Hang Five

The fog drops down heavy and fat from the morning sky and settles like a blanket on the grey water of dawn, muffling all sound and squeezing unnecessary noises from the world. Contrary to all expectations there is not a breath of wind to be felt, heard or seen, and the mighty north wind that was meant to be still roaring after eight days straight is now conspicuously absent.

In its wake however it has left us the swell that it has spent the last eight days whipping up, as it howled down from the mystic Far North possessed by its own insanity, whizzing, buzzing and whistling like a giant bullroarer, and with all its might pushed walls of water out in front of it. Like a metaphorical bulldozer scooping up bucketfulls of warm surface water, chasing it away in front of it, and making room in the upper layers of the ocean for the cold dark water from the deep down below to come welling up. It brings nutrients to the surface, plankton, algae, micro organisms, and injects life and vitality into the ocean’s ecosystem . It is the very system that drives the cycle of El Nino/La Nina from far away across the mighty Pacific.

The easterly trade winds blow warm surface water across the breadth and width of the Pacific, from South America to Australia, as the cold. freezing Humboldt current ferries Antarctic water from the southern ocean up towards the coasts of Peru and Chile. If everything goes according to The Great Plan Of The Big Ocean And His Mate The Wind, then the easterly trade wind will blow the warm water all the way across over to us, and we’ll get rain in Australia. It allows us to survive for another year, and to continue our mind-boggling delusion that we can grow shallow rooted northern hemisphere cereal crops and high-irrigation demanding rice and cotton in the world’s oldest continent which is, essentially, almost entirely made of sterile sand.

The warm water will make way for the cold water offshore off Peru, and the high density of nutrients contained in the cold water will provide ample sustenance for the fish stocks off the Peruvian and Chilean coasts. The people there go to sea and catch the fish, the numbers of which are going through the roof due to the abundance of nutrients, and everyone makes a living and can survive for another little while, especially the commercial trawlers that deplete whatever resource they can find while sending fortunes up north to their owners in the US and Canada. These in turn buy their fifteenth investment property and drive up the rent of the poor bastards that have the misfortune to be their tenants, and the wheels of globalist capitalism are well greased and continue to grind everything to dust underneath them. The fishermen in Peru get a handful of rice each to feed their thirteen kids for another month, being catholics, and all is well in the world.

Or is it.

Because sometimes, particularly after a big night on the tequila and the mescal over in the Sonora desert, where, rumour has it, Apache women dance the fandango in the middle of the night, barefoot and naked by the light of the fire, the poor old easterly wind just doesn’t feel equal to the task. When, in the throes of his hangover and weak with lovesickness and longing for spectral dancers in the night, he fails to blow with sufficient amounts of enthusiasm, ferocity, velocity and persuasion, the warm water doesn’t make it to Australia. It runs out of oompf halfway across the ocean, and, quite rightly feeling in the doldrums, stops and sits down on the job for a cup of tea and a snooze in the shade of a solitary palm tree on a desert island.

When this happens, the absence of warm water in the vicinity of Australia dries up the atmosphere, or at least doesn’t put any moisture into it, and we are struck with drought. The reality of ignoring any and all native plants and animals, adapted to our ecology and climate over the last 65 millions of isolation in favour of introduced and unsuitable cash crops demanded by overseas countries who want the same thing they’ve always had except they want it from us instead of from themselves, comes home to roost in a painful way. Dust blows away the topsoil cunningly and with great foresight ploughed into oblivion by clever farmers planning their next great windfall, and instead they witness a great windblow followed by their own great downfall. Politicians of all persuasion don moleskin trousers, put ten gallon hats on their half pint heads, and strut up and down in front of cameras in “drought afflicted areas” of the country, attempting valiantly to look like they’ve ever done a day’s work in their life, all the while continuing to lie, not through their teeth for a change but this time just out of the corner of their mouth, so the flies don’t get it.

While we get struck by drought, because of the excess of warm water closer to them, the people in Peru and Chile get torrential rain, floods and landslides. Conversely, the cold water from the Humboldt current doesn’t get to well up as close to the surface as it would like, the fish don’t receive the massive injection of micro nutrients they require to explode in numbers, and the fisheries collapse. The fishermen, deprived of income, starve and are reduced to eating their children, which, being catholics, they’ve got plenty enough to go around anyway, and then some. The commercial trawlers fail to send fortunes up north to their wealthy owners in northern America. They, however, just shrug and increase the rent of their investment properties, and continue to play golf and drink themselves along on their merry way to a premature cardiac arrest.

Because this phenomenon of the changing of the winds and the waters usually takes place around mid to late December, i.e. close to christmas time, the local fisher people of the Peruvian and Chilean coast have traditionally called it El Nino, meaning “the boy child” and referring to the boy child involved in the story of the christian christmas. The international community of meteorology and climate scientists, often just referred to and widely known on the international political stage as “Those Bloody Climate Change Conspiracy Communist Bastards From Hell”, or TBCCCCBFH for short, have adapted this terminology, and have broadened it to include the opposite phenomenon, La Nina.

La Nina happens when a more generous amount of warm water than usual reaches Australia, and we get floods instead of drought. South America get droughts instead of floods and the fish bugger off to go play cards and drink kava in Fiji. Although La Nina means “the girl child” she has not been granted the honour and pleasure of being  included into the story of the christian christmas because christianity is a religion of misogynistic life-reviling death-worshipping arseholes, and anyway girls have girl germs.

There is a school of thought that tentaively holds that the cycle of these climatic events, while apparently quite erratic, may well operate on either a seven year cycle or a 19 year cycle. The 19 year cycle provides an intriguing parallel with the metonic cycle of the moon, i.e. the period of time it takes for the lunar year (twelve cycles of the full moon in one year, taking 354 days, 8 hours, 48 minutes and 34 seconds) to coincide perfectly with the solar year (one lap around the sun of 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes and 16 seconds). Every 19 years the two line up so that they start at the same time. A quick look at the drought history of Australia shows us that catastrophic floods, resulting among other things in the filling of Lake Eyre in South Australia, tend to happen at intervals of around 18-20 years: 2010/11, 1991, 1973/74, 1955. Like all theories it’s not perfect and could be as wrong as billio, but it’s a good wheeze.

Anyway, the northerly has brought us cold water, and the last eight days of prevailing northerly winds have generated their own wind swell. Coated in the eerie near-silence of the dense fog covering the water, the sets roll in close together, as is typical of a locally generated swell. but there’s good size and decent shape in them, even if they’re a bit lumpy here and there, so I paddle hard, and drop and freefall into the hole, and surf away into the impenetrable fog. The rides are great, they’re fast and sharp, and there’s decent power in them, with some waves reaching up to shoulder height and occasionally even head height.

I catch a few, paddle back up again, hang out with my mates and generally enjoy the quiet peaceful feeling of being wrapped in the fog. Then it’s my turn again, I look over my shoulder, paddle with all my might , become weightless for that magic split-second, and I’m off flying over the top of the ocean. I crouch down and push on my front leg to go faster, and bounce up and down like a five-year old on a trampoline to try to generate more speed. When the shoulder slope in front of me starts to show tell-tale signs of growing fat, lazy and old I shift my balance, lean back into the saddle of the wall behind me and perform a beautiful if very slow and awkward cutback towards the bubbling ball of boiling boisterousness that holds the power of the wave. I steer right up close to it, leeching all its power out of it, and, slowly but unavoidably, I feel its power starting to seep away, its life force slowly draining out as if sucked dry by a salt water vampire. So to extend my ride as much as possible, to milk it for all it’s got, to get my absolute maximum out of it, I shuffle forwards on my board.

Moving forwards on the board is a time-honoured and well established tradition in the world of longboarding, and is undertaken with considerable style, poise and grace by people other than me. Those who have the ability and skill to do so tip-toe to and fro along the length of the board, cross-stepping in perfect balance and unison with the aquatic world, and are rightly widely admired for doing so. In my case, my forward movement on the deck of the board takes place in shuddering, jerking spasms of uncontrolled twists and contortions, designed to result in at least two sprained ankles and, for all the world, more closely resembling the movement of a dog with worms dragging his itchy fly-blown arse over the neighbour’s freshly steam-cleaned wall-to-wall carpet.

There is a thing in the world of longboarding called “hang five”. It’s a position where a surfer of daring enterprise and cunning ability elegantly slides forwards towards the nose of the board and, casually and nonchalantly, sticks one foot out over the very front edge of it, with the result that his five toes are dangling over the board in the free open air space between the nose of the board and the water rushing beneath it. It is a difficult and advanced manoeuvre, only bested by the more radical “hang ten”, where both feet are stuck over the edge and the surfer gracefully and aerodynamically leans back like a flagpole in a cyclone and rides the wave like an inverted boomerang.

I shuffle forward, employing the full stealth and reach of the baboon bounce.

Shuffle, shuffle.

As I shuffle time slows down, and I eye off the slowly decreasing power of the wave. My gaze drifts forwards, up to the nose of my board. It seems impossibly far away, and yet strangely reachable, so without thinking about it, eliminating the overheating and ill-equiped brain from the decision making process, I slowly stick out one foot. Put it down. Slide it forwards a bit more. And a bit more.

Time slows down almost to a standstill, and now I’m moving in such slow motion it’s almost imperceptible. There is still a considerable distance to bridge between the toes of my left foot and the nose of my board, so I do what I do best: stretch. There are distinct advantages associated with having the physique, appearance and personality of a baboon, and great flexibility is one of them. Every morning at the crack of dawn, no matter the time, weather or place, I stretch, religiously, for twenty minutes, all the while praying fervently to the God Of Elasticity, Mr Rubber. As a result I can do the splits.

So I slide into the splits, my foot almost disappearing from view as it slowly but ineveitably approaches the front lip of the nose of my board. My back foot is now at least six feet away behind me, and the groin is starting to strain a little bit. With one last effort I push down into the last two centimetres of the splits, and my left foot reaches the nose of the board.

Pushes past it. Hangs my Five Toes Over The Edge.

And I’m Hanging Five.

For a split second. Just long enough for me to, finally, look down at the nose of my board. And to realsise that, because I never use the last thirty centimetres of my board, I never put any wax on it. Why should I, I never use it, never go there. Waste of good wax.

And so, as the realisation hits me, I’ve got just enough time to think “shit there’s no wax there” before my foot slips forwards, all the way over the top of the nose and into the void beyond, and I go cartwheeling forwards, arse over tit, and fly over the nose of my board to land upside down in the water in front of my board.

I stay under water long enough to dodge the lethal projectile that is my board, currently zooming overhead at fifty kilometres an hour with a view to decapitating me, then surface in a great big explosion of bubbles, frustration and snot.

I pull on my legrope and climb back onto my board, with a big smile on my face. I got to hang five, for the first time ever. Not for long, admittedly, but it’s a good start.

I look around at the people who witnessed my stunt and who are now rolling over their boards in apopleptic fits of hysteria, gasping for breath and at serious risk of drowning. I nod contentedly to myself. That went very well.

Onwards and upwards.