A memorial wave fit for Col

By KATHERINE HOBY

The surf was "doggy", but everyone knew Col would have been out there.

On Saturday, 70 surfers contested the annual Col McNeill Memorial Surf Contest at Maori Bay, near Muriwai in West Auckland.

The southwesterly wind was bitingly cold and the waves off the beach were messy and thrashing.

But everyone knew the local surfer and board shaper in whose memory the contest was held would never have stood for sitting around.

Mick McDonnell was a friend of Colin "Col" McNeill for more than 20 years.

"He would never accept being caught inside," he says, squinting into the watery sunshine.

McNeill was born, surfed and died in Northland. He was a qualified teacher, but the call of the waves was always going to overrule anything else.

He had a great story to tell every time you met him, his friends say. Like the one about how he survived and surfed on $1 a day while giving windsurfing lessons and sleeping under a Hobie Cat on a French beach in the 1980s.

The first contest was held in 1997 when he became ill with liver cancer. All entry fee proceeds went to his family - he had a wife and two little girls.

McNeill died in July the following year - aged 37 - but the contest that bears his name continued as an annual event, gaining more support every year.

Many of the surfers are members of the Maori Bay Boardriders Club.

Club secretary Mike Massey says the day has always been more about fun and comradeship than raw competition.

"It's about seeing mates, telling stories and having one for Col in the evening."

Although Massey and some of the younger competitors did not know Col McNeill, they respect the memory of his passion for surfing.

After a couple of years, McNeill's widow, Theresa, suggested the proceeds go to a charity. The thousands raised now go to the Make-a-Wish Foundation, to help make dreams come true for seriously ill children.

McDonnell says McNeill was well known as "a true character and a real crazy bugger", who locals suspected had salt water rather than blood in his veins.

He was very fit, motivated and positive at all times.

"Nothing was ever bad. We'd all whinge and moan but he could drag anyone out of a pit. He'd say, 'Get out there, just get out there'."

Jamie Phillips, of Muriwai, says everyone on Saturday was struggling to find "a clean face" to surf.

The warmest vantage points appeared to be inside a car, or flat to the ground. One copper-coloured Australian cattle dog had the right idea, stretched out on the sun-warmed stones in the carpark.

On the grass at the top of the beach wetsuits lay like newly shed skins in the weak west coast sun.

A loud hooter sounded from the caravan in the carpark to signal the end of a heat, and a vast sign painted green and red on either side gave the go-ahead to surfers waiting in the water.

The accompaniment to the thrashing surf was the ceaseless chirruping song of gannets at the nearby colony.

Heat after heat, the riders negotiated their way down the anthill track from carpark to beach, tag-teaming in and out of the surf. Some carried out a series of impressive-looking stretching exercises, but nothing seemed to help once they were in the water. All emerged shaking their heads at heat's end.

But McDonnell says McNeill was the sort of guy who would help keep everyone hyped up, no matter what the conditions.

"As long as there was a stretch of water, and he had a board, he had said he had nothing to complain about. If it was fine but windy, he'd say, 'Well at least it's not raining', and if it was raining, he'd say, 'We're already wet anyway'. Nothing would bring him down."

One year he decided to surf every single day.

"It was madness. Some days were totally awful but he'd get out, make a couple of turns and come back in. It was insane. But that's surfing - one day it's crap, the next it's heaven. And that sort of stunt was Col all over."

Further reading
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