About 1 kilometre off North Steyne lies what is shown on nautical charts as Manly Rock. This reef is known to local surfers as the Bombora.
It took me back to the 60's and 70's when I lived for the beach and surf. I was never much good at it but I loved the culture. September school holidays saw me travelling north with a group of students with our surfboards on the roof to the Sunshine and Gold Coasts of Queensland. 
We would camp by the beach. I owned a Kombi van.The summer holidays (January) saw me at the beach as much as possible. One memorable year I went to the beach every day for the whole six weeks. Another year we drove right around the southern coastline to Perth looking for the beaches we had read about. Weekends during school time often meant leaving after the pub closed (10pm in those days)on Friday or Saturday night (I watched my alcohol intake) with ex-students and driving to an isolated beach so we could wake early the next morning and surf all day. Midget Farrelly and Nat Young were our idols. They were interviewed in the program and they are now old just like me :-).
To make money for the school we showed surfing movies in the school canteen on Friday night and the kids and money poured in.
Generally I am not interested in watching sport but I can still spend hours watching surf movies.
The only problem was that all that lying in the sun, covered in salt, led to today's skin cancers. No-one wore sun cream except perhaps for some zinc cream on the nose and cheek bones.
Nowadays I cover up and I have not been in the surf for over 20 years.
In those days it did seem to be the Endless Summer cruising from beach to beach looking for the perfect wave.
and some of the music of that era. An Aussie band, the Atlantics playing Bombora in 1963. Life seemed so good.
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