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Energetic and perpetually upbeat surfer from Queensland's Gold Coast; a semifinalist in the 1972 World Surfing Championships; 1988 world amateur longboard champion; longtime surfing media figure; and chairman of the Gold Coast World Surfing Reserve advocacy group.

McKinnon was born (1953) in Melbourne, Victoria, to a bookstore-manager father and milkbar-owning mother; at age seven he moved with his family to the Gold Coast, and two years later he began surfing at Mermaid Beach, just north of Burleigh Heads. In 1967, five years after he began surfing, McKinnon won the Queensland State under-14s title. It was around this time that he met and befriended Michael Peterson, Wayne Bartholomew, and Peter Townend, and together the four traveled with the Australian national team to the 1972 World Surfing Championships, where McKinnon placed 6th and Townend finished runner-up. Two years prior, at Cronulla, the 16-year-old McKinnon notched his biggest contest result, beating a talent-loaded field that included Nat Young, Midget Farrelly and Terry Fitzgerald, to win the 1970 Bobby Brown Memorial contest.

A slender goofyfooter (5' 7", 140 lbs), McKinnon had an active but smooth style, was comfortable in big waves, and developed into a first-rate switchfooter. On a 1977 visit to Jeffreys Bay, in South Africa, McKinnon rode supersonic triple-overhead walls in a regularfoot stance.

Unlike Peterson, Townend and Bartholomew, all of whom were leading figures during the early years of organized professional surfing, McKinnon's results tapered off in the mid-1970s. A decade later, however, he returned as a second-wave longboarder, winning an Australian national title in 1987, and a world title in 1988.

In 1981, McKinnon got a job doing a weekly surf column for the 

 newspaper in Lismore, just west of Lennox Head; he has been a consistent and always-sunny media presence ever since, by way of newspaper and magazine writing, on-site surf contest announcing, and regular TV and radio appearances, often introduced as "Andy Mac," his lifelong nickname.

As a surfing advocate, McKinnon helped spearhead the effort to create the Gold Coast World Surfing Reserve, a 16-km stretch of wave-rich coastline extending from Burleigh Heads to Snapper Rocks. The Saves the Waves Coalition awarded the World Surfing Reserve designation to the Gold Coast in 2016.

In 1982, McKinnon received a degree in Visual Arts from the Northern Rivers College of Advanced Education; in 2020 he received a BA in Human Geography from Southern Cross University, and also hosted the biennial Global Wave Conference.

McKinnon, Andrew

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