I spent the weekend in Sydney and got the chance to look around a bit. The activities that they have at the beach are amazing. The one beach I visited (in Manly) had a Surf boat race. The web page listed it as follows: (I didn't take these two photos - but they are much better than mine)
"Sydney's Dee Why beach was abuzz on Saturday with a large crowd (it was really only about 100 people) gathering for the fourth and final round of this summer's Schick Hydro Ocean Thunder Pro Surf Boat series. Australia's top 36 surf rowing crews from all over Australia converged on Dee Why for the series which is viewed by millions of television viewers worldwide."
The male rowers were all 6'5" and 230lb's, real giants. After watching all these guys wandering around I began to think that everyone is that big here in Australia, but at the next beach they were more the everyday size - short and fat. I am surprised that this sport isn't the number one sport watched by women. The guys for some reason, pull their speedo's up to form a sort of thong at the back. Fully exposing their bottoms. So at the start of the race you see 6 teams of 5 men with their butts exposed, getting ready to rush down to the boats. The women's teams don't feel it is necessary to do this with their swim suits unfortunately.
The tough part of the race is getting through the first set of waves, and often one boat is completely swamped and looks like it will sink for sure. But somehow, they can row with the boat full of water and it drains out the back.
Further down the same beach was a larger crowd gathered for kids life guarding training. They had a series of races set up for kids from age 6 to 13. The little ones had a relay race where they had to run down to the beach and then swim through the waves, go around a bouy and swim back. The older kids were doing a race with the rescue boards. They had to go quite far out and around two bouys then back to the beach. It looked like great fun and I wished I could join in.
