Skip to main content

Three Skateparks Near Port Adelaide, South Australia

It's rare that I find myself anywhere with time to kill. On a recent Saturday my partner invited me to Port Adelaide so we could eat fish and chips on the beach and watch the sun set after her NIA class. This gave me four hours to kill. I decided to take my skateboard.

Suspecting there were quite a few skateparks not too far from Port Adelaide, a quick search of skateboard.com.au for Adelaide Skateparks proved me right.



Whilst my partner did her class, I borrowed her car and decided to visit three skateparks that weren't too far away including The Pennington Mini Mini, Regency Skatepark and Royal Skatepark.

All of these parks I've never visited before. You can see my impressions of each in the video below, along with some pretty basic skating from me (sorry, I'm seriously out of practice from my hey days of the 1990s). I've also written a few notes on each skatepark after the video too.




Pennington Mini Mini

The Pennington Mini Mini


Ramps this small are hard to find. I suspect, even though it was probably built by someone not fully schooled in basic ramp design, it's a gem for anyone just learning ramp skating.

Good ramp design for skateboarding means your board should be able to 'rock' on the coping i.e. when your board is placed perpendicular to the coping and the middle is resting on the coping the wheels of your deck should not touch the platform or the ramp, creating a 'rocking' effect that allows you to perform board slides and other tricks.

On the Pennington ramp it's just not possible to rock on the coping, creating a situation where you can just roll your wheels over it, in or out of the ramp, without any risk of hanging up and falling off as a result. Hence if you're just learning, not only do you not have far to fall but your chances of falling from a hang up are almost none.

Intermediate to advanced skaters tend to laugh at ramps like this but I find them so much fun because you can learn almost any kind of lip trick, where your board stays above the coping and out of the ramp, with little chance of falling hard. Once you've got them on a ramp like this, it makes it so much easier to take the trick to higher ramps.


Regency Skatepark

Regency Skatepark


The one thing I really like about Regency is you can skate the whole park (performing lines of tricks) if you want or you can just choose a section of the park you like and skate that. It's big enough that one skater using the park, isn't going to get in the way of everyone else.

That said, there isn't a lot for complete beginners here. However, if you're prepared to take some risks with some slightly larger ramps, pads and banks than feel safe, you could progress fairly quickly.

For me, the two side by side mini ramps were a highlight, even if I couldn't do much more than drop in and carve around on them. I'd certainly consider coming back since the smaller of the two ramps was about the same as my old backyard mini I built back in the 1990s.


Royal Skatepark

Royal Skatepark


Royal Skatepark is one of those small parks that council's install where they lack vision for how much of a family space a skatepark can be. Where as Regency skatepark is integrated into green park land with playgrounds, BBQ's, plenty of shade, tables and space to just kick a ball around, Royal skatepark is tacked onto a spare bit of land alongside a sporting reserve. It has nice grassy area around it but not much for anyone to do except watch their kid skate.

Despite that, it's a good beginner park if you're wanting to learn any kind of slide or grind. None of the rails or pads are too high though a couple are placed in relatively tricky locations to get a decent run up to.

There are no transitions here, everything is banks - and they're relatively steep at that so take a little getting used to.

I didn't spend a lot of time here, even though I had the park to myself for a short while. It's the kind of park that, once you get a few people using it, it's easy to get self conscious because you start getting in each other's way. Thus everyone has to watch you stuff up and get out of the way so they can do their line.

---o ---o--- o---

That was my visit to three skateparks near Port Adelaide. If you know the area you're probably wondering why I didn't visit Semaphore skatepark on the foreshore.  The main reason was because it's on the foreshore, making it the easiest one for any skater to get to and know about. I was looking for more out of the way parks, less likely to be busy on a Saturday afternoon.

As well, although I haven't skated Semaphore, I've been there enough to know there's very little for a beginner skater to do. To make the most of Semaphore you need, at minimum, a decent ollie (I don't) to really enjoy the central fun box that is the main feature of the park.

I hope to do this again some time with three or more different parks. With any luck I'll have learnt a bit more and remembered to take a tripod. (Always pack a tripod because leaning your camera up against things really limits your filming!).

Should you be interested in the deck I'm skating, get a better look at the graphic in my online skateboard shop.

Comments

Buy Gifts and Apparel featuring art by TET.

Popular posts from this blog

Movie Review: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) *No Spoilers*

T his is another film that I would have liked to have seen in a theatre but, for whatever reason, didn't get to. Having now seen  Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga  (2024) almost a year later I'm glad I didn't. Which is not to say it's bad. Like its predecessor Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), which I enjoyed in a cinema immensely, this film would definitely benefit from being on a big screen for the spectacle and epic visuals of it all.  However unlike its predecessor there is so much going on, with back and forth between the waring parties, and Furiosa's story as well, you can't just sit back and kind of enjoy the ride. It's like writer/director, George Miller, wanted to cram in as many of his ideas as possible for the post apocalyptic world of Mad Max, because it's not likely he'll make another one, but whoever does, has a rich, detailed world of on screen source material to draw upon. The story begins with young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) and her journey from the ...

I'm Confused About Why People Prefer to Say Discombobulated?

D iscombobulated. Is a word that I think someone rediscovered about three or four years ago (maybe more because the pandemic years have thrown out my sense of time) and now I hear it a lot. It's not a new word by any means, but when I started hearing multiple celebrities using it in everyday sentences, I actively had to look up what it meant. Define it with as many synonyms as you like but essentially it's just another word meaning 'confused'. Seinfeld Quotes: Quotes.net The words are pretty much interchangeable. He was discombobulated by too many choices. He was confused by too many choices.  My confusion is the length of the word. It's unnecessarily long with too many syllables. There are many other words that mean confused, and therefore also mean discombobulated. Most of them are shorter and easier to say. So why not just say 'confused'? Perhaps discombobulated sounds more intelligent, maybe?  Hawaii Five-0 Quotes: Quotes.net I've noticed it gets us...

Second Sunday Skateboard Session Episode 3, 4, and 5 - Definitely Seeing Progress

TET, Episode 5 Heelflip attempt. C ontinuing my ten part series of Second Sunday Skateboard sessions , the series where I'm attempting to master all seven basic skateboarding tricks in Braille Skateboarding's Skateboarding Made Simple Volume One , over twenty weeks (or ten fortnights).  Each episode is a short Sunday check in to show where I'm at after each two week period of practicing. Generally I aim for at least an hour practice session every second day if weather or my work schedule permits. These are the links to Episode One and Episode Two  should you feel the need to see where I started.  I'm not a complete newbie, having been a relatively hardcore skater through the late eighties and early nineties, however I was mostly a mini ramp and curb skater, and never really maintained my skills beyond riding and ollies.  The explosion of council built concrete parks came a decade too late for me to maintain my mini ramp skills. Once we closed our own skate park in ...

Boom Crash Opera Born Classic But Not Again

Boom Crash Opera are an Australian Band that reached the peak of their popularity in the mid to late nineteen eighties. They are a band that I knew about at that time but was never really excited by until they released their ill fated double album Born and Born Again in 1995 (Album cover pictured). At the time of its release I was very much into emerging Australian musical acts and was also looking out for new sounds that were different and had kind of a futuristic/electronic sound. Artists that I was buying at the time included; Swoop , Nine Inch Nails and Pop Will Eat Its Self . As well as a really interesting release by David Bowie, the concept album, Outside . Born was a fairly radical departure for Boom Crash Opera (BCO). The first single, Gimme , was often compared to the sounds of Gary Glitter, particularly his single, Rock n Roll part 2 , because of the pounding drum loops. Watch the video below. My favorite single from the album is dissemble which probably went now...

Australian Federal Election 2025 - World's Most Boring Government Re-elected by Landside - We're Even More Fine!

Anthony Albanese Victory by ChatGPT and TET. W hen I started writing about the 2025 Federal election the polls were suggesting the world's most boring government was crusing to a defeat . As it turns out, boring is good, and Australia wants more of it, handing the current government a landslide win with a majority vote. Anthony Albanese became the first PM since John Howard to win a consecutive term, and the first Labor PM since Bob Hawke to do so. Some of that comes down to the leadership revolving door both major parties had through the mid 2000s. Although Anthony is my preferred PM over Dutton the irony is Dutton sounds more like a leader with a fairly commanding voice and an ability to speak well, without sounding like he's waffling and dodging questions, even if he is. Anthony, on the other hand, does have the ability (and speech writer) to say a lot of inspiring things but it gets lost in the delivery. He doesn't seem to know when to emphasise a point for effect. In h...

Australian Federal Election 2025 - The Australian Democrats (Please Like Us Again) and The Greens

Image: Reve AI T here's not much to be said about the current Australian Democrats other than in 2025 Australian election, in May, they'll be out there hoping they win a seat... any seat... 'please like us again!' The Australian Democrats For just over two decades, from the late seventies onward, the Australian Democrats were the third most important party in the Federal government (if you don't count the National party since they've been on that coalition ticket with the Liberals for as long as I can remember). In fact, once I moved away from the Labor party, they were my top pick until the party slowly imploded in the early 2000's from a series of unfortunate events like leaders defecting to other parties, and a highly publicised incident of drunkenness, bullying, and abuse from a male party leader to a female colleague. It's been two decades since then (and that guy's with the Greens now)... please like us again! That aside, the party is still t...

Australian Federal Election 2025 - Highlighting Some Minor Parties and Independents

W hile I am all for voting for minor parties and independent candidates, it can be concerning if too many of them win their seats. When independents hold the balance of power it gives them a lot of leverage to get their own policy ideas inserted into the mix. This is not necessarily a good or bad thing but it can slow everything down, and even sabotage policies and promises, that the government won the election with. It requires the government to work harder, and possibly make compromises, to get their policies implemented. Essentially they do what Australian pollical legend, and founder of The Australian Democrats, Senator Don Chipp, expounded in such simple terms, "keep the bastards honest." While I can't list and write about every independent and minor party candidate I can highlight a few, who already hold seats in parliament, and will no doubt be looking to hold onto them in 2025. The Conservatives Bob Katter - Katter's Australian Party There's a joke in the ...