Seagrass Rock

The track is moving along my feet. There’s sand, rock, gravel, stone, sticks, grass, clipping along at a steady rate. The track crosses a creek, goes through a bog, passes over marshland, winds its way up and over a long crumbly cliff and heads back down again into the shelter of the trees. The branches close overhead temporarily, then open up again. The windswept conditions here are not conducive to lush, tall and thick vegetation, and mostly the trees and bushes are sparse and spread out. I pick through the gravel, skip over the rock, enjoy the soft grass and the warm sand under the skin of my bare feet. I wriggle my shoulders to shift my backpack and relieve building up tension on one side, and push on. After a good few kilometres the warm sand disappears altogether, the soft grass becomes as rare as hens’ teeth, and all that’s left is a never-ending blanket of gravel, stones and rocks. They are rough and sharp and annoying, and it gets to the stage where it’s slowing me down too much. So reluctantly I give up, sit down, get my shoes out of my pack, put them on and keep going. My mates have disappeared around the next bend and over the following knoll, and I pick up the pace to catch up a bit.

I crest a bit of a rise and there the bush opens right up. The track leads right along the top of a cliff, offering an unbroken view of what we came here for. Deep below at the bottom of the cliff there’s swell rolling in and crashing against the rocks marking the edge of the land. Further afield there’s steady lines rolling in from out of the wide open ocean. And there, another kilometre or so away, lies the prized reward of our expedition: a bay with a sandy beach on one side and a headland on the other side. It’s hard to tell from where we are standing, but it certainly looks as if there might well be a wave coming off it. We would soon find out. No one ever comes down here, on account of the inaccessability of the terrain. The only way in is on foot, through bushland and up and over towering cliffs. Too much like hard work for 99.99 % of people. Good. We like it like that. A steady overdose of people is what we’re coming here to get away from. We’re looking for empty, unspoiled waves, devoid of cut-throat crowds and bad attitude. And we’re looking for the wide open world, the freedom of the hills, the adventure of the limitless skies.

I shrug my pack around again a bit more, and reposition my longboard under my right hand. Not too much further to go.

A bit later I jump, skip, leap and stumble down a series of rocks, scramble down a wallaby track, and land on the beach. Sand again, at last. Shoes off, immediately. The ocean’s on our side now, at eye level, and there’s rainforest off to the other side. There’s a never-drying freshwater spring there that I know off, tucked away behind a clump of trees, and I point it out to the others. We are delighted. Fresh drinking water will be our first requirement.

We push on further down the beach, crossing a few creeks that come trickling out of the rainforest. They are all fresh water, and drinkable. I drink of all of them. They’re cool and refreshing, dark tannin-cloured water runnning over red sand, trickling its way down to the shore line. Paradise on earth.

We pick up the pace now, eager to get to our destination. We’ve studied maps, read stories and listened to accounts of long ago. There is a good chance we’ll find a wave at the end of this beach. The headland is looking promising, curling around nicely into the shelter of the bay, laying down all the perfect conditions for a clean pointbreak, i.e. a wave that rolls in from the ocean, fetches up against the rocks of a headland, breaks on them, and then, hopefully, continues to peel cleanly and openly, straight as an arrow, down a bank of sand that hopefully will have accumulated on the bayside of the rocks. It’s what tends to happen: the action of the ocean swell drags up and carries along sand, from the ocean floor as well as sediment from coastal rivers. As the water swings around the corner of the headland the outside portion of the water goes fast, centrifugally, and holds on to whatever suspended particles are contained within it. But on the inside of the bend the water slows down and loses speed, and as it does so it loses its ability to hold on to the suspended particles it is carrying, i.e. sand, and deposits it, neatly on a heap behind the rocks. The eddy-effect of the water running back towards its obstacle counter to its main direction brings on more sand and adds to the build-up. The result, if we’re lucky, is an accumulation of sand behind the rocks, which causes a wave to stand up and run smoothly without breaking for miles and miles and miles. If we’re lucky.

We speculate on what we can see as we walk. Ahead of us, shimmering darkly under the surface of the waves, sits a large expanse of something dark and potentially threatening. My mate the Snake Catcher, erring on the side of a half empty glass, suggests it’s rocks, which would make life a lot harder, as we’d be bouncing up and down over them and potentially be getting cut to shreds by them. Not such a great outlook. Myself, with the simplicity of the primitive Baboon mind, always and every day I see the glass sitting under a permanently flowing waterfall in the middle of a Northern Territoty wet season, i.e. full and forever flowing over, although potentially waited on by hungry crocodiles mad feral in their breeding season. I therefore offer the suggestion that the patches of dark we can see are seagrass. We laugh at both our suggestions, and carry on. Time will tell.

We climb up the final rise towards an open grassy area on the low lying headland and collapse under a sprawling banksia tree. I drop my longboard in the grass, all nine foot six inches of it, not before time. Bushwalking with a longboard under your arm is a good way to get even longer arms. This clearly goes to show that baboons have been natural surfing creatures since well before the dawn of time, who got exceptionally long arms solely from carrying longboards all day every day through the savannah of Eastern Africa millions of years ago. They were often found wandering through the Sahara desert, asking for directions to the Red Sea and getting sunburned. It is a not very well known scientific fact that this is the very origin of humanity’s drive to migrate out of Africa and the begining of our species’ long and illustrious adventure of colonising every known, habitable and inhabitable corner of this earth. All thanks to baboons wandering through the desert with longboards under their arms and a single-minded obsession to find waves not made of sand and stone.

The realisation of this simple fact also finally, eloquently and elegantly provides a feasible and inescapable explanation for the mystery of how primitive hominid species managed to cross several significant stretches of open water which have never dried out, not even at the highest peaks of ice-ages that caused water to be locked up in icecaps and caused sea levels to fall dramatically all over the world. There are some areas of ocean so deep that this would never have been sufficient to allow for easy crossing of the expanses of open water separating land masses. The Wallace line is one such area: it indicates an area in between, roughly, the Indonesian islands of Bali and Lombok, and demarcates two ecological zones with distinct animal, and, to a lesser extent, plant species. Westwards of the line animals and plants are a continuation of Asian mainland species, with placental animals like tigers and rhinoes, and eastwards of the line animals and vegetation are of Australian extraction, with marsupials and monotremes, i.e. echidnas and platypuses. The deep ocean channel of the Bali-Lombok divide has never in the last 50 million years been dry land, even when sealevels were 120 metres lower than what they are today. At it’s most dried-up stage the distance separating the two islands has never been less than 35 kms. The question of how early humans managed to cross that line has baffled anthropologists and archeologists for 150 years. It is with great satisfaction that we can now finally inform the world that, in actual fact, they crossed over by paddling on longboards, having learned the trick from the humble baboon back in Africa. And so history was made. Good on those baboons I say.

We lie down in the shade of the banksia and use the baboon-board for a table for our lunch, then we kick back, stretching out in the sun. There is four of us today. In addition to usual suspects the Snake Catcher and The Pocket Rocket Grommet we are also joined by my daughter, Magnetic Girl. She owes her name to the fact that she has so much steel in her face thanks to various elaborate and fashionable piercings, in ears, nose, cheek, mouth and brain, that she is unable to walk past any object with even the weakest magnetic field without being inexorably and unavoidably attracted to it. This has the unfortunate result that she cannot safely or reliably get closer than about three metres to any motorised vehicle. We have found that the pull exerted upon her by the combined electro-magnetic forces of an alternator and a startermotor slam her into the car’s bonnet with all the power, grace and velocity of a reverse bungee jump, and glue her so tightly to the body work that in the past we have frequently found ourselves forced to resort to using a crowbar, a winch and a bucket of cold water to pry her off.

Now the bay lies in front of us, beckoning, with a distinct wave breaking right over the dark patches that are either, depending on which theory you support, made of soft and cuddly seagrass or razor sharp rocks covered in sea urchins. Time to find out.

So I jump up, wriggle into my gear and wade out right out in front of the headland, into what soon turns out to be a three-inch deep wasteland of rocks and stones, which I find out by being bodily lifted up by the first wave that comes along and being smashed down hard onto the first set of rocks in the vicinity. Crunch. I check my various bits of bone and skeleton, and find everything still more or less in good order working order. So far so good. Still, better get out of there before the sea decides to have another crack at me. So I allow the current to push me around towards the north side and I drift along with it, scouting for reprehensible and treacherous bits of sharp rock, coral and razor blades. The water is very shallow, with the tide being low and still runnning out.

I have a good look around, try a few different spots. Attempt a few waves, to no avail. I sit back and think, evaluate the situation. Watch which way the water turns and runs, which direction the cat, presumably at imminent risk of drowning, jumps, and in exactly which relation to the vertical and horizontal plane the cookie, in actual point of fact, does really crumble. I suss it out for a bit and then, before long, I spy the key to success, the keystone to the construction of the arch of my elusive triumph, of the vault of my evanescent vanity. There, off to my right hand side, seems to be a long rectangular slab of what appears to be brown rock, and when the waves roll in it acts exactly in the way we expected it to, by pushing the water upright and causing it to break against it, forming a perfectly shaped pointbreak wave. That’s where I need to be.

So I paddle right over to it, sit right close to it, almost within hugging distance, and wait. I bide my time, stalking the perfect wave like I stalk my quarry when I hunt. The wave, if I get it, will feed a hunger for wave-riding as real and as palpable as the hunger I feel in my gut when I take aim at my quarry in the bush and pull the trigger. I try for one, two, three, miss them, paddle back again, turn around, sit and wait. Then, beyond a set of three small lines, a promising looking slab looks like standing up, so I crawl almost under the rock, eyeball it as if my life depends on it, and then, at exactly the right moment, start paddling like a maniac, feel my tail lift up, and as I start to glide down I jump up in one fluid movement not at all hampered by two long hairy baboon arms with knuckles dragging through the water, I’m on my feet and I launch into a perfect state-of-the-art bottom turn. I’m on and we’re away, and the wave stands up next to me, peeling off to the right, in brilliant blue and green and white and sparkling in the sunshine, and I carve that modest little slope from top to bottom.

It runs its course towards the sandy beach, and as I fall off I utter a loud hoot of joy, excitement and contentment. I got a wave. I made it. We have found a rideable pointbreak that is secret and inaccessible. Mission accomplished.

I am over the moon, and I spin around, ready to go back for more. As I do so my feet hit the ground, hard, and I find myself in a first class position to find out exactly what those mysterious black patches we had seen from the shore are made of.

It’s rock.

Covered in a lush, soft, beautiful blanket of seagrass. Cushioned, user-friendly, not an edge, razor blade or urchin within coo-ee. So incredibly velvety you’d want to wipe your arse with it and sleep on it, although not preferably in that order.

Upon further investigation it turns out that there’s a vast bank of seagrass-covered rock, solid and stable in all weather and currents, which will hold and give shape to any wave in any condition, swell, tide or wind. It is an absolute jackpot bonanza.

I pass the board to my mates and we all take it in turns, getting a plentiful supply of rides. Big smiles all around.

We stay until the sun starts to drop lower in the sky, then drink our fill from the fresh water trickling out of the rain forest springs and start out again on the long bushwalk, back over the hills and through the desert, to where the national park gives way to the long dusty red dirt road back to Karratha. We found a pearl as precious as any that have ever come out of Broome.