// Jackson Winter

“I’ve always been blessed to live near the beach – we’ve lived in the Noosa Shire my whole life. Dad took me down; he’d go surfing and I’d play around in the shorey. I started to stand up on my bodyboard and just sort of progressed from there. So I started surfing before I could even remember.”

But a career on six-foot thrusters wasn’t Jackson’s idea of a pleasurable career path.

“I was in the mal club probably from when I was about six. When I was about 10 or 12 I started doing shortboard comps but I realized I wanted to predominantly do longboard comps from when I was about 14.

“I got really over [shortboard contests] because it became really cutthroat and hassling. I really preferred the atmosphere of longboard comps.”

An unprejudiced mindset is important in today’s disparate society, and never more so than in the environmentally varied world of surfing. But for Jackson his lack of bias has been even more advantageous than simply widening his surfing opportunities.

“Because I started off competing on shortboards, I used a few of those techniques in longboarding comps and I think that worked to my advantage.”

It is with this advantage, and following a swathe of impressive contest results and experience, that Jackson ventured across the Tasman to undertake the 2010 Hyundai Longboard Tour in New Zealand.

Jackson’s humility belies his inordinate success in the 2010 season. In the five events scheduled for the tour, Jackson was victorious at three stages of the Under 18 division, convincingly claiming the year’s crown, and winding up the season in seventh position in the Opens.

Though admirable, this result belies the truth. For his part in the Under 18s, Jackson only competed at three of the scheduled five stops on the tour. The first event, due to be held at Mount Maunganui, was cancelled, leaving all competitors with just four stages in which to make their mark.

But Jackson’s path was made harder still. Sitting atop the U18 ladder and placing third in the Open, Jackson was forging a triumphant path. But he was denied the penultimate event, only New Zealand passport holders being applicable for entry.

Despite being an event short in the already précised tour, Jackson’s results have still boosted his profile to the upper echelons, not just in New Zealand, but back home in Australia.

Noosa’s Classic Malibu have been sponsoring the young gun for the last year after Jackson tested out the high performance quad-fin longboard of friend and Classic Malibu stable mate, Mitch Surman.

“I tried one of Mitch Surman’s quads at the Crescent Head contest in 2008. I loved the boards and went to [Classic Malibu’s head shaper, Peter White] and he asked me if I wanted to ride for him, so it worked out perfectly.

“The boards are incredible. I think that’s probably half the reason I did so well in New Zealand – the boards he’s making are going so well for me.”

Peter White has been known for many years as an expert shaper of longboards, but he has been pushing the envelope with his new designs, embedding fibreglass strands, or roving bands, into the rails of the boards.

This allows the board to be made lighter, while retaining strength, and to flex rotationally as well as laterally.

“They put in that little bit of strength,” explains Jackson, “but also give [the board] flex, which is good on a longboard I think. It’s such a big, long piece of foam that you need it to warp a little to the waves, otherwise it won’t turn off the lip or off the bottom as well as you want it to. So I think those rovings are really good.”

So for such an accomplished surfer, it would only seem right that he is planning to pursue a career of competitions and travel. But this is not the case.

“In the long term, I’m still not sure. I want to travel and learn a bit more and see a few more things before I decide what I really want to do. I’m going to do as many competitions as I can this year and see how it goes. If surfing’s going to take me somewhere I’ll go with it, but if it doesn’t offer anything I’ll be happy – it doesn’t matter if I’m competing or not, I’ll still be happy.”

So with a future as yet unset, he may well one day make his mark at the professional level of longboarding.

But one thing is for certain: we are only just coming into the Winter season…