Youtuber, drone filmmaker and podcaster: Paul van Bellen in an interview - "I want to give something back to windsurfing"
Hi Paul, where do I reach you? You live in Geraldton in Western Australia, right?
Yeah, I am originally from Sydney, but three years ago, I decided to come to Geraldton. During Covid, there were a lot of shutdowns in Australia, and I thought, I don't really want to be locked in a house, I want to go somewhere else where I can enjoy myself a bit. So I decided to go to Geraldton. I thought I was going to be here temporary, but after two seasons, I just decided I actually liked Geraldton. I mean if you're a windsurfer, it's the probably the best place in Australia to live.
We see a lot of things from you like your Instagram posts, your drone videos, the podcast - What's your main job in that?
Okay, good question…How does Paul van Bellen survive? (laughs) It's a little bit of a story and I‘ll try to keep it short. I used to have a small business, I was actually importing Dutch bicycles to Australia for about 11 years. When I got out of the business, I was able to pay off the mortgage from my apartment in Sydney. Then Covid started, I rented out the apartment, bought a van and I started traveling around Australia. I was living in the van, got good money from the rental and had very minimal expenses. When I came to Geraldton, I lived in a house with a couple of windsurfers paying $100 a week in rent. So I was basically surviving like that. I wasn't really making much money, I wasn't spending much money, I was just living like that. Then after two seasons, I decided to make Geraldton my home. I was able to get a new loan and bought a townhouse, and on the bottom level I do AirBnB, so I get income from Sydney, income from downstairs plus I get maybe Five to ten thousand dollars a year from YouTube, plus maybe add another five to ten thousand dollars for sort of odd jobs like a Drone job. I still live simply, but the beauty of it is is that I have a lot of time to go windsurfing. When I imported the bikes, I windsurfed three times in eleven years, and when i finished that business, I just wanted to get back into it.
Paul van Bellen takes the pictures he would like to see himself
Was drone flying your hobby that you made it into a profession or did you have some kind of training?
As someone of our generation you probably grew up watching a lot of windsurf videos from Maui, like the Robert Masters, the NeilPryde, Rigmarole and Gaastra and all those videos. As a kid, I was obsessed with all those videos, I watched them hundreds of times. When I left the business, I had all these visions of videos in my head, but what I saw on Youtube just didn't seem to be as good as back in the days. Whenever I would watch a video I was always like „I wish the camera guy would get that angle“ or „Why doesn't it go there?“ So then I just decided, I can sit here and complain about it, or I can try and get the angles and the things that I want to see. At the time, around 2017, drones were just starting to become a thing. So I went to a shop and bought one, practised the flying and started filming my friends. And just like any skill it slowly got better and better.
One of the first videos that came across to us was the drone footage from the 2023 IWT/PWA event in Fiji.
Well, that's interesting because before Fiji happened, I'd already been doing quite a lot of drone work for five or six years. I got the Fiji job through IWT boss Simeon Glasson, whom I knew before and he'd also followed my youtube channel and could see that I was developing my skills and was starting to put content out that people were liking So it was just a logical step for him to ask me to do the filming in Fiji, as Fiji is only two and a half hour plane ride from Sydney.
You and Jaeger Stone seem like a really good team, you both live in Geraldton. The videos you make of him really stand out!
100% like that, yeah! As a filmer you want to obviously also film the best people because it's just more spectacular. He's the sort of guy that just turns up at the beach, rigs up and sails. He‘s quite a private person, but I said to him at some point I think i'll be awesome if I could film you because I reckon I could get some good shots of you. I just filmed him once and he was happy with the footage. Then we did a proper session over a few hours, and that video got over 220 000 views. That kind of woke up Severne, and I actually just got off the phone a few days ago with the marketing Manager at Severne and we agreed that, they'll set aside some budget for Jaeger and I to become a kind of team, and when Jaeger wants to go sail somewhere that I can tag along and film him! Filming Jaeger is just so exciting! When you film someone of his ability, it's just so much more fun as a filmer because everything's just so much more spectacular. And as a windsurfer, I love watching the footage because you can learn something from him. Hopefully we can continue to get some good stuff!
Windsurfing comedy - Paul van Bellen holds up a mirror to the scene
Besides your drone work, you became kind of famous for videos and postings that you could call „Windsurf Comedy“. Is that just based on your personal sense of humour or do you come up with the ideas?
Yeah, it's a good question. I just like having a laugh with friends, so that Carried over into my videos. In Australia, there's a pretty good culture of people joking around a lot. I quite like the culture because it teaches you try to not take things seriously all the time I mean there are things in life that are serious, but If you can take some laughter into it, it makes everything seem a lot easier. I didn't really see a lot of comedy in windsurfing. It was mostly very serious, like here's a board and here's a sail and that's it. I found that most windsurfers like to have a joke and have a laugh, I think it's in the culture of windsurfing too. So I'll just continue that online, some jokes are funny and other jokes might not work too. Well, but at the end of the day it's just a bit of fun.
I didn't really see a lot of comedy in windsurfing. It was mostly very serious.
Yes, I think a lot of people make jokes about stuff related to windsurfing, but there is no real platform for that…
Yeah, and that's actually where I've been fortunate because I'm not actually employed by the brands, so I was kind of a free agent. I can say whatever I want and not have to worry I'm going to offend a brand or so. But the funny thing is, I get a lot of feedback from people within the industry that just think it's hilarious because behind the scenes people talk about all these things amongst themselves and I'm just basically the messenger that's just bringing all this stuff to the table.
Did anybody ever get really angry with you?
Yeah, there's been one or two jokes that didn‘t work out too great (laughs). A few windsurfers complained that it's very hard to make money in windsurfing. I thought, maybe you have to get a job, it's not 1983 anymore. So I put an instagram post where a talkshow host tells the same thing to this spoiled child and she starts crying, and said this is modern professional windsurfing. A few windsurfers just got offended because they just thought this is unprofessional, but I had a lot of messages from people just going. „Oh finally someone says it out loud!“ We're now in 2024 and there's still a lot of people that want to be a professional windsurfer, but the cake is smaller . You have to be creative and think of different ways to generate income than what it used to be.
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You also became better known through the windsurfing podcast with Ben Proffitt. How did that get started?
I've met Ben once in 2018 or so and had a short chat with him in Geraldton . Then my youtube channel over the years started getting traction, and we had a few messages and phone calls. Ben's actually the same age as me and I guess we had that connection and the same sense of humor. Then he asked me if I would like to be on the podcast as a guest. And then through a few phone calls, just chatting about windsurfing, we just said it'd be cool if we did a podcast together. We just moved it to an own channel, so that it doesn’t get lost. The cool thing about Ben is, he's a genuine guy and his enthusiasm for windsurfing is really infectious!
Preserving the history of windsurfing
You also seem to be a very big windsurfing fan, there are a lot of old clips from the 70s or 80s on your Youtube channel. Where did you collect all of that?
Actually, a lot of it was asking people. I just knew people that had 20 vhs tapes sitting in their cabinets and I just thought, it's a shame that no one gets to see them. So then I bought the necessary equipment, because I felt like for the good of windsurfing you don't want to lose the sense of history of the sports. You need that history to build on it, there's so much to learn from the past. They've just about done everything in windsurfing before, when it comes to trying different things and events and cool ideas. Also for newer generations, there's a lot of young people coming through they have no idea about Some of the things that you and I might think was just common knowledge. I mean there's still many many videos out there that i'm sure that I haven't gotten my hands on but every now and then I'll get a message or a huge box of all these videos and I spend the next few weeks just digitizing them all.
You need history to build on it, there's so much to learn from the past.
Do you have a vision or a plan, where you want to go with your with your work and with your channels?
I didn't actually have really a plan. It was more just when I thought something was good to document, I just filmed it and put it on the channel. I didn't start the channel with a long-term vision, other than just trying to promote windsurfing. This sport had given me so much, it's such a fascinating sport, it's just given me so much joy. When you get on the water, you just forget about everything and you're just loving it, and it'll always hold a special place in my heart. A lot of former windsurfers still talk very lovingly about wind surfing. I think once you get that bug, you're just forever a windsurfer. It is my way of giving back to the sport. I've watched wind surfing boom, i've watched it decline, and so therefore it needs that energy, it needs people like you and I. And that was basically my focus with the channel.
We're windsurfing first and foremost because it's a fun thing to do. When we windsurf here in Geraldton, we cheer at each other! But some people sail and they just look like they're trying to win a world championship or something. I like to try to generate that culture where we're all mates here, we're all doing the same sport and we all love this for a particular reason, so we have that in common! There's a commonality there even with our differences, and I think it's important for the sport moving forward that that sort of idea is not lost!
Moving forward, I would just like to do more cool videos. The issue I find is, once you've filmed, Fiji, Gnaraloo or Maui, it is hard to then film onshore slop after that. You basically set a new standard for what you like. So that's kind of a little bit what's happening with me, I'm getting less excited by filming very average conditions. I might try to do a little bit more „point of view“ stuff, Because I kind of like that I can talk and interact with people. I think a lot of people just like to see the simple things, you know, how do you do a tack? How do you do a jibe? The basics of wave riding…and i'm kind of the perfect vessel for that because i'm just an average sort of windsurfer, so they can relate to me.
If you think something needs to be done, then go out and do it!
The first time to Maui - a childhood dream comes true
For example on your Maui Video, I liked the angles and things from the spot, that you normally don’t see in between the action.
That's exactly how I was thinking when I would watch a video. I get comments sometimes where people say to me, why don't you film a windsurf video where you Do this or that? And i’m like that's a cool idea, why don't you do it? So I feel like it's also trying to encourage people, if you think that something needs to be done, then go out and do it! Because that's exactly what I did. The more people get involved, the wider the net of creativity an the different viewpoints. The other thing I'll say about the maui video: I was only there for 16 days, that were full from the morning when I woke up to 1.00 a.m. at night. The images that you saw in that video were good, however, if I could stay in maui for two, three months and spend a lot more time filming I could get even better images!
Was it your first time on Maui?
Yes, it was my first time. It was actually quite weird for me as a 47 year old going there because I literally dreamed of going to maui since I was probably 13. I've watched so many videos and read so many magazines that I kind of knew a lot of things, and when I was driving I was recognizing so many little things. And the other thing that made this trip interesting was, when I turned up , a lot of people knew me through my youtube channel. And I even had people come up to me and just say you're my hero or something. There's people there that have been subscribed to my channel for the last six or seven years, they followed my journey. When they finally meet you They're just so excited. It was weird for me because I was the one who's excited going to Maui, never in a million years did I ever think as a 13 year old kid i'd be going to maui In that way, you know what I mean? Everyone there were my heroes, but people came up to me. The other thing was i'll say about this, it was kind of nice to get that nice treatment, because over the years I have spent crazy amounts of time sitting behind my computer editig, just pushing a mouse to the point of exhaustion. Sometimes I have these editing binges that will go for five days straight, where I wake up at 7 a.m and don't go to bed till 2 a.m. I don't even look after myself because I get that addicted, especially if I get good footage. So to finally get some acknowledgement when I turn up at a place like that, it made it all worth while. So it's interesting, when you put your mind to something and just go 100% at it, that's where it can take you sometimes.
You are promoting a new kind of contest, called the „Wave Rally“. Whats the idea behind that and when will it happen?
The story is, it's called the Wave Rally World Championships, to make it sound a bit more exciting. Coronation beach, our main spot here in Geraldton, is basically one of the world's best windsurf locations. It's it's like a big windsurf skate park, it has this nice flat lagoon and as you go out in the waves, you get these like nice little ramps and it gets Bigger and bigger. It has something for everyone. It's not a great place for a proper wave event because the waves are out 500 or 400 meters off the coast. But I thought it would be a perfect wave slalom place: You've got the flat lagoon and then you can burn out through the the waves. Basically about a year ago I said „You can talk about it paul“, but maybe do something. I made a concept video with a few mates, and from then on I've been working on it just almost daily. And now it's going to happen on the 10th to 12th of january. It's a wave slalom event, the rules are it has to be a multi-fin board and a max 5 batten sail. Around here in summer no one actually uses slalom gear, all the traveling windsurfers have wave gear as well. The other beauty of the multi-fin and the max 5 batten sails is, it slows the speeds down and therefore It brings everyone closer together, you could literally be racing against Jaeger Stone and actually have a chance. There is a competition element to it, but it's to be social, fun, it's gonna be beach parties, bring the community together, make new friends and just have a positive image for windsurfing and promote it to younger people!
You have any big names confirmed yet?
Yeah, well Jaeger Stone is in. I spoke to Sarah-Quita in Maui and there's a good chance she's coming in the area around that timeand might join in. There's a few other people that are thinking of coming over, as a lot of windsirfers from Europe come to Western Australia when its winter at home, quite a few of them will probably end up joining in! I set up am maximum of 100 People, for Australia that would be a very good sized event!
- All information under waverally.org
Quickfire Paul van Bellen
- Favourite spot: Coronation Beach, Gnaraloo and Pacasmayo in Peru!
- Favourite move: A good bottom turn on the wave
- Favourite rider: Jaeger!
- Favourite music: Deep House
- Favourite movie: Before Sunrise
- Favourite food: Indonesian
- Favourite equipment: 80 litre stone waveboard with 4.7
