Dick Hoole

Dick Hoole has worked in and around surfing for his entire working life since he started at San Juan surfboards in Byron Bay in 1969. Guys like Nat Young, George Greenough, Ken Adler, Chris Brock and Michael Cundith were in town and surfing was on the agenda and by all reports it still is.

Dick Hoole is a successful filmmaker as well as a magazine producer with the low run collectors classics, Backdoor magazine.

Dick’s first film ‘In Search Of Tubular Swells’ (1976) was made with Jack McCoy and together they were ‘Hoole/McCoy films’ which later became ‘the classic surf company’. Jack McCoy has gone on to make numerous successful films and is one of the premier surfing film-makers.

Dick Hoole vintage surfing water photography Hodaddy

above: Dick Hoole filming for 'Stormriders' (1980)

Dick’s first film ‘In Search Of Tubular Swells’ was very successful in a time and era where road-showing surf films was a social bonanza as it brought all the latest surfing footage to your local town, rolled out on film projectors. In these early days of road showing, filmmakers would often tour fifty stops and make a legitimate living from it, whereas today this does not really happen. From the success of their first film, Dick and Jack got funding for the second film, which became the early 80s hit ‘Storm Riders’ and both films are available today on DVD.

Dick Hoole has travelled the World with his camera, often spending months at a time filming Indonesian perfection, Hawaii big waves, jobs in Japan, Australia and the USA.

Dick is a major contributor to the SwitchFoot books and this Hodaddy website. His film collections are continually being brought into the digital age through high quality scanning and restoration. His images of early Bali and early Indonesian explorations stand alone as some of the most important documentation of the early 1970s era.