The Barefoot And Baffled Blog

  Our town of Eagle Bay in the southwest corner of WA can get pretty crowded with blow-ins from the big city up north, so we, in our desperate drive to be able to surf uncrowded waves, have cultivated the art of surfing at night.    Preferably by the light of the moon.   The moon comes up about 45 minutes later every day, so that a half moon, a gibbous moon, appears around lunch time and stays in the night sky for the first part of the night, setting around midnight, leaving the second half of the night moonless and dark. The moon times shift through the cycle until eventually the full moon comes up when the sun goes down. Therefore, by the same token, the moon goes down when the sun comes up the next day. If you time it right you get an abundant amount of light between the moon and the stars, and when the surf is cranking it is pure magic.    If you time it wrong you don’t.    Not satisfied with merely surfing by moonlight, we thought we’...

We staggered out of the surf, frozen near-solid, clutching our boards under stiff arms. As we walked cross the wet sand flats of the low tide a group of three people passed down the beach in front of us, heading the other way. What we had initially taken for boards turned out to be flattened cardboard from boxes they were clutching under their arms. They also appeared to be carrying items implying an intention to party, like bottles of booze. So, not surfers then.    When we made it back to the car park the conversation turned to the enigmatic beach walkers. One of our mates had talked to them. It turned out they were heading down to have a fire on the beach, hence the cardboard. When he told them that wasn’t allowed on this particular stretch of beach, owing to its high visitation and useage, and the issues associated with, for instance, kids walking barefoot over abandoned smouldering coals and getting third degree burns, as has happened in the past, they shrugged it off, ...