Had an early surf at my local break (Secret Harbour). Not bad and no one within 300 metres of me. As I took off on a wave I heard a long whistling sound behind me. Paddling back out I thought that my ears must have been playing up until a whale surfaced about 50 metres away. He stuck his barnacled head out of the water a few times checking me out before slowly heading north, a couple of tail flaps and rising up vertically once before disappearing. Went home feeling warm even though the air temp was about 5*C.
Yea great feeling that.
Went out at Middleton and was paddling out and a whale surfaced about 50 meters in front of me.
There were three other surfers in front of me about 20 metres from the whale.
Bloody hell we are lucky to experience this, so small next to these giant beasts.
Enjoy the stoke.
Jim
Suping out behind the back breakers at a local beachy last year, I had a whale and her calf swimming about 100m from myself and a longboarder. As we were mid conversation - the mother broke away from her calf and swam straight toward us. I turned to paddle away when she got a bit close and just as she got about a metre away (I was a bit worried at this stage), she turned, kicked her tail and swam away.
The wake from the tail nearly knocked me off my board - awesome experience! 
yeah whales coming up close to surfers like that s quite a common phenomenon they usually do it when a predator (like a great white or killer whale) is close by so they try to use the local surfers as a decoy, quite clever really
Awesome,
We had a similar experience Sunday at our local break...
Fantastic innit...
Paddling in Sydney Harbour this morning and a whale broke the surface about 100m away, near another paddler. We hung around and it kept cicrling us, moving closer all the time. It ended up swimming directly underneath me then banked and curved around, giving me a good look the whole time. Spent a good 20 minutes moving around us. The most awesome experience.
