“Hello again off we go, Surfline early morning report this is Pete Jones...” It wasn’t always as easy as a click of a button to find out if the surf was worth getting down for, but for customers of PJ it was! For younger audiences the idea of a phone line may be a foreign concept, however, my old school readers will testify to the game changer of Gower surfing that was PJ’s surfline. Take a trip down memory lane with us as Pete discusses the ins and outs of his time running the line..
“I’ll tell you why I did it.
Around the 80s people would ring up all the time, ‘alright butt, you don’t know who I am but what’s the waves like then?’. I thought fuck this, I’m not answering this phone all day. So we went down, my wife and I, to BT in London. I said ‘I’d like to get a premium number’, in those days that was a thing. Anyway, he said,‘well, what do you want to do?’ A surfline, I told him. ‘Right we will give you a golden number then, a special one’. Well, I thought
what the hell does he mean by that?
See, who wants to be a millionaire, theirs was 081444444. So he said, we’ll give you 081445445. Well how much is it gonna cost for me to have this? 10,000 a year. In those days, that’s a lot of money, but we knew we were getting the calls because the machines were burning up. So I said ok, let’s do it.
But what that signature meant was, I was stuck doing it every day, all year round. It sounds easy, it’s great, but it’s a commitment. When I would go away James would do it, you could tell as he would be hiding a giggle every time. The first month it made ￡240, BT had ￡200 and I had ￡40. 3 years later it started coming and it was worth it, but I’d never do it again. I’d get up, drive down the beach at half past 7 every day, summer, winter I’d sit there..
There was roving, on the nose, off the lip and in the tube. Roving was flat, in the tube meant it was pumping! Off the lip was on shore, and on the nose was small. It was good fun”
The word surfline
I registered it in London in Marks and Clerk. And at the same time as I started it, in Florida, surfline (now) started. I registered the name, it cost me about two thousand pounds, you pay every year so that nobody else can use it.
Then two years later, one of the guys was up here right, and we were on the beach when I remember him saying what a great idea it was. About 3 months later he got a premium number, and he’d advertised the word surf line in tube news and a few of the others. I thought you can’t do that! So I rang him, I said, ‘You can’t use the word surfline.’ He said ‘Yes I can.’ I said ‘No you can’t! I’ve registered it.’ He didn’t believe me, I had to get Marks and Clerks to send him a letter, and all of a sudden he’s calling it something different. We’re friends now, but I thought, fuck that’s cheeky!
We still had the trademark until about 20 years ago, surfline in America couldn’t use it anywhere here. I gave it up in the end. If you’d gone to them and said we’ve got the trademark, they could have taken us to court. It just wasn’t worth it. You could be greedy and it could finish you, or you could just go, (shrugs shoulders) so be it. We had a good run, from 1990 to 2013.
23 years I ran that line.”
did you ever just want to make it up?
“Never, I am an honest man. Well apart from once! I said “Hello again, off we go, this is surfline early morning report its Pete Jones your roving surf reporter, at the time of issue 8am this morning we are in the tube the waves are puuuumping. It’s offshore, six foot”. So anyway two guys from Bristol came down, and it was crap! They came in, “Pete we rang your report mate, you said it was in the tube. We put the phone down and came straight, its fucking shit” I said to them, “what day is it?”