The Barefoot And Baffled Blog

We meet in the morning and we paddle out. The surf is there, waiting for us, an eternal combination of exasperating challenge and generous but jealous lover. There is nothing that comes close to the salt water washing over your head, drenching you with the first rolling set you cop, chasing the cobwebs of sleep out of your mind and dragging you into the here and now without compromise.      We are the First People. We are here when the rest of the world is asleep. We strike out into the pitch-black night, floating out over water as dark as the sky, guided by starlight. When the moon is full and sitting high above our bay, we come out extra early, just for good measure, and snatch up magical hours well before dawn. The peace and quiet, the hush that lies over the ocean, is incomparable. It forges an invisible bond between us, the surfers, and the currents, swells and waves of the ocean. They pick us up and throw us around, like an neverending bareback bronc that chu...

  My mates and me have, over the long years, developed a predilection for surfing at night, in the dark. This curious and bizarre notion was born out of the twin desires to get away from a crowded day-time line-up with its attendant necessity of having to fight, hustle and hassle for every wave; and to step out of the ordinary of everyday humdrum life and our mundane existences by doing something different, something challenging, wild, unaccountable.      Some might say the appropriate term is “stupid”.      It started with surfing by the full moon. We scored magic rides over jet black rolling acres of water under a hard diamond moon, alone and unseen under the night sky. As we got more used to being out at night, we started pushing the envelope, because, well, that was the whole point to begin with. So little by little we surfed with increasingly less moon light, at more and more advanced stages of the waning moon, until, inevitably, we ...

     The humble legrope ties us to our board, keeps us from losing it, and provides us with a buoyancy aid when we’re being held down by every wave in a cyclone set. I’ve been in situations where I certainly came close to drowning and may well have if it hadn’t been for the ready access to my board guaranteed by my legrope, and when it was all I could do to hang on for dear life while triple overheads smashed down on my head, with no more than split seconds for a breather between sets. Without that legrope I would have been in serious trouble, and well and truly up shit creek.      Fine-tuned over many years, the legrope evolved from a bit of old rope strung to a sock for elasticity and tied to a hole drilled into the fixed single fin of a 1960s log, to the high performance 21 st century combo of velcro cuff, titanium swivel, polyurethane leash you can bungy jump with, and ingenious soft-fabric rail saver that will prevent our fibreglass tails ...

We’ve had a huge amount of sand deposited around our break for the last few months. It’s been building steadily, to the extent that, where a few months ago we were forced to glide on our boards over knee-deep water washing over nothing but rocks as far as the eye could see to make it to dry land at the very edge of the dunes and the bush, now there is a 100 metre wide stretch of solid sand separating those dunes from the water. We’re walking at an elevation of at least one-and-a-half metres higher than before, and it’s surreal.      At the same time, further down the bay, a huge amount of erosion is undercutting the dunes over there, and there are buildings that are in danger of toppling over the edge. A panic-struck council has ordered a huge sandbagging operation, and where erstwhile there were glorious acres of golden sand carpeted in holiday makers, there is now a wall of sandbags reminiscent of World War I trenches, shoring up a steep escarpment covered in tra...

They say that every cloud has got a silver lining. It’s one of these gems of folk-wisdom, like “good things come to those who wait”, “the grass is always greener on the other side”, and “better the devil you know”, all designed to make people grit their teeth, dig their heels in and put up with whatever shit situation they’re in instead of actually trying to do something about it.    In this particular case the cloud was pretty toxic. It passed over the whole world, infected and wiped out people at an alarming rate, and forced economies to grind to a standstill. Borders closed, businesses shut down in the single biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and people lost their jobs by the hundreds of thousands.    And I was one of those.    I was making a living teaching surfing, among other things such as kayaking and rockclimbing. The official directives were handed down from above, no human contact was allowed between anyone ...

Surfing can be a highly individualistic thing to do. We focus on the wave we are going to ride, all our attention narrowly brought to bear on one thing only, the movement of the water, and how we are going to synchronise with it. The wind, the tide, the swell, the current, the shape, size and type of the board, all these things are important factors that contribute to our engagement with the living water of the ocean, but that engagement itself, that ultimate result of the harmonisation of all those contributing elements, happens between the ocean and one person only. As a broad general rule, not discounting such things as tow-ins. We might paddle out with our mates, and share time in between waves, and debrief afterwards; and, certainly, help each other pick up the pieces and deal with emergencies if and when required. But when push comes to shove, at the very heart of the matter, in the crux of the moment, by and large we are alone with the ocean, for the duration of that ride, howev...

A humpback whale blew out its last breath, rolled over in the surf, gave up the ghost and died. The waves picked it up and washed it up on shore, where it lay stranded, half in and half out of the water. Word spread around the shark universe like a bushfire under water, and within minutes they turned up in their dozens, swirling around the bits of whale still in the water, attacking, biting, ripping off pieces of flesh, chewing; tails flogging the water, the sea boiling and heaving, the surf running red with the whale’s blood.    It was a popular surf break. Immediately all beaches were closed ten kilometres north and south of the whale, while the local council scratched its head and set out working out a way to get rid of the carcass, and, hopefully, of the attendant sharks.    Twelve hours later and twenty kilometres further south the Cork and I met in the dark below the moon. We are creatures of the night and only ever venture out under cover of darkness, pref...