About Swellnet

Stu Nettle is the editor of Swellnet, an independent surf forecasting and media website. He joined the site in 2009 after founder Ben Matson spotted his writing on surf forums - a fairly unconventional recruitment process that reflects the unconventional outfit he ended up working for.

Raised in Cronulla but now based in the Illawarra, Stu has spent fifteen-plus years writing across formats that don’t sit neatly in any one category: long-form features, bog-standard news, interviews, newsletters, photo gallery copy, and the occasional piece that's hard to describe but seemed like a good idea at the time.

Swellnet’s audience comes primarily for surf forecasts, which means Stu's editorial runs alongside - and is perpetually overshadowed by - a wave modelling service. Stu has made peace with this.

His editorial interests run toward the margins: board design and innovation, coastal science, surf industry, history, and the people who do interesting work without much fanfare. He's written about shapers, oceanographers, fin makers, and tag team surfing inventors, often finding that the further you get from the mainstream, the better the stories get.

Before Swellnet, Stu studied philosophy at the University of Wollongong - a degree he didn't finish, but which probably explains some of the longer sentences.

Jono Kingston grew up in Glenelg, metro Adelaide - yet another of Swellnet’s Festival State Mafia. He started surfing at age twelve during Glenelg ‘stormies’ or by hassling parents for a lift to the Mid Coast. As licences and cars became available, the radius expanded to Victor Harbor, the Yorke and Eyre Peninsulas. Classic South Oz wanderlust.

After school Jono drifted for a while, surfed a lot, and settled down (but not too far down) in Yamba on the NSW north coast. Eventually he returned to Adelaide and completed an IT and Multimedia degree at the University of South Australia, figuring out that the intersection of design and technology was where he wanted to work.

In the early 2000s, and with newfound qualifications, Jono moved to London, spent a few years working across tech companies and design studios, chased a handful of waves in Ireland, though largely took a break from surfing. Returning to Adelaide, he set up a freelance digital design business, got married, had two kids.

In 2017, the family relocated to the Tweed Coast: better climate, more waves, less driving. He'd known Swellnet's Ben Matson from the Adelaide pub and band circuit. A beer led to a conversation, which led to a job.

Working as Swellnet's head of product and technology, Jono accepts his role as being invisible when the site's working seamlessly and the punching bag when it isn't.

Hailing from the north of Adelaide, Craig didn't begin surfing till he started an Ocean Atmosphere Degree at Flinders University. Late to the game, sure, but what he lacked in childhood nostalgia he made up for in sheer obsession - three sessions a day became his standard, compressing years of surf time into mere months.

Surfing broadened his horizons and it did so in a classically South Australian way. To be a metro South Oz surfer means logging serious highway miles, your only company a never-ending line of Stobie poles disappearing into the heat haze. Armed with a car, board, swag, and growing forecasting nous, Craig became intimate with every arterial road radiating from Adelaide, camping for weeks at a time at the dusty surfing outposts they led to.

In Craig's commitment to the road and to cracking the patterns of the Southern Ocean, Ben Matson recognised a kindred spirit. He'd done the same thing a decade earlier. So when it came time to expand Swellnet’s forecasting team from one to two, Craig was the obvious choice. His first job out of uni.

That was in 2009 and it meant a shift to Australia's East Coast - new coastlines to explore, a new ocean basin to decode. As ever, Craig threw himself in completely.

Apart from surfing and travel, Craig has a keen eye for photography, mixing dead ahead surf shots, with landscape and flora. His photographic work has appeared in Surfing Life, Surfing World, Tracks, Whitehorses, Foiling Magazine, Stand Up Paddle Journal among others - plus the odd Wave Of The Day on Swellnet.

Though his commitment to exploration hasn't wavered, it's taken on new dimensions. Snowboarding, back country splitboarding, canyoning, or just good old bushwalking - these days, not every road leads to the coast.

Craig currently lives on the lower North Coast of NSW with his wife and daughter, all of whom like to slide the local sand-bottom point. He still surfs three times a day.

Steve Shearer grew up on Bribie Island, one of the distinctive sand islands strung along the South-east Queensland coast. He started surfing and fishing as soon as he was able, enjoying a Huck Finn upbringing on Bribie. From early on he was preoccupied with the things that would define his career - sand movements, swell origins, the biological world and how it responds to seasonal change.

Steve completed a Science degree at the University of Queensland, majoring in Marine Biology, then walked away from academia and spent a decade as a commercial fisherman. Between seasons he travelled, chasing surf through the Pacific and beyond. Somewhere in all of that, he found he had a knack for writing.

Surf writing tends to default to one mode or the other: lyrical but vague, or technically accurate but dry, yet Steve operates in the gap between the two. A product of scientific training combined with years spent on the water.

Steve eventually settled at Lennox Head, his favourite wave, where he lives on some acreage with his wife, two kids, chickens, ducks, and eleven goats.

At Swellnet, Steve writes and forecasts. He knows when the models are lying.