Where is Bells Beach? How the Rip Curl Pro fits into the calendar of World Surfing League events

It's Easter, which means at some point over the next few days someone who is either cool or is trying to be cool will ask you if you've been following the action at Bells.

To the untrained ear, that could mean literally anything.

But for the Australian sporting fan, it quite obviously means the Rip Curl Pro surfing competition, held at Bells Beach as the fourth leg of the World Surf League (WSL) tour.

While a surfing tournament has been held at Bells or very close to it every Easter since 1963, there's still plenty of us who don't actually know where Bells Beach is, if the search terms the ABC SEO geeks* provide us is anything to go by.

So where is Bells Beach? How does it fit into the WSL calendar? And do you win an actual bell if you win at Bells? We've got your answers.

*Said in the most lovingly way possible

The Bells Beach surf break is about 5km south-west of Torquay in Victoria, about 25km from Geelong and 86km from Melbourne — just where the little radical dude in the map above is, in the bottom right hand corner.

Bells is the home to the longest continuously running pro surf competition in the world, having started in January 1962 before officially being moved to Easter the next year.

Surfers have been recorded using the break as early as 1939, but had trouble accessing the beach until 1960, when Olympic wrestler Joe Sweeney hired a bulldozer to create a road, before charging surfers one pound per use to earn back his sweet bulldozery cash. 

Sweeney, incidentally, also created the iconic bell trophy awarded to winners at the end of the competition. 

Now I can hear what you're saying: 'I know Bells Beach, Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze hung ten there in Point Break way back in 1991'.

Well, they said they did. But they