Long Reef Surf Life Saving Club
Club History - Kenny, Scooter P and KB.
Longy – 1984 – 1999: “A Retrospective By Some Living Legends”
Over the fifteen years to the turn of the century, we saw a lot of changes down at Longy, but thankfully, some things always seem to stay the same. Below is a little something we put together over a few beers. If we’ve made any mistakes about names, dates, places etc., get over it! (PC, you’d be pleased, we’re all turning into AP’s!)
Membership
If you’re one of those people who believe in “7 year itches”, you could apply this to the Clubs membership. We joined Longy around 84 – 85 as a bunch of fresh-faced teenagers in our first years of high school. Longy was going through one of its regular rough patches. There was a core group of Active and Active Reserve members, but very few decent or reliable younger members. There were about fifteen Juniors from around the Frenchs Forrest area involved, but other than a few hot chicks, they weren’t much chop; they were all gone within a few years. So to the rescue came the Cromer and Davo crowd. For various reasons a bunch of us joined and made the Club what it is today, well, made a significant contribution anyway.
1991 – 92 saw SCECGS Redlands begin its association with Longy as well as the first of our “country folk” members, e.g. Pearsons, MacDougalls & Erbys and their friends.
SCECGS Redlands association with the Club came about by Rob Murray. When Rob moved from SHORE to SCECGS Redlands, he started the life saving program there. The partnership between SCECGS and Longy was very successful with plenty of current members coming out of that program. The partnership was also quite popular with the members in our late teens due to the Redlands being co-educational. And probably half of the students doing lifesaving were of the female persuasion!
Once again this injection of new blood revitalised the Club and gave the existing Club stalwarts a break from running the joint. Around 1998/99 saw others come into to the Club and help/take over the running; people like the “nipper” parents. I wonder what will happen in 2008?
Going back through the Annual Reports, in ‘85 there were 110 Active members. This dropped down to about 80 in 1988 (when we didn’t have a Clubhouse). According to last seasons Annual Report there were nearly 250 patrollers at Longy!
Patrols
Patrols have changed a lot since we joined up. Today there is much more emphasis on appearance and the appearance of professionalism. (Back in the good ol’ days, wearing a stack hat was all the patrol uniform you needed!) Paid lifeguards, paperwork, duty of care statements, OH&S guidelines, these are all symptoms of our litigious society. There also seems to be twice as much gear to take down and up these days; this is off set by having the quad bike to do all the heavy lifting! No carrying a hard hulled IRB for today’s kids!
Before the quad bike, we would load the IRB with the tent, chairs, boards, tubes, First Aid kit and drag it on its trailer over the sand dune. The afternoon patrols job was to drag it all back. Many an afternoon a member of the public would have to help us push the stuff back up over the dune. This is why you often hear Jim Selosse talking about lowering and widening the walkway.
A good change is that a reel is no longer needed on patrol. Do the Cadets and Juniors today even know what a reel is? When we were Cadets and Juniors, we were treated well but had to serve as lackeys. We had to get drinks for the older guys, bring down extra equipment from the Club, sweep the hall and mop the change rooms after every afternoon patrol. It might have been a pain to do this, but we did learn to respect the Club and the equipment more.
This servitude was offset by the stories of older members like Macca, Clarkie and Charlie Louden. Things along the lines of “when I was a boy, boy….”, or retelling of Owlies famous Bucks night, and who can forget the famous New Years Day quote “I can’t believe it, I haven’t had a #$^% all year!” Thankfully some things never change and there is a whole new generation of “young” old boys maintaining and adding to this tradition of truth embellishment.
When the Club only had 80 – 100 active members, Patrols seemed to come around at least every two weeks, more often over Christmas and Easter! There was a great sense of community and it wasn’t too difficult to know the names of all the active members. On ugly days the name of the game was to dig a big hole in the beach affectionately known as a tractor trap. Over the years we only caught out Clarkie once when he was cleaning the beach. Windy days called for Tent surfing. You get one of the tents out of the Club; put it up into the wind and see how far you would get carried down the beach. For a few years in the early-nineties, it wasn’t uncommon to see the BBQ down at the patrol tent. Who would have believed that on one Anzac Day afternoon patrol, three guys could go drink about 15 cans of Coke with their sausage sandwiches!
Patrols weren’t all fun and games. Over this time there were a handful of resuscitations at Longy, thankfully all successful. Christmas Day 1989 was extremely sad. Longy helped in the search for a missing person off Dee Why, a man’s body was pulled from the water after several hours; he could not be revived.
Rebuilding the Clubhouse
The old building served the Club well for near on 40 seasons. It was a great place for a bunch of young fella’s like us. It was kind of dark and dingy and getting old and tired so it was hard to wreck anything too much. Many afternoons were spent down there playing ping-pong and pool (on the same table that is still just living). Cricket in the courtyard in summer. Fires in 44’s in the courtyard in winter after a surf. Sitting on the wall and perving at the chicks going to the Bino, it was all gold.
After many, many years of fundraising and battling the council, Longy was finally able to rebuild the Clubhouse in 1988/89. On a very windy day some time in the autumn of ’88, about a dozen keen members, ably led by Clarkie, got to demolish the old Clubhouse. Imagine twelve 16 – 25 year old blokes armed with sledgehammers, crowbars, lumpies, whatever, and given permission to demolish… Only a few of the fittings were incorrectly smashed, and maybe a few walls were reduced in height a bit more than planned; well, you get that.
The 88/89 season was a challenge with the Club basically operating out of the current boat sheds and a shipping container; I can’t remember if we had hot showers (the primary reason for joining a surf club)! This saw our active membership drop to about 80. It was a long, hard season, but the new building was worth the wait. And what a great job on the paint scheme for the change rooms - blue for boys, pink for girls!
Special mention needs to go to the late Phyllis and John Rose who were fantastic supporters of Long Reef for many, many years. Without their generous donations, we would still be raising funds for a new building. It was fantastic that Phyllis could make it down to Longy for the official opening of the new Clubhouse. She was genuinely moved by the thanks she received from all members, young and old.
After the Club house was rebuilt it was special to a lot of members. For us younger guys getting access to the Club was always a chore. Several committee members had keys to the hall but the only one you would see during the week would be Clarkie. Many an hour would be spent sitting around the courtyard waiting for Clarkie to arrive. Around 1991-92 we worked out if we sat on the Committee we could have keys to the Club and get access anytime. Little did we realise that some of us would still be sitting on the committee 10 years later.
With the opening up of access there were more Club members generally hanging around the Club in the afternoons. A lot of us were at university, SCECGS was in the Club, and more Club members would pop in as they knew the Club would be open. The cricket in the courtyard continued, we put up a basketball hoop (don’t ask where we got that from) and one hazy summer cards were all the rage.
Competition
The ten years to the late nineties was a “golden era” for IRB racing. Longy had a great IRB team and competed in carnivals up and down the NSW coast as well as at Aussie Titles in places like Glenelg, S.A., Lorne, Vic and Bundaberg, Qld. During this golden period of IRB racing (before the fun police banned competition), Longy won dozens of medals in all events, A grade, Reserves, Masters, Novice and Chicks at all levels and all over the country. We won a couple of General Point scores at carnivals, Best Driver awards, and won the, what we believe, is the Club’s only Branch Championship. The highest achievement was in 1993. Glen Coppen, Steve Dunn and Lincoln Brown won the Club’s first Australian Gold medal in the Rescue Tube event at Avoca.
The Longy IRB Team made a name for themselves as crazies who enjoyed the night out before a carnival while still being able to compete with the best of them on next morning. A sausage sanga from the club BBQ, a cup of coffee, and a quick swim (didn’t matter the water was sometimes less than 15 degrees) and Longy were ready to race. The quality of our patients also made the Longy team very popular with the other teams! We rolled boats, flipped boats, set them on fire, broke engines, hotted up engines (that shot flames like real racing engines, think V8 supercar cross IRB), broke arms and legs and shoulders and ankles (and one testicle, almost), got hypothermia, got drunk and threw up and built some great pyramids.
Kiama was by far and away the favourite carnival for the Longy team, in fact for most of the Sydney IRB racing fraternity. On the Friday night half the teams would pitch their competition tents on the grass outside Kiama Surf Club, have a beer upstairs and let them know we were there, walk 200m up the road to the Royal - dinner, beer, vodka, sambuca, Shirley Temples... At midnight, the publican would lock those remaining in to allow them to continue celebrating arriving in Kiama. We’d eventually head back to sleep in the tent in the early hours of Saturday morning. We would race all day Saturday, and then repeat Friday night on Saturday night. Longy won heaps of medals over the years, but somehow, we never won the Kiama Carnival!
Showing fear in the IRB in big surf was not allowed. Glen Coppen was the master of getting a fully laden IRB in or out in massive surf (fully laden means about 8 – 10 people in the boat). Coming back in was always interesting as the IRB would not go very fast and as we were about to be swamped Glenn would just tell us to hang on and turn off the engine.
We always had a great time wherever we went racing, met lots of cool people and some knobs, made some friends and won a heap of medals. It’s great to see that IRB Racing has been re-introduced to competition. There is nothing like training and competing to improve both drivers and crews’ skill levels.
Even though IRB’s dominated the Club’s success over this period, there was other competition happening. Back in the 86/87 season, Longy got a Silver in the Brach Patrol Competition and 5th in the State Titles; of the nine members of this team, five are still active in the Club (Dav Mac, Kieren and Lincoln Brown, Brad Anderson and Tony Hardwicke). In 93/94, we think, Longy managed to improve on this result in the Patrol Competition. We had two teams in the Branch Titles and placed 1st and 4th. The gold medal winning team went on to the State Titles and came 2nd (we was robbed of Gold due to those thagnosts from Woolgoolga and their dodgy protest). This qualified the team for the Aussie Titles where they placed a credible fifth. Not bad for a bunch of “Dad’s Army” patrollers!
The boaties, while not as active or as successful as the IRB team were also doing their bit the late eighties and nineties. The eighties saw one committed and talented “A” crew and some fly by night others. The A’s managed to win some stuff, though none of us can remember what! One of the most memorable carnivals of this period was the Aussie Titles in 1989 held at North Burleigh beach. In typical Queensland style, Huey decided a cyclone swell would be appropriate for this carnival. On the Friday, the sets were breaking at the buoys. Having to take a relatively (or more truthfully, totally) inexperienced Colts crew out in this didn’t fill Digger with a lot of joy. But fortune smiled on him that day, the Longy crew was one of only two boats that made it to the buoys in their heat, and they did it without getting a drop in the boat! This obviously pissed Huey off, as Saturday saw the swell increase. The Longy “A” crew was drawn in the first heat of the morning, their quarterfinal. After 20 minutes and several boatloads, time was up and only one crew had managed to get through the break. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the Longy crew and that was their end of their Aussies. The carnival was then moved to Coolangatta. The surf was more manageable with only the occasional clean-up set breaking on or behind the buoys. To everyone’s surprise the Longy Colts made it through to the quarterfinals; helped in a large part by the free ride back from the buoys (or was it beyond) in a few heats!
The early nineties saw a renewed interest in rowing at Longy. This was led by those country folk mentioned above and the advent of women’s surf boat rowing. I’m pretty sure that Long Reef can be counted as one of the founding Club’s for chicks in boats. I think at one stage we peaked with about six actively competing crews – three open, two chicks and the ageless vets. It was a great time to be rowing with many traditional carnivals, marathon events and social rows. This period also saw the (re?)introduction of midnight rows after the Annual Dinner.
Longy had some great results in carnivals. The Refo’s won a Branch Silver in Reserve Grade Boats, the Vets won numerous carnivals including the East Coast Masters several times, but more importantly, Australian Masters Gold. The chicks did well in the early years winning several carnivals and the Newport Arms Regatta. Some memorable moments during this period would have to include Digger’s first carnival sweeping the Refo’s. In some serious surf at DY, he asked how they handled comebacks only to be answered with “what’s a comeback?” by the bowman. Obviously the Refo’s didn’t do too well that carnival. Then there was the Sydney Harbour Marathon. There was a rule that support vessels had to be smaller than 30’. But of course the Longy connections had enabled us to get a 45’ cruiser as our support boat! Any of the Murray Marathons are memorable. For those who don’t know, this is a 400 km charity “race” down the Murray River over 5 days. Over the years, Longy has used anywhere between 7 and 20 rowers rotating through the days paddling. There were the Forster Marathons, a leisurely 60 km paddle around the Forster Lake in one day (to be celebrated with everyone’s good friends Mr Coopers, Mr Guinness and Mr John Jameson). But probably the most enjoyable of all the rowing events were the regular trips to Watson’s Bay, either from The Spit or Little Manly. A leisurely row across the harbour, possibly with one or two passengers in the boat, several cleansing ales at Watto Bay pub then an even more leisurely row home.
The End Bit
During the eighties and nineties, there were lots of other events at Longy.
We hosted a very successful Metrops Carnival as well as two Branch carnivals and a Branch IRB championship. We had some great parties; especially one “open” party in about ’86 - three local bands, a full Clubhouse and about another 2000 punters having their own party in the carpark. It sure was a night to remember. We had some great pub crawls and a harbour cruise; some good, but mainly dodgy evenings with home brew, plus annual trips to the SCG for test matches (which only halted because of fun police at the ground). No one who was there could forget Clarkie claiming “discrimination” at the Beauchamp because they wouldn’t hire him as a barman, something about him not being young and buff! There were three Sony Surflites which were part of the then world sail boarding championship. Seeing the worlds best sail boarders, including world No. 1 Robby Nash, doing their stuff out at Back Bombie was seriously impressive.
For us, Longy was a great place to spend the high school years and beyond. It was small Club with an emphasis on “Club community”. While it was never forgotten that we were a surf lifesaving Club first and foremost, this was integrated into the culture. Patrolling was something that needed to be done, but it wasn’t necessarily a chore or a penalty. It was a time to spend talking with your mates, having a swim, a paddle and perving while keeping the general public safe. Competition was done for enjoyment and if a few medals came along, great. But again it was about spending time and doing something you enjoy with people you liked.
It’s great to see Long Reef growing and being successful, but we hope this doesn’t cause us to lose the intangibles that make Longy the Club it is. It would be a tragedy if we ended up being like some of our Northern Beaches neighbours which are highly factionalised (boaties v nippers v paddlers v IRB etc.) and proscriptive in their activities, for example “the surf boats and racing skis are for competitors only, no social paddling allowed”. In our experience, chasing success and recognition is not what Longy has been about and once you’ve reached the pinnacle, there is only one direction.
So that’s it from us. We hope that the Cadets, Juniors and Colts of today have as much fun as we did and still do. And fingers crossed, we’ll still be around for many years (decades) telling the young folk how easy they’ve got it and turning into crusty, objectionable opinionated old fellas!