Fifty-Seven Years in the Water: Palm Beach Boardriders

Long before it was a sponsorship, Palm Beach Boardriders was a handful of surf-mad teenagers with nowhere else to be. In the mid 1960s, a group of local lads, among them Ian Gordon, Peter Kelly, Shawn Conway, Michael Gillet and Neville Palmer, held their founding meeting in Neville Palmer's parents' garage on 8th Avenue, Palm Beach. There wasn't much else going on in Palm Beach at the time. There was the Palm Beach Hotel for a beer, and Bert Cockerall's movie theatre, where a new surf film would draw a crowd once a week. What the lads wanted was simple: a club of their own, built in the mould of the era's great surfing clubs like Kirra and Windansea.

That club grew fast. Through the 1970s, Palm Beach Boardriders built a strong record in the Gold Coast Shield, going head to head with clubs including Windansea, Kirra, North Shore, and Brunswick Heads. It wasn't always smooth sailing. In 1981, an internal split within the club led to the formation of a rival, Salt City, in the Palm Beach Currumbin area (now The Alley Boardriders). Four decades on, the two clubs coexist happily and remain proudly competitive.

By the early 1980s, the club had found a permanent home at the Allstars Sports Club on 19th Avenue, where it still meets on the first and third Wednesday of every month.

Junior development has always sat at the heart of what the club does, and that hasn't changed. Palm Beach Boardriders is a member of both Surfing Queensland and Surfing Australia, and its junior program has produced a steady run of talent through the decades, from 1990s standouts to the current generation. The club's own history page lists a surfer named Daniel Binskin among its standout members of the 1990s.

More recently, Palm Beach juniors have gone on to compete in the ISA World Surfing Games and the Australian Junior surfing titles, and in 2019 the club placed in the top ten at the Kirra Junior Teams, the largest junior teams event in the country. Big wave surfer Ryan Hipwood and WQS competitor Dru Adler are among the current crop of Palmy talent carrying that history forward.

The club is also home to one of the Gold Coast's most meaningful surfing events. Each year, Palm Beach Boardriders runs the Eager Beaver, a two person tag team surf contest held in memory of long time member Nathan "Beaver" Jagger, who died in 2013. The event has grown into the largest of its kind on the Gold Coast and raises awareness and funds for mental health support, with proceeds going to LIVIN.

This season, that same club spirit is being backed by Sherpa Group's ongoing three year sponsorship, now in its second year. The support so far has gone toward a new club trailer, the first update in 20 years, fortnightly junior development training, travel subsidies for members competing at state and national titles, and updated equipment including tents, rash shirts, judging tablets, and medical kits.

Palm Beach Boardriders has been part of this coastline since the 1960s. Backing a club with that much history, and that much community behind it, is exactly the kind of community commitment Sherpa Group wants to be known for.

Almost sixty years after that first meeting in a Palm Beach garage, the club that grew out of it is still doing exactly what it set out to do: giving local surfers, young and old, a place to belong.

Get connected with Palm Beach Boardriders online: https://palmbeachboardriders.com.au/