After last year's succesful resurrection of the Shark Island Challenge, the comp is set to run again in 2025. With the waiting period having just kicked off it seems an opportune time to look back at a defining chapter, not just in the event’s history, but in the sport of bodyboarding itself.

The 2001 Shark Island Challenge was arguably the wildest surf contest ever staged in Australia.

Veteran surf journo Nick Carroll once claimed that bodyboarders began to search out and ride heavier, slabby waves because aggression from surfers had driven them away from “better” established waves. I’ll respectfully disagree with that. Bodyboarders seek out steep, powerful waves because that’s where bodyboards work best. Short rail lines and smaller surface area means a boog is much better at harnessing power to generate speed than it is in generating its own, plus flex and recoil lets them match wave contours while generating forward momentum.

Bodyboarding essentially had a split personality in the late-eighties and early-nineties. Contests were usually held in horrible beachbreak conditions, and so professional riders often spun and flopped themselves around in substandard conditions in order to try to earn a paycheque, while others pursued the biggest heaviest waves they could find.

In Australia, Shark Island was the pinnacle of heavy slabs and Cronulla locals like Matt Percy, Nathan 'Nugget' Purcell, Dave Ballard, Adam 'Wingnut' Smith, Warren Fienbier, and others in the tight crew set the standard. They openly mocked and spurned the riding being done in beachbreak contests as a misrepresentation of what bodyboarding was about.

By the mid-nineties, the Cronulla crew had enough of beachbreak mediocrity. They wanted to show what bodyboarding could really look like. Their solution? A contest at the best bodyboarding wave in Australia.

At left, the view from the headland on the morning of July 6th, 2001, and at right, the Letraset type sums up bodyboarding's late-nineties mindset: 'Grovelling is dead.'

Spearheaded by Mark Fordham and Purcell, the Shark Island Challenge debuted in 1997, a 32-rider invitational that paired 16 locals with 16 of the sport’s best outsiders. The format was simple: all riders would surf two non-elimination heats, with their best two waves across both heats tallied to decide the winner.

With a generous waiting period, the aim was to run when the Island was pumping.

Percy, long hailed as the Island’s best local, claimed the inaugural title in solid but not spectacular conditions. However, the concept was proven, a contest could be held that showcased bodyboarding in heavy waves.

Over the next few years, the event grew in stature, second only to Pipeline in bodyboarding prestige. But still, a true 'Island day' had eluded the event.

Then came July 2001.

A tropical depression drifted south from the Coral Sea and met a stationary New Zealand high. The result: a week-long groundswell that swung from south to a clean-lined, long-period east swell featuring 8 to 10 feet of square-edged fury. East swell is not the ideal swell direction for the Island, the swell lines wrap in hard and focus all of the wave energy on the shallow end section of the wave called Surge, producing thick, often multi-lipped double and triple up sections. On the 6th and 7th of July, Surge more closely resembled a giant whitewater rapid run onto a barely submerged rock shelf.

What looks so innocuous sketched in B&W lines materialised as a Hall Of Fame east swell and a wild game of Russian Roulette as the direction tilted away from Shark Island's ideal south-east direction.

As competitors stood in the pre-dawn light taking in the maelstrom before them, the quietly-muttered consensus was that conditions were unsurfable. Local icon Dave Ballard expressed so to contest director Fordham, who replied. "We're out there!"

Pre-inflatable vests, minimal water safety, not even an ambulance waiting on shore. No real media coverage or heavy sponsor obligations, no public pressure or expectations. So why run..?

The answer to that is buried in the inferiority complex built into bodyboarding at that time. As a collective culture, bodyboarders had something to prove to everyone who'd given them shit as doormats and dickdraggers and Esky lids. It was at the very essence of why the locals charged so hard at the island, why the event had been created in the first place. Here was a chance to showcase something truly extreme that only bodyboarders at the time could pull off...so it was game on.

Port Macquarie’s Damian King had more than pride on the line. The night before the contest, he tried to sleep in his car overlooking Cronulla Point. His brand - Rejected Clothing, which was launched with his brother and fellow boogers - had just received a $25,000 invoice it couldn’t pay. That number would come to matter.

Surfing in the opening heat Kingy was a clear stand out, throwing mid-face spins on roll-ins before hopping and popping over inside Surge mutant lumps.

Not to be outdone, the locals also produced, and in more ways than one. Nugget Purcell had long been the clown prince of the Australian bodyboarding scene. Cronulla born and raised, the first time he ever rode a bodyboard was incredibly at low tide Shark Island.

Almost everyone has a Nugget story that centres around his extra-curricular activities, however he was also in the top echelon of riders at Shark Island for over two decades.

On the morning of July 6th, when contest director Fordham called Nugget to tell him the contest was on, he was still out sampling the nocturnal entertainments of the early 2000's Kings Cross nightclub scene, and by his own admission, considerably inebriated. Jumping in a taxi and making it to Cronulla just in time for his first heat, he stroked in to a flaring 8 foot beast that ended up as the covershot for Riptide's 2001 photo annual.

The event had grown in prestige and also attracted the who's who of overseas pro riders including Mike Stewart, Jeff Hubbard, Spencer Skipper, plus South Africans Andre Botha and  Alistair Taylor.

South African bodyboarders had a reputation as the most core of all boogers through the nineties and into the new century, recklessly charging during the Hawaii seasons and doing it on the poverty line. Alistair Taylor once famously spent a season sharing a two-man tent in a Hawaiian backyard subsisting almost entirely on a giant bag of potatoes purchased from Costco.

As the waves built with the incoming tide, Taylor endeavoured to live up to the crazy Saffa reputation saying, "It was kinda like Russian roulette out their for me, I was pretty charged up, I just tried to go on anything, just pull in and see if I could make it out."

Chance caught up with him when a thick-lipped mutant slammed him into the shallow inside shelf, however he also ended up splashed across the back page of both the Daily Telegraph and Sydney Morning Herald the next day. That night feeling a little extra sore and sorry he drove himself to Sutherland Hospital where it was discovered he'd broken his back and had rib cartilage damage. He still showed up for his heat the next day.

Expecting to see the result of the previous night's Sharks vs Raiders clash, footy fans instead flicked to the back page of the Telegraph to see Alistair Taylor with more water above him than below.

Following the same format of previous Shark Island comps, riders would surf a second round of heats with opportunity to better their wave total from the day before, although the heat order was reversed. The second day of competition was much the same as the first, with slightly cleaner and more manageable conditions than the day before. Cue more big tubes and crazy wipeouts.

At the presentation event later that night first place came down to two people: Kingy and Western Australia’s Ryan Hardy. Hardy had already etched his name into history by beating Stewart, Tâmega, and Taylor at the Teahupo’o skins event the year before, but on this day Shark Island had a new King.

Showered in beer and handed a novelty cheque for - poetically - $25,000, Damian King was handed the ability to save his company and cement his place as one of the bodyboarding world's best ever

“I was just in a different mindset over those days,” he later told Riptide magazine in a post-event interview.

The 2001 Island Challenge was a defining moment in bodyboarding’s evolution. It distilled the raw potential and burgeoning cultural ethos of never holding back in gnarly conditions, into a visceral and visually spectacular event. To this day it's still the heaviest surf event ever held.

Looking back on the event, two-time world champ Ben Player says, "I think the 2001 SIC event allowed bodyboarding to be showcased in the way bodyboarders at the time wanted - which was totally unique to what other surf craft were doing for their events."

"That event defined bodyboarding and gave it a place in surfing culture forever."

// DAN DOBBIN

The 2025 Shark Island Challenge waiting period started on the 28th April and concludes 30th June.