The Woebegone Wobbegong

Three of us met in the dark.

   ‘What’s it look like?’ said one, who had just gotten out of his car.

   ‘It’s pumping,’ said another one, who had gotten there five minutes earlier.

   ‘What, really?’ said a third one, incredulously.

   ‘No mate. It’s dead flat,’ replied the first one, with the smug wisdom of someone who got their first, spent five minutes peering into the darkness and had seen the square root of bugger-all.

   ‘All right boys, that’s it. We’re on!’ proclaimed the third one, rubbing his hands, presumably with glee.

It had been dead flat for two weeks. We had never seen such still, crystal clear water before. Beaches that were normally pounded into submission with back-breaking bone-crushing surf had turned into pleasant lilly-covered billabongs, with ducks bobbing up and down looking for things to eat. Small children and grandmothers lolled around on lilos, reading papers, eating icecream, and scoffing at razor sharp jagged rocks that had, in another lifetime, cut surfboards to ribbons. Although not, admittedly, at that time of the morning, a time so unadvanced that it really belonged to the night instead.

So we had settled on A Plan, a devious scheme to provide us with something to do in the absence of towers of carnivorous water to jump off.

We loaded our three boards onto the one of our cars, turned our backs on the desolate wasteland of the beach known as The Goose in local folklore, no one knows why, and wound our way around to the other side of the headland, the mighty bulk of ancient rock spewed out by volcanoes hundreds of millions of years ago. Known affectionately as The Grape, it jutted out into the ocean further than any other piece of land anywhere along the entire coast of our island, and was widely held to be the furthest point out on that side.

On the south side of The Grape lay a beach known as Shallows. It was well known for its great depth. Somewhere in an air-conditioned office some overpaid numbskull spends his working life coming up with stupid names like that.

The mighty bulk of the Grape stretched north from Shallows, an unbroken expanse of cliffs and sharp rocks, rising vertically from the ocean, until it mellowed out, dropped down and melted into a long low finger of scattered rock reef, partly submerged, known to us as The Gates Of Hell. Through The Gates and around the corner lay the first of our sheltered surf beaches in the bay, a small stretch of sand known as Ugly Duckling. Speculation had it that that fella in his office somewhere had named it after himself.

On any half-normal day, the ocean out the front of The Grape is a heaving, boiling, roiling mess, with ferocious currents tearing at the rocky base of the cliffs, and long-distance swells from across the mighty Pacific throwing themselves at it with uncontained violence. The mere mention of it habitually causes ocean-going people, such as ourselves, to shit in their dacks, throw three grains of salt over their left shoulder to ward off bad luck, and throw a horse shoe over their right shoulder to make sure the bad luck lands in someone else’s face, along with the iron horse shoe. This is why a small but reliable supply of horse shoes is an essential component of the kit and caboodle of any self-respecting surfer, along with wax, spare legropes and spray-on shark repellent. The latter is a little-known lotion the ingredients of which are kept carefully secret by the sole manufacturers and distributers, the Flat Earth, Astrology, and Sincere Politicians League of Australian Suckers, or FEASPLEAS for short. Everyone I know swears by it, and we apply it religiously three times a day.

Due to the unusually calm conditions though, the waters before The Mighty Grape were as calm as anywhere else, and The Plan that had ripened in our over-stimulated and under-used tiny brains was to paddle our surfboards from Shallows beach, out onto the open ocean, along the length of the cliff face, and around the Gates Of Hell back to our surfbeaches inside the bay.

It was a good plan, and we took great care to draw up our wills and say a teary farewell to our wives and children before we left our houses that morning.

We covered ourselves in shark repellent body lotion, slung snorkeling gear around our necks, and launched ourselves onto the flat water of Shallows. Our passage barely caused a ripple. Three seagulls, languidly and lacklustrely yawning in the pre-dawn gloom, looked up from the carcass of a dead surfer they were pecking away at, blinked at us twice, and continued their breakfast. We felt pretty sure they’d be able to find us, too.

The rocks and cliffs lining the point of Shallows dropped away off to our left hand side, and we paddled out onto the Pacific, secure in the knowledge that there was nothing between us and Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, a mere 9,568.95 km to the east. If we got blown off course we’d fetch up there sooner or later, no worries. We had packed a vegemite sandwich just in case, carefully tucked inside our wetsuit tops.

Out on the open ocean there was a bit more movement in the water, with slow languorous swell rising and falling rhythmically, like the deep and steady breathing of a sleeping giant. The ocean, breathing in and out, quietly and sleepily, and us, tiny pissants, crawling over its surface like vermin. Considering the huge islands made of thrown away plastic rubbish that float around in the bowels of the Pacific, the ocean could be forgiven for thinking of us as a pest. We crossed our fingers and hoped it wouldn’t wake up and notice us before we were finished.

We paddled onwards, keeping a good twenty metres or so between us and the cliff face. It was easy to see how an ocean breath a bit deeper than the others, say, on a particularly disturbing section of bad dream, or maybe during an unusually satisfying mid-sleep fart, could pick us up and smash us into those walls of rock at no notice. Every now and then we’d stop, and snorkel around. Leaving our boards to dag around behind us, we’d float on top of the water, and watch life under the surface. Around the base of the rocks, providing shelter and habitat, there were colonies of bream poking around, flitting fleetingly in and out of rocky crevasses. Lying flat facedown on the sand, as is their wont, we found stingrays. Coming back up out of the water we were just in time to see a tuna jump.

One of us drifted a bit too close to the rocks, and, when a larger-than-average roller turned up and bared its teeth, threatening to smash him into tiny bits against the rocks, had to scramble double speed to get out of there. Meanwhile, the third person in our party spotted three triangular fins and almost fell off his board in a fit of panic. They were dolphins. We pulled a bit closer together anyway.

Eventually the sun came up, rising slowly out of the water like a disc of molten gold. We fell quiet and sat on our boards, bobbing around as the first rays of the sun fell on the towering cliff face in front of us. It occurred to us that not many people would have had the honour of seeing the sun rise and cover the cliffs with first light, as seen from the ocean looking back at the land. Certainly not while drifting around on surfboards. There’s a well-known lookout on top of the cliffs, and in the past people have died falling off these rocks. Some of them on purpose, including a good friend of one of us. We commiserated with him as he talked about it, and reflected on the transience and fragility of life.

We made our way further along, and before we were aware of the time passed and distance crossed, we had gotten close to the Gates Of Hell. Here, where there are formations of low rocks lying close to the water, fishermen often come to try their luck, and all of us had, at some point or other in the last few surfless weeks, tried our hand at it, with varying degrees of success. Diving under the water now, for a last snorkel before rounding the cape of the Gates, we could see, first-hand, that they were sorely mistaken. Out in front of our favourite fishing spot, a place known locally as The Bar Stool, lay nothing but a barren desert of sand. Any fish hooked around there would have to be an accidental passer-by. A little bit further over though, closer to the slipstream of the current moving in and out of the bay, a vast multitude of fish were thronging in the water. I made a mental note to fish here instead, next time.

In addition to the silver bream meandering peacefully through the water there was a whole cloud of white pilchards dashing to and fro just below the surface, moving manically, sometimes breaching the waterline to briefly become airborne and land again; or, more appropriately, sea again. Below them was a veritable shoal of silver trevally, with their distinctive black boomerang-shaped tail, cruising along placidly. I wished I had a speargun, so I could wreak devastation and destruction upon the peaceful submarine scene, and take them home and have them for breakfast ... On the third level, dwelling on the bottom, lay, languidly stretched out and minding their own business, on the one side a stingray, nose firmly buried in the sand to suck up any and all invertebrate life forms hiding in there, and a brown flathead, wriggling his tail reflectively and frowning disapprovingly at my intrusion. I could see the wrinkles in his forehead.

Then something moved, a little bit off to the side. I caught it out of the corner of my eye, and drifted around for a better look.

A thin cloud of sand drifted up, no more than a wisp really. I looked closer.

There, two metres below me, nestled snugly in the sand, lay a green-and brown speckled wobbegong. The word wobbegong is of Aboriginal origin, and is thought to mean “shaggy beard”, on account of the drooping, moustache-like growths around their face. I froze and stayed stock-still. Though they are widely held to be harmless, they are a type of shark, and there are more than forty cases on record of attacks by them in Australian waters. Extremely flexible, they can bend their spine into a 360 degree circle and bite your hand if you try to grab them by the tail, as people have tried to do in the past. They are, in truth, the original yoga masters, and many of the ashrams and yoga studios scattered around the hinterland mountains of our alternative lifestyle-minded region have large pictures of them on their walls, accompanied by deep and insightful philosophical quotes such as “Master Wobbegong Will Bite Your Arse”. This is widely held to inspire spiritual stimulation, emotional liberation and sexual gratification.

Master Wobbegong stirred. I froze. He turned his head and fixed one glassy eye on me. I winked, for good measure, and just in case he got the joke. For one heartbeat-long moment he looked me square in the eye. Maybe he was sizing me up, or analysing the irises of my eyes for some deep-field genetic information beyond the grasp of us mere mortals, like an ocean-born naturopath trying to make a diagnosis by throwing a dart over his shoulder at a board, while wearing a blindfold.

Whatever the case may be, he clearly didn’t like what he saw, much like not a few people and other species before him, and in a great hurry he flapped his fins, and, using them as shovels, flung sand over the top of himself until he was all but invisible, with only the very tip of his head sticking out. Behold the mighty Wobbegong, ostrich of the ocean. If I can’t see you then you can’t see me.

I had no intention, or, indeed, no way of harming him. That wasn’t what I was there for. So I gave him a big thumbs up, just in case he was still looking, and turned around; kicked once, twice, three time heavily with my feet, and all of a sudden found myself in another world entirely.

Gone was the quiet, peaceful world of slowly stirring sand and the occasional waving seagrass, hiding bream, flathead and stingray. Gone were the clouds and shoals of trevally and pilchard. Here was the turbulence and roller-coaster movement of surf breaking over shallow ground, kicking up sand from the ocean floor and troubling the waters beyond recognition.

I stuck my head out and looked around.

Behind me a minor wave was announcing its intention to break on my head and smash it in half.

So without thinking about it, reacting purely out of instinct and habit, I pulled myself onto my board, paddled hard, and jumped to my feet, and rode that wave into the shore of Ugly Duckling beach. With my mask and snorkel firmly on my face, allowing me to breathe quite clearly, and not seeing very much at all in the bright glaring sunlight of the early morning. Don’t know how many people have ridden waves there wearing snorkeling masks.

The whole paddle from Shallows to Ugly Duckling clocked in at just under two kilometres, across the open ocean on surfboards. Not a bad effort.

The very next day, a few kilometres to the north, a dolphin washed up on a beach. Stone cold dead. Mauled to pieces by what, judging from the size and shape of the jaw marks on the carcass, could only have been a Great White, largest and deadliest of all sharks.