The Barefoot And Baffled Blog

It’s dark when I get to the beach, by myself. It’s a new beach, a new break, a new hang-out. A new challenge for me, as a aspiring, enthusiastic and talentless beginner surfer, to try my hand at and see if I can learn some new tricks. I leave my car in the deserted unfamiliar carpark and wind my way down to the beach through the dunes, the sand cold underneath my bare feet. I feel morally obliged to check the conditions before paddling out, because this is unknown territory to me, and I can’t just navigate blindly like I would at my home break. As it turned out I can’t really see anything, because, true to form and habit, it’s dark, still half an hour before sunrise, and the first faint glimmer of the dawning day on the horizon doesn’t really shed much light on the situation. peering into the middle distance I figure I can make out a bit of bubbling and frothing white water near the point, and that will do me. I turn around and head back to the carpark.    Ten minutes of doi...

The night paled away into insignificance and reluctantly gave way to the first faint feints of deepening dawn. We had walked out underneath the stars as usual, to claim the first waves of the day. Out in front, wheeling his steady progress through the night sky, was Orion, him that fella of the big bow shooting action, forever and all eternity aiming his arrow at faraway Sirius, bright and distinct against the cold black velvet of the winter night. Off to the other side, reliable as always, proudly heralding and overseeing the dawning of the new day, Venus. Always in the same spot, always the brightest in the sky, always the last to wink out when finally swamped and overtaken by the steady advance of the blue sky, melting away before the heat of the daytime sun.    Waves had been plentiful and enjoyable in the solitude of the pre-dawn, when all other sane and reasonably-minded people were holed up in their sleeping cocoons. The water was breaking in a perfect way right there...

Not long ago an old mate of mine came to see us and stay for a bit, and since he had at one point used to surf, a fair while ago, we took him out with us in the morning. By a stroke of good fortune, or, alternatively and depending on how you look at it, by catastrophic bad luck, his visit coincided with the full moon. So we dragged him out of his bed at 3.30 in the morning, and, yawning, scratching and farting, shoved him in the back of the car and hauled him off to the beach where we gave him a board and pushed him out into the boiling surf by the light of the moon. He afterwards confessed that he thought his number was up and that he was sure he was going to die out there. Miraculously he didn’t, and he survived to tell the tale and to meet a good few of our regular crew, us mob who meet in the darkest hours of the day and claw our way through impenetrable darkness to sneak waves in solitude and peace and quiet. During a rare spell of lucidity and relative sanity afterwards, in betwe...

The Art And Craft of catching waves is governed by practices so inscrutable and impenetrable to the uninitiated as to be akin to Black Magic. Novices such as myself, well and truly noviciated after several years of practising The Craft with little discernible progress, if any, devote every waking hour to the analysis of every perceivable, and, frequently, unperceivable, detail, approach, strategy and angle of the craft. These attempts at deciphering the unfathomable are then followed by commendable if doomed and ineffective efforts of translating formulated theory into successful practice. Occasionally lucky flukes serve to brighten the day and harden the obstinate will to persist in the folly, and they are invariably followed by setbacks the depressive nature of which is only matched by the magnitude and spectacularness of the mishaps, wipe-outs and stacks that they manifest themselves as.    So, on this day I was bravely and futilely flapping my arms around and kicking my ...

The Dreaming, also sometimes referred to as The Dreamtime, is a concept that is both unique to Australia and essential, crucial and pivotal to traditional Aboriginal culture. There are lots of different way whitefellas have tried to explain it or understand it, and they all skirt around the outside of it and touch on various aspects of it, while, most likely, never truly come to grips with its essence.    The imperfect understanding of it that I have arrived at, as a whitefella from the Northern Territory, is that it appears to be a human being’s state of being in and with the world. On one level there is a series, a cycle, a complex whole of songs and stories that relate how the world came into existence, at a point in time that is not fixed or identified, through the actions, undertakings and decisions of a group of beings that are both considered exterior to human beings as well as ancestral and interior to them. A very straightforward example is that of the Rainbow Serpe...

Chapter I – Agent Orange   I paddled out into the dark night. The water is black, the sky is black, the stars are cold white silver, and there is a rapidly diminishing sliver of moon hanging on for dear life high up above in the pre-morning sky. The full moon has been and gone, and us mob, The People Of The Moon, have followed its beck and call faithfully, like we do every month. We surf at night, because, for one, it’s exciting, special and spooky, sends shivers up and down your spine and is a challenge, and, for another, because it’s the only way we can get a wave to ourselves and beat the crowds, here at our regular surf spot. It’s a popular place and the entire world wants a piece of the action, so it seems, and so it gets flogged to within an inch of its life, with all the attendant issues of human nature rearing its ugly head and showing itself from its worst side: when it gets busy the beautiful peaceful ocean becomes a battlefield, where random characters push, shove, h...