Amid the perfect blue rolling waves of Byron Bay’s beaches, a menace lurks.
It’s not sharks or stingers that are spoiling the vibes at perhaps Australia’s most famous tourist town, but out-of-control surfboards.
A trend among some surfers to not wear leg ropes attached to their board has been blamed for a spate of serious injuries, including most recently to a surfer who had his arm slashed open by the fin of a rogue surfboard.
Mathew Cassidy was hit by the longboard’s fin while surfing at Wategos Beach, a picturesque cove 2km south of Byron’s main beach. The board – not attached to its owner by a leg rope – flew up among the waves and caught Cassidy under the arm, according to reports.
Ripping through veins and arteries, his biceps was partly torn off by the impact.
“Waves throw surfboards around like matchsticks,” Ian Cohen, former Greens MP and surf enthusiast, says. “A 10-foot board with fins on it coming a long way has got a lot of momentum and weight behind it.”
“They effectively become a deadly weapon.”
Cohen says it is common courtesy for surfers to take the responsibility for wearing a leg rope, and supports local councillors who want that courtesy translated into regulation.
“It is no different from regulations around safe use of boats, water skis or jet skis when there are people around,” Cate Coorey, a Byron Shire councillor, says.
More than 2 million tourists visit Byron Bay annually and Coorey is worried a lack of regulations and enforcement could put visitors on their beaches at risk.
“We really do need something that will actually give people pause for thought before they venture into a crowded surf,” she says. “Those boards travel at great speed, and a lot of them are really pointy.”
Coorey says there have been countless collisions between beachgoers and stray boards, including “penetrating head injuries” on small children. But a board doesn’t have to puncture skin or bone to cause damage. “They are also really, really heavy. If somebody is knocked out, they can drown.”
In 2019 a group of lawyers highlighted the danger posed by surfers who failed to wear a leg rope in a campaign to enforce them at crowded breaks or else hold surfers liable for negligence in civil law.
Coorey is currently seeking legal advice on the possibility of regulations under Byron Shire’s local government act, and is consulting national and marine parks in the area before moving the proposal at an upcoming council meeting.
Cohen says opposition to regulation from the surf community comes down to a sense of pride.
“Surfing is a very hedonistic sport that is regulated by image, or people who are selfishly hell-bent on looking good.”
The result is an “incredible surge in numbers of inexperienced people” without leg ropes in an increasingly crowded surf.
But not all local surfers agree that leg ropes are the problem.
“I’d say 99.9% of people that come in to me have been run over with people wearing leg ropes, so that is not the issue,” Simon Maltby says. He has been repairing surf boards in Byron Bay for more than 10 years.
“A lot of incidents in the surf are caused by people who do wear leg ropes. They go out with a sense of false security because they have it on. You take off on waves that are far out of their capabilities, because they know they won’t lose their board.”
Maltby says the real issue is a lack of education about surf conditions.
“I’ve lived here for 30 years, and I’ve surfed the Pass for 30 years. Over that length of time, it got crazily busy and the education is not there for new people.”
“They go straight out into the main break after a lesson or two lessons, when it takes years to get the capability to go and surf when it’s busy.”
“So I don’t think regulation is going to solve the issue. We need education.”
