Nick Atkins is a Gold Coast icon through and through
It should be no surprise that a surfer-dude content creator is being dubbed Mr Gold Coast. Inside the rise of Nick Atkins.
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On the beach most mornings before dawn, behind the DJ booth at festivals and the Gold Coast’s hottest bars, on the radio, on TV, rubbing shoulders with the who’s who of the Gold Coast social scene.
It may not look like it, but Nick Atkins is hard at work.
As a Gold Coast import I only stumbled across Atkins’ social media profiles during ex-tropical cyclone Alfred in March, but since then he’s become a regular on my feed.
In the sun outside Tugun Surf Club I caught him in his natural habitat and witnessed the mechanics of how a Gold Coast dad has become one of the region’s most prolific social figures.
Spend any time perusing his content, and it’s easy to understand why he is so popular and has had such a huge and surging following online.
But outside the surf club in the city sunshine as I speak to the man himself - recently dubbed the Gold Coast’s unofficial ambassador by TV personality Karl Stefanovic - I get a glimpse of how he translated his social influence into his morning, day and night job.
Atkins has been part of the texture of the Gold Coast for 10 years but he also understands what’s cool, what’s happening, and in the last few months has had a steady run of online hits seeing him transcend into a personality, with his 54,000 followers on Instagram.
He’s well connected locally and nationally - Pete and Karl Stefanovic have been mates with Atkins for years, after having spent time working together at Channel Nine.
Pete Stefanovic told me he’s known Atkins for about 20 years - Atkins was also a groomsman in his wedding.
“He’s always been the life of the party,” he said.
“He’s spent so much of his career behind the camera, but as we are now seeing he belongs in front of it!
“He’s got a great sense of humour and enjoys life - much of that comes across in his content.”
At the end of June, Atkins was made an official ambassador for the Gold Coast with Experience Gold Coast’s ambassador program, amongst other Gold Coast celebrities like Leisel Jones and Casey Barnes.
It’s not hard to understand why he was the perfect pick for the role; down to his most mundane habits, Mr Atkins’ vibe has a cartoonish Gold Coast quality.
Along with his humorous and action-packed daily surf report called The Skeg Report, he has been in front of headlines with attention-grabbing Gold Coast stories including Cyclone Alfred as it bore down on the city and its aftermath and a recent shark attack at Cabarita beach.
After 12 years together, his partner Jessie Jones said his new-found following is no surprise.
“He has this energy that people really love so it’s no surprise to me that now that he’s got a bit of a platform going that people are just loving seeing him and seeing his personality,” she said.
“That’s truly how he is in real life.
“He’s not putting on an act or anything that’s just the way he is.”
In a Peter’s Fish Market cap, a top lip adorned with a serious moustache, and complexion that reflects a life-long romance with the beach, he comes across as very Gold Coast.
He tells me he gets up every morning at or before sunrise, as is common practice for a lot of Gold Coasters, he notes.
At least around Tugun in the early hours, he says there’s a dependable echelon of folk who surf or jog with headlamps.
“You know people who are up early because people who get up really early are really habitual,” he said.
“I know people and they don’t even know I know them, because I go places and I see them - I check to see them.
“There’s a lady that’s always on her laptop at a cafe at Kirra, and then there’s my mate’s parents who are always up real early - he doesn’t even know I know this - they’re sitting around at this other cafe just farting around in the dark.”
In these early mornings, he does his daily surf report, capturing iconic moments and characters, something he started on a whim but also as a creative outlet to keep him grounded.
He says his following started to grow via those entertaining, regular surf reports, and it was also why he was filming on the beach when the swell picked up as Cyclone Alfred spent an eternity approaching the coast.
“It’s been years since we’ve had waves like that,” he says.
The pre-arrival of the cyclone stirred up the surf so much the swell was gnarly enough for the world’s best surfers to flock to the beaches in droves, and Mr Atkins was there to capture all the action.
“I was just at Snapper and at Kirra for 12 to 14 hours of each day sitting there literally going up and down on the bike working out where everyone was.”
As Mr Atkins kept posting, he watched the engagement with his social media profiles going up by the minute.
“Every time I opened the phone (my) following was going up thousands of people every ten minutes,” he said.
“I started getting big hits because the waves were getting really crazy and consequential and then that started going really well, then the storm started hitting and I’m like man, I’ve been out here every day, all day doing this surf, I’m just going to stay out and see what happens - and it was exciting.”
People from all across the Gold Coast started sending him content, which he would do his best to verify before posting to his platforms as well.
“It’s an aggregated approach to content creation and it really works in these kinds of times,” he said.
“The main reason I did it was because the power was out for so many but people had their phones.
“A lot of people from other places who have family here who couldn’t get through were writing me asking what’s happening here, what’s happening there, and I didn’t know, but I was asking and getting multiple responses.”
On the first night when the cyclone got serious, Mr Atkins slept in his van parked in the driveway of his friend’s house so he could connect to their Starlink and upload his content.
“I’ve got a phone, a radio mic, and a drone, and you can basically tell any story with that.
“It all fits on my e-bike, or in a tinnie - it’s pretty nimble.”
That agility enabled him to cover so many key moments, he says.
“I have a battery that’s a back up - it’s in my bike, so I just connect [my phone] when it runs low.”
Mr Atkins - often seen out there with his crocs on the ground, sopping wet in a yellow raincoat and boardies - recalls: “There was a lot of funny stuff that actually happened with the storm.
“People come out of the woodwork carrying on like pork chops.
“There were so many people like doing like really random exercises in the storm, people meditating in the storm, people like took dumbbells down to the Spit and to Snapper. Dumbbells on the f*****g beach.”
His partner Ms Jones said of all the things Mr Atkins has devoted himself to over time it was his surf report and impromptu cyclone coverage, which cut through the most.
“It’s funny because we put so much effort and energy into other things that did well but ultimately ended or we sold them,” Ms Jones said.
“With the surf report - and the same goes for this storm chasing stuff - they were just kind of things he did on a whim.”
“Surfing is one of the most important things in his life that brings in the most joy - if he can’t get in the water he is not a happy person to be around,” she said.
“It’s this kind of hobby on Instagram (that) has turned into such a big opportunity for him and is still leading to opportunities, and maybe things we haven’t even realised yet.”
Mr Atkins is not the family’s first social media sensation either; his follower count only recently surpassed that of their cat, Sir Winston Smushface.
“It’s been a contentious issue in the house,” Mr Atkins said.
Ms Jones shared the first picture of the cat to its Instagram account in early 2015, and by the end of that same year their pet puss was being featured on TV and had a shout out from Ellen Degeneres, with more than 40,000 Instagram followers.
Sir Winston went on to feature in a Super Bowl commercial and landed plenty of brand deals, which Mr Atkins said had helped him reverse engineer social media success. The cat was so popular they even knocked back approaches - including one from Australia Post which wanted to strap him to a motorcycle and for watches: “He’s a cat, he doesn’t wear watches,” Ms Jones told the Bulletin at the time.
Mr Atkins adds: “I actually learned a lot about Instagram, and social media ... I actually learned everything because of that cat.”
Mr Atkins said he didn’t make a cent from his cyclone coverage, but it catapulted his public profile.
When the Sun Spirit statue mysteriously disappeared from Currumbin in April, he lead the quest to find it.
In an interview on Nine’s Today show, he left the panel of anchors in stitches after his brief appearance, donning a bucket hat dotted with a psychedelic mushroom pattern.
His most recent endeavour is leading the charge in getting the Sun Spirit’s twin statue, Sheila, to the Gold Coast.
Energetic and fun to talk to, just as he comes across in his surf reports and on TV, he is thoughtful and focussed.
Our interview comes to an end when the dad notes he has to pick up his “groms,” and rides off on his trusty e-bike.
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