Spot X

We had come.

We had seen.

And we were entertaining definite views towards conquering.

Ahead of us, stretching out to the north, lay the fabled unknown land of Eldorado. Long sweeping deserted beaches, interspersed with headlands jutting out into the mighty Indian Ocean, creating small sheltered bays with points where perfect waves peeled off down that salty line, not a drop of water out of place, clean walls of green glass. A tantalising prospect. And, the clinch, only accessible by foot. No roads, tracks or pathways. Like the mythical Lasseter’s Reef, a gigantic reef of gold-bearing rock, rumoured to be out in the western desert somewhere, between Kintore and Yuendumu. The madman Harold Lasseter famously set out into the wild blue yonder to try to rediscover it after he had allegedly stumbled across it several years earlier, hallucinating, and moving across country wildly erratically. Even more famously he never came back from the journey. It’s a matter of speculation whether he spent the rest of his life living in the lap of luxury, eating gold three times a day, or whether, alternatively, he just died of exposure, starvation and thirst. His mummified remains, found a year after his disappearance in a cave, appear to indicate the latter.

Personally I have always felt my affinity to be with John MacDouall Stuart, who found a way across the desert heart of Australia from Adelaide in the south to what later became known as the Top End of the Northern Territory, my country. It took him six goes over the space of four years, finding himself forced to turn around and give up five times in a row, and finally making it through to the north coast on his sixth attempt in 1862.  We can only guess how he felt when he looked down on the pristine sparkling blue water of Chambers Bay, roughly halfway between modern day Darwin and Kakadu, presumably the first European to do so. Even more importantly, he made it back alive to tell the tale, unlike others before him, like Burke and Wills who tried a similar thing at the same time and epically and dramatically, doing all the wrong things every time all the time, tragically and stupidly died.

We had set up our camp in the shade of paperbarks on the banks of a creek flowing out of a small coastal lake, black with tannin, and were now looking towards The Wild North. The surf was gently slushing and surging to our left, terns, gulls and the odd osprey were wheeling overhead. Away off to the side, staying out of our way, was a couple of pied oystercatchers, tiptoeing to a safe distance. Birds won’t fly if they reckon they don’t have to. It takes a lot of energy, a lot of effort to become airborne, and, given half the chance, they much rather keep both feet firmly on Terror Firma. Hence places like New Zealand, where in the absence of natural ground dwelling predators birds just gave up on the whole flying thing as being too much like hard work and chose to remain earth-bound, eventually losing the ability to fly altogether. This, they later found out to their detriment, had not been a brilliant idea, as demonstrated by the first cat to sneak off the first British ship to turn up. A bad evolutionary move.

On this day we had chosen to leave behind the busy, frantic and manic tourist town of Margaret River, and to find our way deep into the national park that stretches out along the coast to the cape. We figured that the only way, in this day and age, we were ever going to get peaceful uncrowded waves, devoid of the aggressive hustlers, snakes and drop-ins so prevalent in the popular easily accessed surf spots, was to boldly go where No One Had Gone Before. Or not, at the very least, three times a day every day.

So we put on hats and sunscreen, packed bags with food, water and first aid kits, tucked our boards under our arms and hit the track. Or rather the beach. A super highway of clean white sand lay out in front of us. Ahead of us, distant blue-green headlands, beckoning. Behind us, only our footprints, leading away out of sight. There was a good crew of us, veterans most of us of a few exciting surf endeavours: The Pocket Rocket Grommet, small, wiry, fast as lightening on a wave; his dad, the Snake Catcher, allergic to queue jumpers and arrogant arseholes; Chief Switchfoot, ambidexterous mid-surf stance switcher; his daughter, The Girl With The Hair Like A Winter Sunrise, dark red gold on fire; my partner, The Evil Woman; and myself, endowed with the unfortunate nickname Baboon on account of my unusual and slightly disturbing stance on a surfboard: head down, arse up, and knuckles dragging through the water. A great many more of our friends had been unable to make it, and we hoped to be able to bring them all there another time. Sharing is caring. Shared joy is double joy.

Barefoot on the sand we crossed several beaches and headlands bearing typical southern Western Australian Aboriginal names like Wilyabrup and Injidup, until we arrived at our target: Bugarup Bay, sheltered by Bugarup Head. Some old maps listed it as Devil’s Point, and there are old legends that echo around the campfires and quiet country pubs that speak of the slithering of the Bunyip in the dark of the night, the quiet splashing and the muffled screams. Old blokes in moleskin trousers, chequered shirts and Akubra hats cross their fingers, spit over their shoulders and avert their eyes, refusing to say more about it. We had shrugged it off. When I was a kid my best mate was a half feral bunyip that I had dragged out of a creek with a broken leg and nursed back to health. We’d be right.

We fetched up at the foot of Devil’s Head, now better known as Bugarup Head. The tide was half out, so, scouting our way around, a couple of us tried to get around on the sea side of it, while the others picked their way along the wallaby track that led criss-cross over the top of it, through coastal heath, spreading wattle, and banksias, and past pandanuses and looming lumbering black coffee rock. Those of us going through the salt water waded and pushed through the tide, crossed a narrow swift water channel between rocks, jumped from boulder to boulder, and landed on the wet sand on the other side. The others dropped down from the high track, and we stood, shoulder to shoulder, and beheld the view in front of us.

Here was our Eldorado.

We didn’t need gold, or riches, or fame and fortune. All we wanted was a quiet peaceful wave under the sun.

It lay there right in front of us. On the half tide the swell rolled in from Africa, bounced against the outlying granite fingers of the headland and rockshelf, pointing well out into the sea, and curled off it in a perfect, beautifully shaped little point break, sweeping away to the north for a good couple of hundred metres. A curvy wall of luminous blue-green aquamarine, graciously bending at the top in a soft shower of white foam.

We chucked down backpacks, shrugged into wetsuits, snatched up boards, slapped on legropes and dashed into the ocean. Bliss on a stick. The wave was quite little, but moving pretty fast, so you had to be on your toes to get on it. The Pocket Rocket Grommet mastered it immediately and went shooting down a watery laneway immediately. Myself I took a bit longer, but learned how it worked after a little while. Considering that everywhere else, notably all the beaches around our home town of Margaret River were flat as a tack and utterly devoid of swell, we weren’t complaining. We learned later, upon our return, that on that weekend we had been the only ones to get any waves at all, as everywhere else on the coast the water had been as flat and quiet as the inshore tropical waters of Ningaloo reef, 1400 kms to the north.  

We weren’t complaining. We paddled and jumped and rode, zoomed along the face of that point break, all the way from the rocks to the beach, struck back out and did it all again, time after time after time. The sun shone high up in the sky, the waves curled and swirled, the froth and foam pearled and twirled, and we were the luckiest people on earth.

Until, paddling back up again, I looked up and ahead in front of me.

There was movement at the station.

Overhead, a flock of terns, gannets and gulls were shrieking and screeching, excitedly and manically. They circled, gained height, plummeted down; dislocated their shoulder joints fractions of seconds before hitting the water from great height, disappeared down under the water in a trail of bubbles, then shot back up again, their beaks snapped shut on fish. Down they came, up they went. Around the circle, back down again.

The water in front of us had turned dark and was boiling and slithering with movement, a giant million-organismed semi life-form moving as one great big blob of scaly commotion through the water. A bait ball, of respectable size. A huge school of fish, herded and pushed together by something much bigger. Something of a predatory nature. Something that circled its prey under water, shoving them closer and closer together until they had coalesced into an almost solid wall of frantic and panicked little fish, rightly and with good cause scared for their lives.

There are a number of aquatic creatures that can do this.

Two of them appeared right in front of us: two black, rounded triangular fins popped up. Lifted themselves slightly out of the water with that tell-tale rising and falling bucking-like motion that betrayes their dolphin nature. Headed sideways around the periphery of the baitball, snacking away.

Not a problem. Dolphins are our mates. We like dolphins. Dolphins are good. They are beautiful, agile, athletic, fun-loving creatures, that surf and leap out of waves, and they are, more particularly and more to the point, NOT the other kind of triangular finned baitball feeder.

Such as the one that, rising inexorably from the depths, appeared ten metres right in front of my face and made a beeline for me.

The waters split and rushed sideways off his back, greyish brown, exposing his flat spine with the fin sticking high out of the water. The fin long, pointy, sweeping back in definite, undebatable and incontestable un-dolphin-like curves. Sharp, ragged, announcing danger.

I looked at it for a second, establishing its identity as best as possible, assessing the situation. It’s not the sort of thing you want to encounter when you’re half a day’s walk through trackless bush or down an empty beach away from the nearest motor vehicle or area with phone reception. The loss of blood from a minor bite will do you in before you can get anywhere.

A wave came my way, presenting itself at the exact right moment. I turned tail, paddled hard and jumped onto it, deciding it would be a good idea to get a bit further away to begin with, and then maybe re-evaluate the situation. I didn’t feel it was strictly necessary to be able to see the white of its eyes.

I jumped off near the end of my ride and made my way over to my mates a bit further off to the side. We discussed the sighting. Chief Switchfoot had gotten a pretty good look at it too, and the Snake Catcher had caught a glimpse that told him enough. We looked at the Grommet, young and innocent, a bit further down in the water. We considered the presence of The Evil Woman, going through the early stages of learning how to surf and not in urgent need of having her levels of difficulty and challenge increased significantly by the presence of people-eaters sniffing around her feet. We meditated on the strict necessity of Winter Sunrise Hair Girl being submitted to the traumatic experience of watching people bleed out in front of her on the beach where she was reading her book. Lastly, we contemplated the distance back to camp, and the desirability of arriving there with non-leaking major bloodvessels.

It had been great. The day had been beautiful. It was a better than average idea to try to keep it that way.

We spun around on our tails, paddled hard into a wave rocking up just then, gave the sign to The Grommet and The Evil Woman, and bailed out. Time to retreat.

Back on the beach, as we shouldered our bags and stuck our boards back under our arms, we looked up and down Bugarup Bay. There were another two headlands on the far northern side of this bay, their promise of perfect solitary breaks hidden behind their cliff faces.

We would be back for more.