Dog surfing comes to the Noosa Festival of Surfing in March, thanks to sponsors VetShopAustralia.com.au, and Chris De Aboitiz’s Natural Balance dog training program. With Council permission, we’ll be running an exhibition event prior to the opening ceremony, Sunday, March 11 at 4.30pm.
This will be dog surfing like you’ve never seen it before! Former world tandem surfing champion Chris De Aboitiz has been surfing with his dog Lani propped up on the nose of his board for years, in the tradition Chris first learnt as a Waikiki beach boy, at the beach where dog surfing started back in the 1920s. Since establishing Natural Balance dog training programs, he’s also taught many other dogs to enjoy the waves.
Since the early beach boys started taking their dogs out in the surf with them at Waikiki more than 90 years ago, the sport has made stars out of some of them. California surfer Jim Bailey and his dog Rusty were featured in a full page photo in National Geographic back in 1944, but the most famous of all surfer dogs was Scooter Boy Kaopuiki’s Sandy, a Honolulu mongrel that Scooter Boy rescued from a life of scurrying from bin to bin in a lane behind restaurant row in Chinatown. Moving upscale to Waikiki, Sandy surfed all day and lived on scraps from the best beachfront restaurants. Scooter and Sandy appeared on early reality show, “You Asked For It” in the 1950s, and were later featured in the early surf films of Bud Browne.
According to surf historian Matt Warshaw: “When Sandy died in 1958, the Waikiki beach boys bore his ashes to sea in a flotilla of canoes.”
There are now dog surfing contests annually in California at Huntington Beach and Coronado in San Diego, where owners get very serious about hanging paws. The VetShopAustralia.com.au Dog Surf Spectacular will be an exhibition only, and strictly for fun, but Vetshop is promising pet supply prizes for all competitors and something special for “best in surf”. Chris De Aboitiz will be conducting a couple of dog surfing clinics in Noosa in the coming weeks, so if you can ride a board and have a dog who’s game, let us know at info@noosafestivalofsurfing.com
