The Starfish Manoeuvre

We congregated in the night at the edge of the water. We stared into the inscrutinable darkness of the sea in front of us. We found it, not surprisingly, inscrutinable.

Deciding we had nothing to lose and that it was better to try and to fail than not to try at all, we waxed up, stuck our boards under our arms, and climbed down the track to the beach below us. Striking out towards the Far East, the end of the bay, there where the easy waters of the bay become a lot less cosy and comfortable, we picked our way through the rocks and boulders haphazardly strewn across the sand, carefully placing feet and cunningly timing on-rushing waves to be able to cross areas where the sand was thin over the rocks without mangling our feet. The stars above us cast a weak, cold light upon our heads, ghostly white in the pre-dawn dusk. All around was quiet. If it hadn’t been for the quiet sloshing around, the rushing in and rushing out of the sea to our side, we could have been in a remote, dried out desert somewhere, or a barren, lifeless planet without breathable atmosphere, a location devoid of any spark of life or inspiration; Mars, maybe, or, at a stretch, Parliament House in the seat of government.

We pushed our way through the last shreds of the night, batting aside the remaining lingering afterthoughts of fog, mist and dew, and glided out onto the water on our longboards. There were three of us here today, come out to face the monsters of the deep: Chief Switchfoot, who has the remarkable and not-to-be-sneezed-at ability to surf evenhandedly with both feet, The Space Shuttle, whose idiosyncratic and highly individualistic style of taking off on waves involves causing his board to be launched rocket-straight into the air while he scrabbles for the ocean floor, and myself, The Baboon, the only surfer south of Bali and north of Lombok who can stand bolt upright on a board and still manage to drag his knuckles through the water, often handing out concussions and minor brain damage to unsuspecting bystanders in the process.

The on-rolling waves battered and tossed us around as we paddled out into the Zone where the swell was standing up on its head and breaking. This area here is known as The Meeting Of The Waters: for strange unfathomable reasons the currents here move at three different angles to each other and the shoreline. A wave will come rushing in straight from the open ocean outside of the bay, and will proceed, as is quite normal and acceptable standard behaviour for a well-raised and properly educated wave from a good family and solid breeding, in a perfectly regular linear fashion, moving forwards with all the single-mindedness of a three-trailer roadtrain with busted brakes down a steep hill. Until it hits a section somewhere roughly in the middle of the bay, where all of a sudden, for reasons only known to itself, half of it will decide to, at a whim, at the spur of the moment, perform a 90 degree turn at a perfect right angle and head straight for a rock known as the Stone Of Destiny, because no matter where you start out and where you try to head with all the best intentions of the world, you’re still gonna end up getting smashed smack bang on top of it. Personally I have left behind many layers of skin and fibreglass on top of it, as a result of which it is now twice the size it used to be and three times as dangerous. Then, as if that wasn’t enough to be getting on with, another couple of hundred metres further down the bay another section of it will, without a word of prior warning, jerk spasmodically sideways and continue its erratic journey at a neat 45 degrees from its last course, aiming for the beach head on one side, and, more to its liking, a steep cliff accompanied by lots of sharp rocks below it. Go figure. Buggered if I understand.

We did battle with the maelstrom of boiling water in a generically fruitless and pointless fashion for a while, catching rides on waves that looked like heading south and ended up running east instead. Maelstrom is a Scandinavian word that has wormed its way insidiously into the English language, and means “a powerful whirlpool in the middle of a sea or river”. It is thought that originally it referred to an area off the north-west coast of Norway where a tidal whirlpool was feared far and wide for sucking in and destroying everything that came anywhere near it at all times, causing death and damnation for untold numbers of hapless sailors. Medieval cartographers carefully inked it onto their maps, just below where the map turned white and read ‘Here Be Dragons’, and then shuddered and had nightmares and heartburn for three days. It is one of only very few words of Scandinavian origin that are retained in the English language in something more or less approaching their original form, the only other one being smorgasbord, a lavish pig-out buffet of bread, cheese, butter and buckets of alcohol. The two words, therefore, essentially mean the same thing, at least from the point of view of the dragons.

Eventually, after a number of wild and woolly rides and the mad rollercoaster of The Meeting Of The Waters, having artfully dodged the Stone Of Destiny through no discernible skill or aptitude other than sheer arse luck, we floated into the treacherously calmer waters surrounding The Standing Stone. The Standing Stone is a razor sharp piece of molten glass that lurks beneath the surface in the middle of the bay, ready to slice open the feet and bowels of anyone foolhardy enough to venture anywhere near it. At times, when conditions have been favourable, i.e. with non-existing swell and at low tide, we have climbed up on top of it, having constructed make-shift footwear of fibreglass, shark skin and toothpaste, and used it to launch ourselves into sluggishly on-coming waves to increase the momentum of the ride. Most of the time we give it a wide berth, cross our fingers at the sight of it, spit over our shoulders into the breeze and avoid at all cost mentioning it.

We bobbed up and down harmlessly and contemplated life. The sun came up quietly and unassumingly, and shed orange light over the rising and falling water of the sea. We cruised around for a bit, complimenting each other on having, purposefully and with great cunning, personal initiative and creativity, been washed into calmer waters with most of our skin still intact.

However, notwithstanding this maritime bliss, action announced itself before long, in the shape of a wave with a mind of its own. It reared up behind us and bared its fangs on its way to hell, and, carefully shitting ourselves, we paddled like mad to get onto it, whilst screaming ‘Party wave! Everyone on!’. Out of the corner of one eye I spied the signature vertical board take-off that signalled that our mate The Space Shuttle had, on this occasion, not been entirely successful in securing his spot on the party wave, while out of the corner of my other eye I noticed Chief Switchfoot firmly in position not far to my left on the wave. I swivelled my third eye around towards the front of the wave, and cunningly carved up and down the wall of this monster, which, by now, stood at least 30 centimetres high.

Chief Switchfoot bore down on me with an evil grin on his face. It has been noted, in the wider surf community at large, that this has occurred often before the terminal disappearance of quite a large number of people over the years. I shrugged it off. What could possibly go wrong? Instead of worrying about his homicidal chainsaw murdering tendencies I focused on the wave beneath us, which we now rode on majestically, side by side. Slowly and as inevitably as a high mountain glacier’s slide down a steep Himalaya valley an idea occurred to me. This wave, I couldn’t fail to recognise, was perfect in every way for that most highly prized manoeuvre of The Longboarder, i.e. The Hang Ten. This is where the surfer stylishly and elegantly dances forward onto the very nose of his board, places both his feet side by side with ten toes hanging over its edge, and leans back like a crooked flagpole in a stiff breeze, all the while artistically balancing his entire body on the three square inches of the nose of the board, hanging high and dry above the surface of the wave below it, and riding it in in immaculate, perfect and carefully groomed fashion. I had, hitherto, never managed to pull it off. Somewhere in the deep and dark cloudy and murky depths of my mind some primate simian ancestor banged two stones together over a bit of dry grass and bark, landed a spark on it, and blew on it fervently until the flame caught and the guttering and erratic flame of a cave-fire came on, the primeval antecedent of the light-globe moment of inspiration.

The idea blossomed in my mind with all the delicacy and tact of a fireworks cracker in a letter box.

‘Hey!’, I called out excitedly to Chief Switchfoot, half turning to look at him over my shoulder,’Watch this! I’m gonna do a Hang Ten!’

And, without waiting for a reply, I abandoned all reservation, reason and sanity, threw caution headlong to the wind, and, with the grace and agility of a rhino in a jacuzzi, shuffled forwards towards the front of my board. Another step. Another shuffle. One more little stretch of the foot ...

I leaned over towards the nose of the board, attained critical balancing position, adjusted and shifted my weight just so ...

And, as slowly and deliberately as the evening sun setting behind the mountains on a balmy and hazy summer’s day, the nose of the board disappeared under water, and with arms and legs spread out in five different directions, I went flying over the front of the board in what has since become known as The Starfish Manoeuvre, landing arse over tit headlong in the water with my board bucking and jumping up behind me like a bare-back bronc at the rodeo.

When I stuck my head back out again and wiped the seaweed from my face, I saw the shape of Chief Switchfoot, convulsing and contorting with manic helpless hysterical laughter, holding his gut and trying not to drown, while shaking his camera at me and shouting ‘I’ve got it! I’ve got it!’

It’ll be one of those great pics for the family album. Or maybe not.