The Barefoot And Baffled Blog

We meet in the morning and we paddle out. The surf is there, waiting for us, an eternal combination of exasperating challenge and generous but jealous lover. There is nothing that comes close to the salt water washing over your head, drenching you with the first rolling set you cop, chasing the cobwebs of sleep out of your mind and dragging you into the here and now without compromise.      We are the First People. We are here when the rest of the world is asleep. We strike out into the pitch-black night, floating out over water as dark as the sky, guided by starlight. When the moon is full and sitting high above our bay, we come out extra early, just for good measure, and snatch up magical hours well before dawn. The peace and quiet, the hush that lies over the ocean, is incomparable. It forges an invisible bond between us, the surfers, and the currents, swells and waves of the ocean. They pick us up and throw us around, like an neverending bareback bronc that chucks us down on the

  My mates and me have, over the long years, developed a predilection for surfing at night, in the dark. This curious and bizarre notion was born out of the twin desires to get away from a crowded day-time line-up with its attendant necessity of having to fight, hustle and hassle for every wave; and to step out of the ordinary of everyday humdrum life and our mundane existences by doing something different, something challenging, wild, unaccountable.      Some might say the appropriate term is “stupid”.      It started with surfing by the full moon. We scored magic rides over jet black rolling acres of water under a hard diamond moon, alone and unseen under the night sky. As we got more used to being out at night, we started pushing the envelope, because, well, that was the whole point to begin with. So little by little we surfed with increasingly less moon light, at more and more advanced stages of the waning moon, until, inevitably, we got to the stage we were at on this day.