Surfing Australia

By David Hitchens, resident Saffa

Jakes Australia

Australia is a seriously big country. You drive for five hours at a good lick and then look at the map to see you've only just past the lettering of the city that you left that morning. It's a bit unnerving looking at what we had planned to do on this segment of the trip and what we have done since we arrived two weeks ago - about an inch and a half on our big sand-coloured map.

Before Tuesday I hadn't actually been in the sea for almost three weeks. The last week in SA was just about flat and we did the safari thing at Kruger National Park, caught up with some new friends in Durban and even went deep-sea fishing. We flew into Perth and stayed near the beach in the western suburbs. Perth is the neatest place I have ever set foot (that's neat in the non-American sense). It makes Singapore look like a rubbish tip. That sounds very nice and all, but I kept on getting the feeling that there were storm trooper type guys hiding behind trees waiting to jump out and arrest you if you dropped your bus ticket on the pavement. It has the cheesiest suburb names you ever heard as well - Peppermint Grove; Wombat Close etc etc. The place was freaking me out so we hired a car and headed south towards Margaret River. Mid-winter is off-season for surf in this region but you never know, some of my best sessions have been at times of year when there are not supposed to be waves - it catches the locals napping and the feral surfers in the wrong hemisphere. Not this time I'm afraid - we sat in Margaret's for a week and it rained almost constantly. We passed the time playing cards, watching videos and amazingly, talking shit with the American that we first met in the car park in Cape Town - turns out his route is just about exactly the same as ours, except he was heading back to Kauai - if I had known that I would have dropped in on him more! We checked out all the famous spots along the coast, Gas Bay, the Box, etc, all were ten foot, howling onshore and churned to mush.

I gotta say that I wasn't expecting to go three weeks without even getting in the water - that's 1/8th of our whole trip - not happy. But then fate took us by the hand. We had booked a flight from Broome to Melbourne two weeks later and were figuring out how we were going to make the 3000km trip up the west coast of Oz to get there. Then we got chatting to a guy in the car park overlooking Margaret's main break. He was a bus driver for a backpacker service and he had long hair and liked Heavy Metal music - and get this, his name as Otto. No really, it was. He sold us on the idea of catching a jump on jump off backpacker bus all the way to Broome. He was taking the next one leaving from Perth so that was that.

Now, the next place I surfed you have probably never heard of, but there are some amazing pictures of it on www.wannasurf.com , so its not like I'm letting you all in on a big secret or anything.

Anyway - when I surfed it, it looked something like this, except the wind was offshore and it was probably a bit more perfect - all day for two days straight! It's up the west coast of Australia - and I am told that there are lots of lefts like it, so it probably doesn't matter where it is. There is a fishing village nearby and the locals are a hardcore bunch of Cray fisherman and tough nuts. They don't like people from Perth so if you visit make sure you talk loudly in your American, English or whatever accent. If you are from Perth - try and put on an American accent!

It is the most intense wave that I have ever surfed. Raw swell comes out of deep water and hits a rock shelf, folding in on itself before wrapping around the edge of the bay and running along the rocks. You can walk right out on the shelf and stand twenty meters from Teahupoo-like waves breaking in two feet of water and (hopefully) dissipating before they wash over your feet.

My home breaks are sand with a few rocky point breaks, which for most of the year are about as scary as your little sister with a feather duster. When I arrived there were about ten guys out and smaller waves were breaking quite consistently along the shelf with a very large set every now and again. I couldn't work out where to go in - it looked very sketchy going straight off the shelf and the paddle from the beach was about a mile away. Don't you hate this feeling? Cooking waves but you don't want to make a complete arse of yourself and ding your new board going off the 'tourists only' jump off rock. Luckily I didn't have to wait to long until another guy came trotting along the point. I followed him out along the rocks and watched nervously as it looked like he was going to bail straight off the edge of the shelf. He did and paddled manically sideways towards deeper water - not very successfully as the next wave smashed onto the shelf, dragging him fifty yards backwards in the churning mess - duck-diving was no use as the whole body of water was moving. There then seemed to be a real break so I took a deep breath and dived in - also stroking hard for the channel, which I amazingly reached in a few seconds without even getting my hair wet. I exchanged a 'howdy' with the guy who had now made it out and it turns out it was his first surf there too. Some old guy in the parking lot had told him vaguely where to go off from. We both paddled wide up the point, watching the horizon closely for a set, which seemed to be more than twice the size of the other waves. The water was clean and I could see the ripped and jagged rock formations below us - with no sand at all. My heart was thumping in my chest, but I was excited, this was what I had come half way across the world for - this was the surf that I've been watching in surf videos since I was ten. Hell, half the guys out there were wearing helmets.

A set came through, and I was happy I was sitting wide. Someone went on the first one and ran away from the hugest barrel I have ever looked down. The second one was a little bigger and someone went on their backhand, a helmeted figure, grabbing rail and just making it under the lip. The last thing I saw was the white helmet and wide-open eyes, deep in the green barrel before he got sucked over the falls in what seemed like waist-deep water. Genuinely concerned for his welfare, I watched for him to pop up. He didn't, and I had to scratch to get over the last two waves in the set, which were both bigger and breaking further out. When all was quiet again I looked back and saw the guy in the helmet about 200 yards down the point, scrambling away from the rocks and seemingly OK.

"F*ck me," I thought - "not sure if I'm ready for this just yet."

Twelve people doesn't seem like much of a crowd, but when half of them appear to be clinically insane and take off ten yards deeper than I would have even considered possible, sometimes pulling into the barrel on take-off directly in front of dry rock - there are not a lot of waves to go around. A couple of people were picking off the smaller ones, but they were in serious trouble when a big set popped up. It was about half an hour before I got my first wave. I was still sitting wide, and a little closer in so that I could watch the barrel fest that was going down. I noticed that the wave didn't seem to be as dangerous as I first thought. If someone ate it, they weren't washed straight onto the shelf, but along the edge of it. A couple of the wipeouts looked like hospital candidates for sure, but the guy was back out again five minutes later. I eventually got a wave when someone chickened out of a take off at the last minute and I was able to swing around and get it further down, my heart in my mouth as I turned away from the shelf with rocks flashing underneath me, plenty deep but seeming like they were going to take a fin off. This was more like it - with the confidence I got a bit more plucky, sitting closer to the rocks and picking off the smaller ones and the scraps from the bigger waves - still no barrels, but some of the best waves I have ever had, and a major learning curve. I went in four hours later - so tired I was worried that I wouldn't be able to drag my sorry carcass onto the rocks. I slept pretty well that night.

I woke up early the next day, hitching out to the break with a guy who was going to check his pig traps. He dropped me off at the road and as I walked down the track I could see the same green lines wrapping around the point. One difference from yesterday though - there was no-one out! OK It was seven in the morning but this was perfection, where was everyone? When I got down to the beach I saw two figures way out the back, so far around the point that I hadn't seen them before. They were waiting for the BIG sets and wave after perfect wave was going un-ridden further down. Forgetting my aching muscles, I ripped on my suit and scrambled down the rocks to where I jumped off the day before. The sea was flat and I was about to go in when something stopped me, I don't know what - kind of a little nudge of something in the air. Hey, maybe I am a mystical fruitcake after all. Then I saw the guys out the back scratching and the horizon seemed to have developed a little fold in it. I back-tracked up the ledge, almost back to dry sand and watched as a huge set unloaded on the shelf, smashing down the point in a great foamy torrent, sweeping over where I had been standing a minute before, where I would have been dragged over the jagged rocks. I figured I should keep an eye open for the sets then!

I made it out with no problem and got my first wave straight away - a little wider than the guys were taking off the day before, but a steep wave and the kind of barrel where you can just see the curl go over your head, and there is never any doubt that you are going to make it. I got a couple more before two local body boarders, that were typically nuts, joined me and we drunkenly shared waves for an hour, barrel after barrel, more time in the tube than the rest of my life put together. Then they shouted me into a set wave that I should have left alone, maybe a double-overhead face. I was as deep as I had been, and I paddled for it sideways, trying to do as shallow a bottom turn as possible to keep away from the rocks. It felt like slow motion - all the water seemed to suck up off the reef and there I was, feeling like I was standing still, at a weird angle six feet into the thickest barrel I have ever been near. The moment didn't last, as I was in the lip, going over the falls for what I thought would be the last time in my life. I couldn't believe the violence of the beating I got - I got shook about so much my neck is still hurting. I hit the reef feet-first, which could have been head-first for all the control that I had. I popped up to hear the body boarders yelling and cheering and managed to get back on my board about a hundred yards down from where I had eaten it - I puked a bit of water - checked that my feet were not cut too badly and gingerly paddled out for some more. Along with the first time I got to my feet on my battered yellow board when I was 11, this felt like a milestone. After 20 years of riding waves I felt like a real surfer. The water is still spilling from my nose.

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