Vampire Day
Peace and quiet is hard to find sometimes, especially in a popular surfbreak in the middle of the summer holidays. Therefore us devoted and committed madmen venture out as early as possible to try to beat the crowd, score some waves and enjoy the silence and solitude of the ocean before the onslaught of the masses.
Being particularly keen, I had arrived earlier than early, before any of the others. When the full moon is out we habitually get together and surf by moonlight, often at times of day or rather night that may well be considered ludicrous, insane or just downright stupid by people more grounded and with less salt water obsession between their ears. When the moon is running, so to speak, I usually get up at 2.45 am to make it to our home break and be on the water by 4. With a bit of luck we get a good two solid hours of surfing in the night by silver light before the less deranged crowds come strolling down our beach.
On this day however, the moon was a distant memory, it was new moon, and the sky was therefore pitch black. In deference to this state of affairs I had grudgingly given in to the realities of the world, and, in a sweeping majestic gesture of acquiescence and acceptance of things beyond my control, I had instead arrived at 4.30, after a massive and opulently decadent sleep-in until 3.30 am. Standards are slipping indeed. Don’t know what the world is coming to.
I stole down to the beach without a sound, my bare feet melting into the cool sand, dark cloud cover overhead, no sign of any stars, salt water lapping gently around my ankles as I waded in. The phrase for “cloudy sky” in Japanese is “sóra kumóri”. Saying “today the sky is black and cloudy” would be “kyo sóra-wa kuro shi kumóri des”. I’m going skiing in Japan in a few weeks time, and I have been trying to learn Japanese for that reason. This attempt at learning the language has, in the main, consisted of asking random words and translations of the Japanese people that I know in the surf, and parroting back at them what they tell me. This has been particularly successful, so that I am now well-equipped with a respectable amount of vocabulary and conversational titbits in the language, all of which, unfortunately, solely deal with and relate to the sea, surf, wind, waves and other aspects of surfing life. This, I feel, will come in extremely handy in, say, the streets of Tokyo or the snow-covered slopes of the skiing area we’re going to. I can’t wait to pull over a random punter in the snow and start up a conversation about the quality of the waves there on that day. It might be worth my while looking into the ready availability of straitjackets in Japanese ski resorts.
So I waded waist-deep into the black water of the bay, my home away from home, my spiritual homeland, laid on my board, paddled out towards the rock that is my customary take-off point, and I pulled up right next to it. For these early or rather middle-of-the-night sessions I never check the conditions before paddling out. As long as the wind is favourable, i.e. not northerly, I don’t bother to try and suss anything out, I just go, mostly because 1) I can’t be arsed stuffing around, 2) it’s a waste of good solid surfing time, and 3) you can’t see a bloody thing in the dark anyway. Most of the time it’s impossible to see where the sea finishes and where the sky starts, so trying to work out which way and how the water is moving, if at all, is a pointless and exceptionally delusional preoccupation. I usually pin my hopes on the fact that 1) it’s impossible to see what’s happening on the other side of the rocks, and 2) usually something of some description turns up, as long as you paddle out. It’s Murphy’s Law in reverse: if we don’t paddle out, the water will be dead flat. But if we do make the effort to strike out into the dark, the bay will rouse itself from its lethargic slumber and rustle up some waves from somewhere, just to reward us for the dedication and mostly pointless expenditure of energy.
As it turned out it was flat.
I rounded the rocks, sat up right on my board and saw the exact square root of bugger all. Not a ripple within cooee.
I didn’t mind.
While the ultimate goal is, eventually, to get waves of some description, I’m pretty happy to just sit there on the water and bob around in silence, enjoying the tranquillity of the night, the calm before the storm. I can feel the country and the ocean around me, minding their own business in event-less un-threatening existence, and I enjoy their presence.
Sure enough, within ten minutes or so The Bay, after consulting with Huey, God Of Surfing And Hangovers, had decided to do me a favour, and a wave came rolling my way. Huey is a versatile fella, and shares his duties as God Of Hangovers with his mate Ralph, Also God Of Hangovers. They are often found in the presence of erstwhile revellers who, in the small hours of the morning, or, alternatively, in the bright glaring light of a migraine midday, find themselves on their knees in front of a dunny somewhere, admiring the exquisite workmanship of the porcelain bowl at close quarters, and alternatively calling out and cursing the names of their Gods, often followed by impromptu and inventive deliveries of Prose Of Praise And Worship:
‘oooo, I’m gonna be sick, oooo .....’ [violent spasmodic contraction of tormented and abused stomach muscles struggling under overload of gastric acid and alcohol] ‘Huuuuuueeeey ....’. [careful wiping of mouth and fishing of diced carrots out of hair hanging in front of face]
‘ooooo please just let me die, I want me mum ....’[head catapulting forwards with whiplash force] ‘Raaaaalllllph ....’ [projectile stream of orange and white goo leaves mouth at terminal velocity, misses bottom of dunny bowl, hits back wall of bowl, folds back onto itself like a standing wave in a rapid, bounces back up again and hits luckless worshipper square in the face].
People go to great and bizarre lengths to worship their gods, but, you know, each to their own, and more power to them.
I said a quick "thank you" to Huey on the off-chance that he might be awake with nothing better to do than to listen to the pathetic mewling of humans, heads in or out of toilet bowls, and focused on the wave, rising black surrounded by black. Off to the left it started to crest and I aimed my board just so, just there, for this particular patch of black water, and then I jumped up and found myself riding a gurgling and regurgitating fountain of pure blue electric light, revolving underneath my board and streaming away in a trail of fluorescent wake behind me. The phosphorescence was out in force, the microscopial plankton organisms that live in the surface layer of warm sub-tropical water and give off light when stirred and disturbed. At times they shine with hues of silver, purple, and green, flickering and tumbling away under the board; on this day they were a hard blue, like a blue-light disco for kids.
I rode the wave out to a respectable distance, the slope walling up to about waist-high and stretching out blackly and sombrely off to the right, and me shuffling to and fro, and pumping the board up and down in what has recently been described as The Rocking Horse Technique, in a bid to generate more speed and be able to carve up and down the face of the wave. It has been kindly pointed out to me at several reprises that, while this has no discernible effect on the speed, motion or progress of my board and myself on the wave, it does make for some very entertaining watching for those bystanders not already half drowned from hysterics at the sight, so, by all means, keep on doing it, go for your life.
You can’t go around trying to please critics. There’s just no pleasing some people.
I paddled back up again in the darkness surrounding me, and repeated the same thing a few times, slowly and quietly, in perfect relaxation, not needing to compete for anything with anyone. The visibility of the water was outstanding. In spite of the almost complete absence of light I could, somehow, see straight through to the sand on the bottom of the sea. There was a long, vaguely shark-shaped rock that had been exposed recently by the eternally shifting sands, and it sat in the exact right spot for that stage of the tide to be a perfect landmark for take-off. So I positioned myself over it time and again, and caught one electric blue wave after another,
Before very long my mate The Snake Catcher came out, him of the low tolerance threshold for snaking and dropping-in would-be wave-riders, and found me at the rock. We sat in the dark companionably and shared waves, taking it in turns, and were soon joined by The Shredder, Lord Of The Tooth Pick Board. Unfazed by prevailing conditions of small waves, minute swell and zero gravity, he insists on riding boards with a maximum size of strictly no more than one and a half foot. His determination and commitment to his art is only matched by his impressive stoicism in the face of getting no waves at all, and his unflappable ability to bob up and down next to our main rock for hours and hours on end, occasionally striking out and, after a heroic and valiant effort worthy of an Olympian, spectacularly failing to catch any waves whatsoever, while in the meantime around five hundred people on longboards around him catch wave after wave.
We hung out and shot the breeze, enjoying the time we knew wouldn’t last long. In summertime every man and his dog wants a piece of this wave, for good reason, and we knew the crowds would turn up sooner rather than later. However, I wasn’t quite prepared for what did turn up. The night had moved on and given grudgingly way to wan daylight, paling in the east and stretching bits of grey-blue sky over the wicker framework that holds the sky in place over the Flat Earth and gives it the illusion of being globular in nature. We had been sitting in the cocoon of our companionship, sharing stories and discussing things private and public, when a wave announced its presence in front of us and I turned around to face downstream, ready to take it head-on.
And almost fell off my board.
Because there, right behind us, no more than half a metre from our boards, vaguely outlined shapes in the dwindling twilight, sat two vampires.
I stared at them. They stared back. Unsmiling, unnodding. Unhuman, potentially.
There was two blokes sitting there, black hair, full length black wetsuits, grim expressions on their pale white faces. Never seen them before in our lives. Arms crossed over their chest. Looks that meant business on their faces.
They had crept up in the half-light and pulled up right behind us, so close we could almost touch them, had sat up on their boards, and had said not a word. Not a squeak. Not a good morning or how are you or fuck you. Nothing. Cloaked in a veil of silence.
‘Right. Well, there goes the neighbourhood’, one of the others said.
I nodded commiseratingly. This could only go one way.
Sure enough, the first wave that came along they turned tail and jumped onto. As it so happens, it was the one that The Shredder had been coveting and waiting on for the last three quarters of an hour, and had been scouting out from the top of a Hoop Pine that grows in a sad and lonely way out here on an outcrop of rock fifty metres away from dry land. It is his wont, on quiet days with long spells between waves, to tie his board neatly onto one of the lower rocky outcrops there and climb the tree with all the grace, agility and ability of an asthmatic aardvaark, and use his binoculars to scour the empty ocean ahead for any sign of impending wave doom. We have in times gone past to our puzzlement noticed that, inexplicably, he often actually has his back to the open ocean and seems to be examining the lay of the land just behind the nudist beach on the other side of the bay, perhaps with a view to calculating particular aspects of ocean-floor topography and aqua-dynamics which cannot fail to elude us mere mortals.
As they robbed The Shredder of his long and bitterly awaited wave, we took note of the inescapable fact that they were not using legropes. Ah. Purists. For some obscure and ill-explained reason there is a growing trend for not wearing leg ropes in the surf. It is thought that this is a nostalgic hankering back to the days before leg ropes were invented and most surfers would happily and blythely put their heads in the way of a three ton 18 foot hardwood plank careering out of control on a one way journey to a hospital bed and an early funeral. Inexplicably this romanticising of the olden days (“so much better in all ways!”) does not extend to the wearing of woollen jumpers instead of neoprene wetsuits in winter time, to getting to and from the surf solely by horse and donkey cart, and to refusing to take penicillin when they get crook. Luckily, in response to the growing demand for action on this issue the local hospital has now taken to putting signs on the doors of their emergency rooms that read “no legrope no assistance”. They have introduced new procedures where prospective patients not only need to provide ID but also a valid and noticeably recently used legrope, in the absence of which they will politely but firmly be shown the way down the road a few blocks where a witch doctor is practicing homeopathy and tarot healing. The first reports on the results of the new policy are in, and they are promising a speedy decline in the numbers of living and breathing no-legrope users, and a sharp rise and boom in the undertaking and cremation business. The economy will boom.
We watched the No Ropers No Hopers disappear downstream with mixed emotions: we were glad they were gone, outraged they weren’t using legropes, sure they would be back, and depressed at the prospect. The cocktail tasted, on the whole, pretty sour.
Before long we were joined by more of our regular crew. There was The Pyjama Banana, a bloke with the unfortunate propensity for wearing glary, lary and loud pyjama shorts in the surf, usually of violent colours that hurt the naked eye to look at, and often tastefully decorated with images of pineapples, chillies, reindeer, or, particularly appropriate for the jolly loving and merry time of the year, George Pell. The Pyjama Banana is an excellent surfer of long-standing experience who doesn’t usually miss too many waves. Indeed, there are some whose names won’t be mentioned but it’s everyone else, who wish that he would miss a few more sometimes, and leave some for other people. As it turned out, they had nothing to complain about on this day. In his wisdom The Pyjama Banana had placed his bets on a surf report from 1984 that predicted sizeable swell for this day, and he had turned up with a toothpick-sized board worthy of The Shredder. We smiled and congratulated him enthusiastically on his choice of board for the day, and paddled onto every wave he fell off or couldn’t get on.
One especially touching moment, worthy of recording for posterity in the annals of Our Break, came when The Pyjama Banana found himself in the exact right spot at the perfect point in time, just when what seemed to be shaping up as The Wave Of The Day turned up on his doorstep. He spun around with the fluid lethal grace of a mushed banana, bent his head forwards, struck out mightily, somehow matched the speed of the wave on his toothpick board, a feat of human achievement that deserves an accolade, a gold medal and a seat in parliament, and jumped to his feet with the power and determination of a banana smoothy in a cage full of starving chimpanzees. We were very impressed and cheered out loudly, and even more so when two seconds later he wobbled backwards and, with arms spread out wide like a christ who’s enjoyed a good old stretch of the arms and chest on the cross for an afternoon or so, landed flat on his arse while the wave took off by itself to Timbuktu, full steam ahead.
However, there’s always a second chance. Undaunted and determined to get the next one The Pyjama Banana turned towards the next wave, lining up in front of him. Unfortunately for him he was by now in the company of one of his good mates, The Phantom Menace. This bloke is an unassuming quiet friendly fella who will sit placidly and smilingly on his kneeboard, sunken three-quarters of the way below the surface of the water, treadling away with his flippers and minding his own business. He will float around without drawing any attention to himself, and will, unerringly, somehow manage to drift right around the back of everyone else into prime snaking position, and then without a word will claim whatever wave turns up, regardless of who else has designs on it or has been waiting for it. In this case it was The Pyjama Banana. Intent on snavelling up the next wave and making good on his spectacular failing just before, he neglected to check his back, and as he swung himself around, paddled onto the next wave and successfully pulled into it, he heard a ‘Hey! Hey!’ from his left, from the inside, saw The Phantom Menace bearing straight at him, and found himself forced to do the right thing – much against his natural instincts, inclination and better judgement – and pull off the wave, relinquishing it to his mate, face bright red and steam coming out of his ears.
We rolled around with laughter on our boards and considered ourselves lucky we didn’t have mates like that.
It was clear that something would have to give sooner or later, and the progress of time was not and is not ever on our side. We knew full well that it was foolhardy to try and stay out too long, and I for one am always reluctant to tarnish a beautiful peaceful night time experience with the hustle and cut-throat bustle of the daylight time, so I have in recent times come around to the point of view that it’s better to leave a bit earlier and retain the happy vibes. So I resolved to get one more for the road and head in.
Now, usually even thinking that constitutes a jinx: as soon as you think it, or, the gods (Huey and Ralph) forbid, say it out loud, there will be no swell, the ocean will go dead flat and everything you attempt will fail ignominiously, and, more often than not, you will find yourself forced to do The Paddle Of Shame, i.e. paddle back to the beach instead of riding a wave, tail firmly tucked between the legs and back of the ears bright red with embarrassment, humiliation, disgrace and midnight moonburn. I had no reason to believe that this time was going to be any different, but, ever and always the eternal optimist, I peeled my eyelids right back of my eyeballs, flapped my ears enthusiastically and stuck my tongue out and panted with excitement. Apart from providing some internal aerodynamic cooling effect for my overheated brain this also has the welcome side-effect of spooking people and getting them to back off in case of contagious insanity, providing me with an edge over any would-be competitors for the coveted next wave.
Waves came and went, and, to a heartfelt and sincere round of applause, The Pyjama Banana finally managed to get onto a wave and disappeared down the line. Good on him.
With him gone it was now my turn, and so I manoeuvred myself into position for the last hurrah of the day. As luck would have it, unbelievably, a seriously decent bit of swell turned up right in front of me and started to wall up, looking intensely promising. I couldn’t believe my luck and spun around, and as I started paddling I heard a voice somewhere to my left calling out in annoyance: ‘Hey Baboon! What are you doing!’
I glanced to my left in a split second and saw, to my amazement, The Phantom Menace plucking away at the surface of the water and flapping his flippers manically, fully intent on stealing my wave from the inside. Last I had seen him was two minutes earlier, when he had just arrived back from his previous ride. I had spotted him paddling up out of the corner of my eye, and had not paid him any mind. Clearly, in the intervening 90 seconds he had wormed his way back into the inside pocket and was now clearly intending to snatch my wave.
Not on your life, mate.
So I looked at him in a flash, took a nanosecond to register the fact that he had only just gotten back and was jumping the queue, and leaned forward with all my might, paddled as hard as I could and pulled right into the hole in front of him. I jumped up and focussed on the wave, never once looking back.
And the sight I saw was a spectacle of epic proportions.
Right next to my shoulder the wave rose up high, creating a smooth and clean slope of glistening green and blue crystal, with a hairline crest of snowy white cascading down behind me, and I bent forwards deep down over my board in what is often referred to as The Baboon Pose, i.e. head down, arse up, feet wide and brain turned off, and the power unwinding behind me propelled me onwards and upwards down that line, faster and faster. Once I had my footing secured I steered down, gaining momentum, then pushed my backfoot around in a turn and sped back up the face, as high as I could before running the risk of sliding off the back of it, and down again, carving, twisting, turning, wending. I cut back towards the foam ball, leaned forwards when water welled up into a bump in front of me, pushed with the front foot to take the board over the edge than shifted reverse and shuffled backwards to bring the nose back up again so it wouldn’t get stuck under water.
Over and over again.
I hit the midsection and, instead of losing steam, the wave picked up power, really hitting its stride, and hurtled me forwards. I stopped thinking about anything other than the water beneath my feet and next to my shoulder, and I swung my arms around and leaned and threw my weight into turn after turn after turn.
Behind me and to my left side, the banksias, the pandanuses and the paperbarks filed past in a blur; the rocky promontory at the back end of the stretch known as Switchfoot Alley came and went, the vine-scrub wall of green lining the area known as The Bistro, favourite hang-out of local sharks, streaked away, and still I turned and cut and carved and twisted.
At long last I was forced to look ahead and noticed that I had literally run out of water: the wave was heading headfirst into the sand of the beach, and just there, right here right now, there was the last hiccup of this majestic unbelievable wave as it bubbled up one more time and turned into the shorebreak at the very edge of the beach. I looked down past my feet and I saw the water sucking back from the yellow sand, and I was hanging half a metre or so above the ground in thin air, with nothing below me but the harsh shoreline of reality, and so at the absolute last second I threw myself backwards, and as my board shot out in front of me and wedged itself firmly into the sand I flew back over the shorebreak and landed in about 5 cm of water.
I stood up, stretched my arms out to the sky, and let out a huge wide-mouthed roar of victory, bouncing off the hills and cliffs and mountainsides, and rolling around the bay in three layers of echoes.
Right behind me, on the next wave in, was Mr Kamikaze, a Japanese bloke that we know who surfs with us here, and he came over with a huge grin on his face, slapped a big high five and clasped my hand up high. Behind him again, a bit further over, my mate Chief Switchfoot, shooting down the third wave in the set, deftly rode his board right onto the sand and in great style stepped off from his board onto dry land without getting his feet wet, cool as a cucumber. Spun around and waved with a massive smile on his face.
Never mind The Pyjama Banana falling off what had looked like the best wave up to that point. Turned out I had just scored what was indisputably the wave of the day. And beat The Phantom Menace to it.
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