Unexpected Company

We paddled out into the dark this morning, three members of The Brotherhood Of Madmen: The Snake Catcher, vigilant militant against any would-be drop-ins and wave thieves, The Uncle, staunch supporter of youth at risk and fatherless kids, and myself, The Baboon, master of surfing with an ungainly wobbly pink arse sticking out and pointing up. The stars overhead were bright and alert, the eastern sky a black featureless wasteland, devoid of light or sign of life, and the water of our sea was warm and welcoming. With the low tide we waded out through the shallows, side-stepping rocks here and there, till we made it to waist-deep and launched ourselves headlong onto our boards, paddling leisurely out onto the bay. The sea was calm and placid, with no wind scarring and chasing the water, and we paddled out into the middle of the water in our own sweet time, not chased by any pressures of sweep, dumping crashers, howling wind or clamouring crowds. In spite of its relaxed and peaceful appearance there was good solid swell around, turning up in regular sets, and, reading the dark water as is our wont, we turned and aimed and paddled and jumped up and rode, pleasantly cruising along the wall of black surf, cutting back towards the power-generating curl, and leaning into turns up and down the walls. While they weren’t massive, ranging between waist and shoulder high, they had a nice bit of push to them, and stretched out in front of us in a very satisfying way.


I was top cab of the rank and disappeared into the dark on the first wave of the day, while the others sat back on their boards and companionably shot the breeze, catching up on life and savouring the shared solitude of that quiet time before humans wake up and flood our break. When my ride finished I dropped back down on my board and headed back up to the take-off zone, about four-fifths of the way up the bay. Something strange has happened: our wave here, rightly and justifiedly world famous for being fantastic, is normally a point break, wrapping around a rocky promontory, peeling off it and rolling in one streak of greased delight all the way across the bay. People flock to this break from far-flung places all over the world, lured by its spectacular cleanliness and sheer length. On a good day it is possible to ride one single wave from the furthest point out right into the deepest pocket of the bay, a ride of almost 800 metres. It’s pretty spectacular. However, after a series of recent storms and associated torrential rain and floods, the bay has undergone a transmogrification, and now, bizarrely, the swell washes up onto the point in a harmless fashion, doing absolutely nothing at all, and then, a good 100 metres wide from the point, breaks into the same illustrious wave as always. Presumably the configuration of the sea bottom has been changed by the currents and the floods, and sand has been removed from around the point and dumped into the middle, where the waves now stand up and break.

Regardless of the how and wherefore, the waves were majestic, and, paddling up in the middle of the bay, I got about  three quarters of the way to our take-off point, when a wave rose up in front of me, shimmering black in twilight dusk. I eyed it off carefully, weighing up the odds of it being worth going for, when, right in front of me, a dolphin leaped out of it, as they like to do, and in a graceful arc landed in front of it.

That was all I needed to know. Any wave that’s good enough for a dolphin is good enough for me.

A switch was flicked over somewhere in the murky and uncouth recesses of my mind, and, in a split-second decision, I spun around, paddled hard, pulled onto that wave, and jumped to my feet.

No sooner had I gotten to my feet then a long, sleek black shape, longer than my board, flitted right underneath me, triangular fin proudly on its back. For one heart-stopping moment I did a manic double-take, just to make sure. In some very old languages, where words carry explicit meaning and are not distorted and wrought beyond recognition by unintelligible input from unrelated donor languages that twist and mask meaning, lending relevance through memory rather than semantics, a shark is called “wolf of the sea”. In the same vein a dolphin is denominated as “dog of the sea”, the implications being obviously that while dogs are domesticated, trustworthy and friendly to humans, wolves and sharks are emphatically not.

This one was a dolphin. I double checked, just in case.

Right underneath me it swam, appearing at my right elbow and flashing forwards past my left foot. While I gaped and stared at it, it did a lightning speed cutback back to the right, flowed back up into the body of the wave we were both sharing, did an instant 180 degree turn and dashed back underneath my board the exact same way. If I had been walking on water without a board, as is occasionally practiced by stark raving mad delusional middle eastern religious fanatics, employing smoke, mirrors and underwater stone causeways such as those found by archaeologists in the Lake Of Galilee a few years ago, he would have swum right between my legs. Luckily, thanks to the ridiculously, pointlessly and uselessly wide stance associated with the Baboon Pose, there would have been plenty of space there for him to pass through.

At the same time as that dolphin streaked underneath my feet for the second time, out of the blue, or rather, given the limited visibility before the sun came up, out of the black, no more than two metres to my right hand side another dolphin broke through the surface of my wave, flew through the air flapping its tail and gyrating its hips, and splashed back into the water. When Elvis is reincarnated and resumes life on Earth it will be in the shape of a dolphin. Then, taking away what little breath I had left and finally dumping my bottom jaw firmly onto the deck of my board, my mate the Underwater Fleetfin cut back to the right, threw himself upwards into the underwater moving wall of the wave, and then cut back again, to fly back underneath me one more time.

And right at the exact same time, off to my right again, another dolphin launched himself out of the water, soaring sky high towards the stars, rolling around along its headlong axis with its head bobbing and lolling, beaming a demented delighted grin into the world, and, with a final triumphant tail flap in mid-air, disappeared back into the dark water of the ocean, now starting to fade to dark blue with the first hint of light seeping in from between the eastern edge of the world and the orange hem of cloud hanging over it.

I threw my head back and my arms up high and laughed and laughed and laughed out loud, riding that wave all the way through until it finally lost steam and deposited me gently into the warm and wet embrace of the ocean.

This is what life is about.



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