The Mon Repos Flap

We’ve had a huge amount of sand deposited around our break for the last few months. It’s been building steadily, to the extent that, where a few months ago we were forced to glide on our boards over knee-deep water washing over nothing but rocks as far as the eye could see to make it to dry land at the very edge of the dunes and the bush, now there is a 100 metre wide stretch of solid sand separating those dunes from the water. We’re walking at an elevation of at least one-and-a-half metres higher than before, and it’s surreal.

     At the same time, further down the bay, a huge amount of erosion is undercutting the dunes over there, and there are buildings that are in danger of toppling over the edge. A panic-struck council has ordered a huge sandbagging operation, and where erstwhile there were glorious acres of golden sand carpeted in holiday makers, there is now a wall of sandbags reminiscent of World War I trenches, shoring up a steep escarpment covered in trailing roots and fallen trees. Bemused would-be holiday makers stare at the scene in bafflement, clutching their towels, sunscreen tubes and screaming children, and, finding the tarmac road behind the dunes unfavourable for sunbathing and relaxing, demand refunds from their holiday accomodation and return to their stressed-out city lives.

     In the surf, the huge amount of sand build-up has moved our favourite bank 150 metres further out to sea. The swell rolls in from the ocean, hits the newly deposited sandbank hard, and riffles off into oblivion with a vengeance. Drops have been steep and fast, walls have stood up overhead, and several heads have been smashed, most usually mine.

   After a particularly pleasing drop, followed by a comprehensive wipe-out, I was paddling back up to our take-off point. I have been focussing on my paddling technique for years in my drive to become the best surfer I can possibly be, and have listened attentively to advice freely and kindly meeted out by more adept people who, evidently, couldn’t bear to watch the spectacle any longer. So I reached out and plunged and pulled and drew and huffed and puffed and blew and heaved, and as my 9’6” longboard cut smoothly and in grand style through the water like a hot knife through butter, I was overtaken by twelve-year old girls on shortboards, arthritic grannies on li-los, and a three-year old toddler in blow-up duckie floaties. Their passage whipped up a whirlwind slipstream around my head, and as I pushed the hair out of my eyes I just managed to catch a glimpse of the back of a Labrador sitting sedately on a toboggan, water-skiing behind the three-year old, and leaving me for dead in its wake. My board rocked to and fro disturbingly, and I briefly considered getting seasick.

     With a final groan I pulled up beside Chief Switchfoot, riding the swell calmly.

     ‘Ah, you’re still alive?’ he said. ‘We thought you’d died.’

     ‘Hmmpff. No, I had a long ride,’ I pointed vaguely over my shoulder in the general direction of Alice Springs, ‘and it took me a while to get back up here.’

     ‘Ah yeah?’ The Chief wiggled his eyebrows doubtfully. ‘That’s about 100 metres. How long did that take ya?’

     ‘Uh ... uh,’ I inspected my nails carefully. They were black, torn and septic. I looked up. ‘About ... uuh ... about twelve minutes ... ‘

     ‘Twelve minutes?? Hahaaaa! You are joking!’The Chief’s face went purple with mirth. I looked at him sourly. A minor heart attack would come in handy right about now.

     ‘Well, yes, it’s easy for you to say that,’ I grumbled. This bloke is a freak of nature. I have often raced him, or, rather, merely tried to keep up with him. I will strain myself to breaking point, giving it everything I have, flat chap, and he will lie on his board casually, one arm folded underneath him, and, paddling with one arm and whistling to himself contentedly, will vanish over the horizon in a trail of black smoke and burned rubber. ‘You should have been an Olympic swimmer.’

     ‘Bullshit. You just can’t paddle for shit.’

     ‘Yeah ... well, I don’t understand why. I’m a good swimmer, and I’m a white water kayaker by trade.’ To illustrate the point I made broad sweeping kayak paddle movements through the air.

     Full On, sitting on the other side of the Chief, leaned forward attentively. She herself is a gun surfer, one of only very few shortboarders in our mob, and she has the uncanny ability to manoeuvre her tiny toothpick board squarely onto waves us mob on long boards can’t even see, let alone get onto. She’s also an ultra-long distance runner, holds a genuine world land speed record set on a scooter with a jet engine strapped to it on the bed of a salt lake out the back of woop woop, and is generally speaking all round as mad as a cut snake.

     ‘Oh, is that what you’re trying to do?’she said, and grinned.

     ‘Do what?’

     ‘You try to paddle like you’re holding a kayak paddle! That’s what it is!’

     ‘What what is?’

     ‘I’ve always thought there was something wrong with you!’ she said and burst out laughing. She was joined, excessively and needlessly so, by the Chief and by the Space Shuttle, sitting on the other side of her. I glared at them.

     ‘Yeah well ... huh,’ I muttered. ‘Should be bloody well all the same alonga me, ey. Gimme a paddle, mebbe. Bloody hell.’

     The Chief wiped the tears from his eyes. ‘You know what is is?’ he asked, twitching with enjoyment at someone else’s misfortune, always the best source of entertainment.

     ‘No, but I have a sinking feeling that you’re gonna tell me.’

     ‘What you’re doing,’ he said, nodding for emphasis and positive affirmation, ‘is the Mon Repos Flap.’

     Full On and the Space Shuttle, who is known far and wide for the way he takes off on big waves, i.e. with his board taking off vertically into orbit around Earth and himself submarining headfirst into the sand, turned and looked at him uncomprehendingly.

     ‘What?’ said Full On, a paragon of Great Manners and graduate of St Clitilda’s Finishing College For Fine Young Ladies.

     ‘You what?’ said the Space Shuttle, momentarily betraying his long-ago British origins.

     ‘Yeah, you know,’ said the Chief, ‘Mon Repos? Along over that way long way?’ He gestured randomly in the general direction of Cape York. ‘You never heard of it?’

     Full On and the Space Shuttle shake their heads in unison, grinning widely in anticipation. A mob of the rare and seldom seen Antarctic Farting Monkeys, who spend their short and brutal lives sniffing each other’s arses and pulling disgusted faces when they fart, would have had nothing on them.

     ‘Ah,’ said the Chief, baring his teeth, ‘it’s a turtle hatchery. You know how little baby turtles break out of their eggs ...’

     ‘Nnnggggrrrrchhh,’ snorted Full On.

     ‘... and then they crawl through the sand trying to get to the edge of the water ...’

     ‘Prrrffffttthh,’ concurred the Space Shuttle

     ‘... and they’ve got these tiny little arms and legs ...’

     ‘Rrrrrhhhhuhuhuh!!’

     ‘ghghghghghghnnngg!!’

     ‘flapping around like mad, a 100 miles an hour, without getting anywhere?’ the Chief grinned broadly, ‘well, that’s what he’s like when he’s paddling!’

     “Hahahahaaaaaaaaarrrrrrgggghhhh hoooogaaaaarrrrhh!!!’ Full On and the Space Shuttle lost it, rolled off their boards and disappeared under the water. ‘aaarrgh blubblubblub ...’

     I beheld the sideshow in front of me, feeling mightily put out. The Chief was apopleptic, Full On and the Space Shuttle were spitting out seawater and trying to breathe through their ears. ‘Well, I’m happy you think it’s funny,’ I said bitterly. ‘Look, there’s a wave, see yeez.’

     I turned around, stuck out my rubbery neck, pushed my shell back a little bit, and snapped my beak shut. I would show them all right. I struck out first with one flipper, then with the other, and, waggling my little pointy tail, paddled as hard as I could for a wave. I figured it would be all right as long as I didn’t end up on my back with my flippers in the air again. However, it was not to be. The Mon Repos Flap asserted itself in no uncertain terms, and sheepishly, to add to the zoological flavour of the day, I slid off the back of the shoulder and missed it.

     And inadvertently and unwillingly found myself in the Danger Zone, i.e. directly in the firing line of the Space Shuttle.

     Thinking I had disappeared behind a wall of rolling white water he had committed to the next wave along, and I now saw him four metres in front of me, straining and moaning and groaning with all his might, set on a course destined to land on top of me and put us both in hospital. I looked at his face, saw the white of his eyes bulging out like an overfilled hot air balloon, and did the only thing I could do. I paddled sideways furiously, into the wall of the breaking wave, and, as the wave crested high above me, preparing to pick me up in its momentum and smash me down hard on top of the Space Shuttle, I punctured the green wall just below the crest, grabbed my board by the edges, and rolled sideways into the wall, and, carried onwards by my momentum, tumbled half over and half through it to the other, safe side. In the sideways tumbleturn I felt the fins of my board slice hard across my foot, and I knew something had happened. I stuck my head up out of the water just in time to see the Space Shuttle, blissfully unaware of anything else than his wave, fly past me no more than half a metre to my side, and vanish into the distance.

     I turned my board over and examined the fins. Gratifyingly the leading edge of the middle fin still proudly held the ragged and serrated edge it had acquired one moonlit night when a sweep from hell had skulldragged me in five directions over a set of rocks, while breaking the fin of my mate the Cork, the only other person mad enough to be out that night.

     Next I stuck my foot out of the water. Blood was pissing out of it at a rate usually deemed highly appreciation-worthy by any shark within a vicinity of about 300 kms, and a flap of skin was doubling as a flag, proudly undulating in the breeze. Seemed it was a good day for flaps of all kinds.

     I limped out of the water and onto the beach. It was going to be great to get back into that big warm hole in the sand and to use my massive flippers to pile the sand all over the top of me again. I might give today a miss and be born again tomorrow. Or, just maybe, be hatched again.