JACK McCoy has enjoyed a life that most of us - ocean lovers or not - can only dream about.
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For half a century, he has travelled the globe with many of the world's greatest surfers, swooping from one exotic location to the next and amassing a body of work that includes some of the most acclaimed surf movies ever made.
From his first feature - 1975's In Search of Tubular Swells, shot with fellow photographer Dick Hoole and featuring Newcastle legends Mark Richards and Peter McCabe - McCoy has gone on to shoot some two dozen full-length surf films, capturing successive eras of surfing greats, usually from the water, in the impact zones of some of the heaviest waves on the planet.
His work has made him a legend in the surfing world, which like rock'n'roll has tapped a rich vein of nostalgia that allows the older crew to revisit their youthful exploits and lets the new kids on the block meet the giants whose shoulders they stand on, for themselves.
As well as a filmmaker, McCoy is a storyteller with a lifetime's worth of insider's tales, which he'll bring to Wests New Lambton next Friday night as one of the final stops on the east coast leg of his Talk Story tour - a two-hour-plus show featuring the man himself, a revolving door of surfing greats and a suitcase full of some of the most famous surf clips and still images of all time.
Earlier guests have included '60s hero Wayne Lynch, freesurfers Craig Anderson and Dave Rastovich, and recently retired 2012 world champion Joel Parkinson. In Newcastle, and at a Central Coast show on Sunday night, Jack will share the stage with one of his favourite collaborators, Mark Occhilupo, who starred in three McCoy films: Bunyip Dreaming (1990), The Green Iguana (1992) and Occy: the Occumentary (1998).
Occy is one of the funniest characters in surfing, and McCoy says the show will be "the best live surfing experience you'll see all year, I guarantee it". McCabe will also take part, reliving some adventures with Jack in the pioneering days of surfing Indonesia.
"But it's not a fireside chat, man, it's a real show! I tap-dance my tits off!" McCoy exclaims in a rapid-fire delivery that still holds echoes of an American accent - he grew up in Hawaii - despite moving to Australia almost 50 years ago.
"I came here in 1970 for the Bells contest," McCoy explains, describing how he and three other Hawaiians - Randy Rarick, Jim Blears and Gerry Lopez - joined Australians Keith Paull, Terry Fitzgerald, John Otten and David Treloar in a two-Kombi surfari from Victoria to Noosa.
"We got a big swell and followed it all the way, getting waves at every pointbreak. I thought Australia had surf like that every day! And when it came to leave I said no, I'm not going anywhere, and I stayed.
"Six months later I got a job showing movies up and down the coast with Paul Witzig [who shot Hot Generation, Evolution and Sea of Joy between 1967 and 1971].
"There were two surf shops in Hunter Street. The O'Neill shop on one side, and Ray Richards [father of Mark] on the other. I became friendly with both of them. We were here a lot. It was a big thing in the '70s and early '80s, showing films at the Civic Theatre and the Hunter Theatre at The Junction [demolished after the '89 quake]."
If I've concentrated on the golden years here, I should point out that McCoy is still in the water, and still turning out extraordinary images. Waves shot from under the water are familiar enough today, but McCoy was one of the first to capture the view with his 2011 effort, A Deeper Shade of Blue.
That film came after Blue Horizon, released in 2004 after McCoy had spent two years trailing American surfers Kelly Slater and Andy Irons during the peak of one of the greatest rivalries in competition surfing.
McCoy has worked with plenty of big names in his time but even he was star-struck when a mutual friend, acclaimed music producer Chris Thomas, showed Sir Paul McCartney some of Jack's underwater jet-ski footage from Deeper.
"Paul said he loved it, and wanted to marry it to a song he was about to release, called Blue Sway. I made a music video and showed it to him in London. He says, you've blown my mind, and I'm saying, in my head, can I get that in writing please? You know what? When the song came out, he said it again in the liner notes, so I did get in writing! I've done another one for him, and it comes out later this year."
With anecdotes like these, it's easy to see why Jack has plenty to talk about.
- Jack McCoy Talk Story, Wests New Lambton, Starlight Room, Friday, June 28, opens 6.30pm for 7pm start. Tickets $45 & $20 concession from eventbright.com.au. More images and video at theherald.com.au