside of walking distance to your house then in a way you're guilty of this to some degree..


proximity to your local break will always give you the advantage of a) understanding conditions better and b) being able surf when the conditions are best - forecasts (and even cameras to a certain degree) can't give you that kind of detail..



as for the boys putting this site together, good on them - i hope they do well

[localbogan]

You have obviously never been the victim of a car load of surfers turning up to your remote break at dawn on the one good day of the week.
On top of that, if photos of your local break going off (particularly if it is rural) popped up on the surftourist website then I am sure you would not be impressed