Nature & Environment
“I was enthralled with Margaret River straight away, before I even saw the waves here,” he says. “And when I saw the town, I knew that this was the kind of place I wanted to be.” ~ Tom Hoye, surf legend.
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AUTUMN 2020
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margaretriver.com
a surf-shop. It was the first coastal surf-shop in the region. “It was just half-a-dozen Quiksilver board shorts, and about two-and-a-half wetsuits,” he says. “It was mostly a place just to show the boards, and for people to hang out.” More travel followed – South Africa, Hawaii, back to California – but Tom knew he wanted to settle in Margs. And in 1977, that’s what he did. A year later, he bought a block in the new Margaret River industrial area, and two years later, he built the factory he still operates from today. Tom has had to pay his dues to stay in business for half a century in Margaret River. He has held onto his shop through cancer, trouble with the banks, and two dangerous surfingrelated accidents – the most serious his black day on ‘The Rock’. One winter day in 2005, Tom and his mate Rob Mansell-Ward went to Sugarloaf Rock. A six-and-a-half metre swell was running. Tom wanted to watch the waves. “There was water on rocks that I’d never seen wet before,” Tom recalls. “We went right
up the top and watched for close to an hour. We were getting ready to go and there were two big waves on the outside. They were about 1,000 yards out. When they got to 500 yards out the rock just seemed like it shrunk. “We could have run back off the rock and saved ourselves, but it didn’t read that way. It looked like all the others. Then a heartbeat before it hit the rock, we realised two 20-feet swells had doubled up together. I knew I was going to get wet, but I was a rabbit in the headlights. “The wave hit the ledge and exploded. Then I got hit with eight feet of green water going sideways. It just wiped the rock. Rob was higher than me and had time to lay down and lock onto the rocks.” But Tom didn’t. The wave washed him down 60 vertical feet of cliff, and when it passed, he found he was wedged into a rock a metre above sea level. “I felt I didn’t fall that far. But I turned around and I was 100 feet from where I started. I was conscious. The ocean looked like it was gonna