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Uluwatu surfing in the 1980s

July 1, 1985-ish. Big Monday at Uluwatu and Padang Padang was a day burned in the memory banks of anyone there to see it in person. Photo: YouTube//Screensyot


The Inertia

Before anyone was surfing Uluwatu, the waves were still rolling in. Waves don’t need surfers, but surfers sure do need waves. As surfing’s popularity blossomed, crowds got thicker and waves like Uluwatu became more and more crowded. But back in the mid-’80s, about a decade after Gerry Lopez first surfed them, Uluwatu and Padang Padang were paradises for those surfers who were lucky enough to be there. In the video you see here, both waves are featured in iconic surf filmmaker Chris Bystrom’s Beyond Blazing Boards.

The film, which Kelly Slater once said was “the film I watched so many times as a 14 year old I probably burned a hole in it,” was shot entirely with 16 mm film, and featured waves from Bali, Australia, Mexico, and California. Watching it now, one can see how surfing’s evolution in the 1980s had a hand in what surfing has become today.

The snippet of Beyond Blazing Boards you see here comes courtesy of The Australian and New Zealand Surf Film Archive, an organization that’s devoted to preserving as many old surf films as possible. Its YouTube library is extensive, and for any fan of surfing history, it’s a necessary subscribe.

“All the footage you will see was originally shot on film, and has been scanned from the highest possible copy we could find, sometimes even the camera reels,” the creators write. “Everything is scanned and shared with permission by the original filmmakers or their families. Most of this footage has rarely been seen in 50 years, some has never been screened to the public before.”

Although the exact year of the footage here is up for debate, we do know it was shot on July 1.

“We’ve all had the experience of a classic one-day swell that seemed to disappear overnight just as quickly as it arrived, leaving us only the memories of the few hours of perfection,” says the narrator. “Monday July 1 will be remembered as ‘Big Monday’ in Bali, when the largest clean swell to hit Uluwatu and Padang Padang in over five years poured through.”

 
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