Go Left

A humpback whale blew out its last breath, rolled over in the surf, gave up the ghost and died. The waves picked it up and washed it up on shore, where it lay stranded, half in and half out of the water. Word spread around the shark universe like a bushfire under water, and within minutes they turned up in their dozens, swirling around the bits of whale still in the water, attacking, biting, ripping off pieces of flesh, chewing; tails flogging the water, the sea boiling and heaving, the surf running red with the whale’s blood.

   It was a popular surf break. Immediately all beaches were closed ten kilometres north and south of the whale, while the local council scratched its head and set out working out a way to get rid of the carcass, and, hopefully, of the attendant sharks.

   Twelve hours later and twenty kilometres further south the Cork and I met in the dark below the moon. We are creatures of the night and only ever venture out under cover of darkness, preferably with assistance of the light of the moon, but without it if need be. The three-quarter waning moon was half hidden behind cloud cover. By the left-over moonlight, reflected on the low cloud banks, we surveyed the scene. The water in front of us moved from the right, the open ocean, to the left, into the bay, like a runaway freight train.

   ‘Hmmpf,’ said the Cork, by nature eloquent and talkative.

   ‘Yeah ... you would say that, wouldn’t you ...’ I replied.

   ‘There’s a good wave, but the sweep looks terrible,’ grumbled the Cork, one of life’s eternal optimists.

   ‘Nah, it’ll be all right,’ I replied, terminally committed to looking at the bright side of everything. [See that car about to run us over? Well, don’t worry about a thing. See those tyres? I know them, they’re really, really soft. Won’t hurt much at all.] ‘I’m more worried about that dead whale on that beach over there, surrounded by sharks. It’s not far from here. Not far enough.’

   ‘So what do you reckon we should do?’

   ‘I reckon we should wait till daylight,’ I answered, betraying hints of uncharacteristic common sense.

   ‘Nah, fuck that,’ growled the Cork, ‘if we do that we’ll get flooded by millions of people.’

   We stared at the swell. It was pumping. We both knew the Cork was right.

   ‘All right, then ...’ I said, turning over options in my head. ‘In that case I reckon we hog the rocks on the right and try and get that little rip that’s been running out along them. If we can get in there we can ride it out to the point and then go sideways from there.’

   ‘Really?’ The Cork looked dubious. ‘I was thinking we should go left, and paddle as wide as possible to get away from it.’

   ‘Nah, trust me, that rip is beautiful, I did it the other day, it worked a treat.’ I nodded emphatically for extra persuasive power. ‘True story.’

   ‘Oh, all right then ... I’ll follow you,’ said the Cork, much against his better judgement.

   Yeah. Good luck with that ... You know as soon as someone says “true story”they’re lying through their teeth, and when this is accompanied by “trust me” you can rest assured your life is hanging in the balance, and the best thing to do would be to drop everything and run for the hills.

   The Cork had not hitherto been aware of this. So he followed me as we sneaked out through the shallows. The sweep proved to be remarkably weak there, almost non-existent. We took heart at this, interpreting it as a good sign. We negotiated a few rocks here and there, waded through a waist-high hole, and almost made it out to where the ocean meets the first point.

   Almost.

   We waited for the set wave to break in front of us, timing it, we reassured ourselves, just perfectly, then launched ourselves out onto the rushing white water in front of us.

   And got picked up and thrown around hell west and crooked immediately.

   I rode over the top of the first wave, rolled underneath the second one, and got thrown sideways like a sack of shit by the third one, thundering down on my head. My board got ripped out from underneath me.

   I came up for air, my ears ringing from the impact. Felt the tug on my leg of the legrope, grappled madly with it underwater to control it.

   ‘Watch out! I’m just here! Hold your board!’ the Cork screamed from out of the darkness behind me. My board had narrowly missed improving his hairstyle considerably. Longboards don’t travel well in these conditions.

...I reeled my board in frantically, threw myself on top of it, and started paddling furiously. A stream of bubbling white water rushed past me and shoved me on top of a rock. I pushed off, hard, and felt and heard my fin rake over it. Crrrrrunch. Ouch. Time for Plan B. I turned my head sideways to that spot in the dark where I had last heard the Cork.

   ‘Go left! Go left!’ I yelled.

   ‘What?’

   ‘Go left! This isn’t working!’

   I bent forward and dug in deep, working my hands, pumping my arms, aiming, in well-timed delusion, for a gap in the breakers that I thought I could see. Crashed into a wall of white. Slam. Rolled over in front of another one. Pulled the board back underneath me. Got smashed in the head by another one. Took a deep breath of salt water, spat it out, coughing. Paddled hard. Paddled harder.

   Water stopped hitting me over the head with hammers.

   I stuck up my head to get my bearings. I blinked and did a double take. The rock where I had raked my fin and where we had, finally, better late than never, decided to go left, was now a good 500 metres in front of me. And, more alarmingly, was disappearing in the distance at a clipping rate.

   I redoubled my efforts. Off to my side, ahead of me, I saw the dark shape of the Cork doing battle. I blinked, and now he was behind me, one leg seemingly waving in the air. Maybe he was hoisting the White Flag of Surrender. He could be forgiven for doing so. We were beyond shouting distance, it was impossible to hear anything over the din of the raging water. I blinked again and he was gone. What?

   Realising that there was nothing I could do to help him, should he indeed need help, I resolved to try to get out of there. So I fixed my gaze on a lone light by the beach access, focussed on it, and started pulling myself towards it as hard as possible. I looked up again to gauge the distance covered, and saw to my consternation that it was now further away than before, in spite of all my manic paddling. I wasn’t just being dragged further away from our take-off point, but also further out to sea. This was not, potentially, an ideal situation to be in. While the water would be deeper and less inclined to try to break my head, it would also be substantially more likely to harbour some of those sharks from further up north, who could reasonably be expected to have taken a break from their whale feeding frenzy to drift casually down our way for a spot of light dessert to mix things up a bit. I looked up at the sky. Still pitch black, with here and there a strayed star, lost and lonely between the clouds. I looked over to the east. Nothing doing. Black as the night. As black as the inside of a bushpig’s arse. Fancy that.

   Eventually I found an eddy with a sideways runner of whitewash, tumbled through the shorebreak and fell out of the water onto the sand. I took a deep breath of relief. My guiding light of our beach access was hundreds and hundreds of metres away up the beach.

   I made my way through the night back towards where we had started, and before too long saw two black shapes coming towards me. The Cork, accompanied by our mate the Snake Catcher who had just turned up, was relieved to find me in one piece. It was mutual. We inspected our boards by braille in the night. My fin had taken on the serrated aspect of a steak knife, but was still in one piece and serviceable. The Cork’s fin however, hadn’t fared as well. He had gotten skulldragged over the same rocks that I had been raked over, and his fin had snapped.

   We stood in the dark, hung our heads and commiserated.

   ‘Well, that’s it for me,’ declared the Cork. ‘I’m out. There’s no point trying to do this, and my fin’s busted anyway.’ He looked gloomily down at the mangled remains of his brand new board.

   ‘Yes, fair enough. Bugger this for a joke.’ I agreed, solemnly.

   We turned to the Snake Catcher. He was standing in the night with his board under his arm. He looked slightly disappointed.

   ‘Yeah ...’ he started, and tugged his earlobe with his free hand. Behind him his son, the Pocket Rocket Grommet, had sat down in the sand with his board next to him, clearly announcing his opinion of the situation, and the course of action he intended to take.

   ‘Yeah ....’ the Snake Catcher said again. ‘I guess we better go. Unless ...’ He turned and looked at me. ‘Unless ... you wouldn’t wanna have another go, would you?’

   I looked at him. I looked at the curling, swirling, thundering, savage mess of white water. I figured it was running at close to ten knots. I looked to the east. Still black. I looked back at him and nodded.

   ‘Yeah. Let’s have another go’, I said, and picked up my board.

 

It was no different the second time around. We left before the sun came up.