Paola Zlaltar is a local entrepreneur and avid surfer who will be celebrating at Surf Festival this weekend after falling in love with the sport 15 years ago.
‘I am a passionate surfer and I used to be part of one of the surf schools in Byron. I have many stories as a woman that has been in love with surfing for the past 15 years and changed her whole life just because of it,’ she said.
‘I remember meeting someone from Australia at a party and telling him, ‘One day I will go to Australia and learn how to surf’. He just laughed!’ According to Paola.
‘Ten years later, during a holiday in Brazil, I was watching the surfers in the water while I was sitting with my girlfriends on the beach. As the surfers ripped, it occurred to me, that I should be out there and not here.’
When she got back home to Chile she instantly bought a surfboard and a wetsuit and headed south.
‘After freezing my brain and toes many times with water temperatures as low as seven degrees in summer I decided that it was time to come to Australia,’ she said.
‘I quit my job, sold everything, and arrived in Oz.’
‘I called someone that I had met eight years before in a surf spot in Chile and he helped me by introducing me to some friends. One of them brought me to Byron Bay.’
In that first year Paola surfed six hours a day for 360 days, in all conditions.
Not lightning hitting the water, sharks sightings, nor a tsunami warning could keep her out of the water.
‘I love surfing, it has been my biggest passion for the last 13 years of my life. But surfing in Byron just brings it to the next level!
‘To be able to call dolphins by singing to them, or to almost touch a stingray leaping out of the water over your head… or to see a baby whale and its mumma just a few metres away while surfing in a bikini is priceless!’
The Byron Bay Surf Festival runs this weekend and includes a Freestyle and Stoke surf session at Wategos Beach on Sunday from 8am.
The open event of noncompetitive surfing includes finless, logs, mermaids, fish, torpedoes (bodysurfing) and tandem categories.
