Geoff Helisma, Clarence Valley Independent

Clarence Head Longboarders is holding its third annual invitational surfing competition at Turners Beach, Yamba, over the upcoming long weekend June 11–14.

Dubbed the Yamba Single Fin 2021 Scene III, club captain John Mansfield says 90 competitors have registered to compete across 13 divisions, ranging from juniors through to over 70s.

“Like all long board events it is a fun event, with a lot of camaraderie between us and the visiting competitors.

“We’ve come across one another, with clubs from the Queensland border down to Coffs Harbour, when the long board comps are on; and there is at least one a month.”

However, John says this weekend’s event is just the second invitational competition to be held on the north coast since the Covid pandemic arrived.

“Over the years our club had been to a lot of invitational comps and we were the youngest club.

“It took us a while to get ourselves to the state where we thought we could run one.

“We held our first single fin comp in 2018, followed up in 2019, but missed 2020 because of Covid.”

As well as the age division events, there will be two ‘special’ categories, says John, “timber [surfboards] and old mal logs up to 1967 – the timber boards are either hollow, which goes back to Okanuis [marine ply surfboard first made in the late 1950s] or the next progression, which was balsa, but they’ve got to be nine feet or longer”.

This article appeared in the Clarence Valley Independent, 9 June 2021.