Crunch Punch

One of our mates is known as The Reefshark, for his uncanny ability to catch giant waves on razorsharp reefs in remote exotic locations and return alive to tell the tale, more or less in one piece, without leaving more than a few square feet of skin on the coral for future generations of cuttlefish to feed on. In our own home playground, a endlessly rolling lush and luscious pointbreak with a soft sandy bottom, he is renowned far and wide for being able to sneak his way onto the most ferocious-looking cycone engendered waves with three rows of shark-style teeth that glare at you with contempt as they prepare to swallow you alive, chew you up and spit you out. He will sit there, calmly bobbing up and down on rising and falling mountains of black, murky and deep salt water, and will casually appear to be looking at everything but the waves approaching with intent to kill. Then, as if by afterthought, he will casually cast one look in their direction, slowly turn around, glance at the roaring wave as if it was a passing curiosity arousing mild but unfocussed interest, and, while everyone else around him variously screams for their mums, sinks, drowns, or, in my case, shits themselves, he will unhurriedly pull one arm through the water, as in slow motion, followed by a lazy summer-Sunday-afternoon stroke by the other arm, and all of a sudden, as if by black magic, he is on the wave, is standing up and is steering that mad wild thing straight into the deep dark yonder. He will slouch casually on his board and with a roof of salt water weighing a tonne above his head threatening to crash down, crush his spine and obliterate him, he will pick his nose, clean his ears out, file his fingernails and catch up on a bit of light reading while he flies a hundred miles an hour away into the unfathomable distance. With a broad cheesy grin on his face, from ear to ear.

   He is, mildly put, a freak of nature.

   In my quest and burning desire to learn how to surf a bit more betterer and more properer I have been watching him like a hawk for years, and have been pestering him for The Secret Of Catching The Wave With Two Arm Strokes at every opporunity. Being by nature a kind-hearted and generous person he has painstakingly explained in careful detail exactly how to go about it and how to do it, and, I myself, one of nature’s natural learners, have sucked up everything he has said, hanging on his every word in rapt devotion, and have comprehensively failed to ever even come close to the trick. Such is life.

   By way of being one of life’s great tragedies this mate of ours, The Mighty Reefshark, is leaving our shores. He has, inexplicably, had a gutful of working twenty-five hours a day eight days a week, and has decided to go and do something else. Can’t hold it against him. So we got together and had a barbie with him, and hung out and shot the breeze and had a great time. We sat and stood around high above the waves of our stomping ground, ate beer and drank meat, and watched the sun go down in a million different shades of orange. It struck us that it was unnatural to see the sun’s colour display over the wrong side of the ocean, in the west rather than the east, where we normally see it, and so we resolved to set that wrong aright.

   Therefore the next day we turned up in the dark, as is our wont. Being borderline allergic to daylight and, more particularly, to the crowds that inevitably come with it, we do most of our surfing in the dark of night, in the armpit of the morning, in the yawing tonsils of dawn. Checking out the conditions before leaping in headfirst we found that our nemesis, The Great South Wind, had turned up for a game of push-and-shove. It’s a bad omen, heralding doom and disaster, also known as The Cold Time. I had happily and blissfully surfed without a wetsuit since the start of summer, four months ago, and had really enjoyed the increased freedom of movement that came with the absence of a neoprene coccoon, but faced with the icecold needles of the wind I found myself with no other choice than to put on something to keep me from freezing to death. Reluctantly I squeezed inside of a sleeveless top, and we headed down to the water, four of us: our mate The Reefshark, The Snake Catcher, The Pocket Rocket Grommet and myself, Baboon. The sky overhead was as black as the inside of the arse of an esspresso machine, speckled through with all the billion stars of the Milky Way, high above us, and decorated with a tiny sliver of left-over moon, providing just enough light to remind us that there was no light. The ocean ahead was dark and mysterious, sloshing to and fro alluringly, with here and there a stray wave langorously inviting us to come over and share some happy-time.

   We looked to our right. There, through a gap between two rock formations, lay a fabled unknown territory known as Bulli’s, short for Bullshit, so called because the narrow beach and its attendent break are both short, sharp, shocking, sheer, shore-bound and sure to knock your brains out. Normally the preserve of shortboarders with booties and a deathwish, it was not a place we ever went. I’d gone out onto the water through there only once before, blithely and idiotically following a far more experienced and better equipped mate, and was at the time very proud of having survived it to tell the tale, having taken shameless advantage of an unscheduled and unauthorised lull in the normal proceedings of bone crushing and skull smashing wave action that is the normal state of affairs there, and had jumped in and paddled out at the speed of light before the ocean had had time to spot me there and kill me. We looked down the gap. We agreed that there seemed to be a lot of sand. We concurred that it looked inviting, although in truth we couldn’t actually see more than two meters in front of us. We scratched chins, tugged earlobes, pulled noses and cleared throats, shuffled feet once or twice, and then decided that today would be a good day to try paddling out through Bulli’s, why not indeed. After all, with a bit of luck The Reefshark might still manage to kill himself right in the nick of time before finishing up work.

   We ambled through the gap, enjoyed the luxurious amount of sand that had been deposited there recently, waded out into the shallows and with a push, heave, pull, jump and paddle we struck out and through the breakers.

   We made it through easily enough, and found ourselves in the lightless shiny water of the night sea. A bit of hurried discussion highlighted the expediency of steering away from a large, pointy and especially sharp looking black rock that was only just sticking out from underneath the surface and could only be seen if you squinted with your eyes three-quarters shut, went cock-eyed, stared pointedly in the opposite direction and then sneakily looked at it from out of the corner of your ears. Ah yes, that thing there. Stay away.

   We paddled around it, rounded the first point where the waves break into our playground, and floated out onto the wide open bay.

   The ocean stretched out around us in all its magnificence, unscrutinable, dark, swaying gently, swooshing and whispering, and, especially, looking dead flat. No wave within cooee. We sat up on our boards to assess the situation and wait for a wave to have the decency to turn up and provide us with a reason for existence. Cold existential dread manifested itself, accompanied by inescapable anguish at the unbearable lightness of being. What if there were no waves? What if this whole existence here on earth was perfectly pointless and fruitless? What if there was no such thing as a Dog, Dyslexic Creator Of The Universe And Caretaker And Micro-Manager Of All Things? What if it was all a conspiracy by Nasa, set up to sell more Coca-Cola? What if, more to the point and slightly more urgent, the south wind would freeze my nuts into two rock-hard raisins never to be defrosted again? I shivered violently. The South Wind hit us straight between the eyes and let us know, in no uncertain terms, that as far as he was concerned and if he had any say in the matter summer was well and truly over and anyone refusing to believe it, like me, would very soon be the recipient of the Darwin Award For Natural Selection, for having the good grace and common decency of removing their idiotic selves from humanity’s gene pool. It was, no bones about it, time for The Cold Crunch.

   And crunch I did. Hypothermia set in swiftly, manifesting itself in uncontrollable shaking and shivering, the speedy onset of the umbles – mumbling, fumbling, stumbling, grumbling, tumbling – and an alarming loss of gross and fine motorskills, never at a particularly impressive level at the best of times. In an attempt to stave off early-onset rigor mortis I started paddling around in circles, while the others sat on their boards in a perfectly relaxed fashion and shot the breeze. By contrast the breeze was shooting me.

   A wave turned up and, of course, in one lazy unhurried slow motion move of otherwordly grace, perfection and envy, The Reefshark worked his magic, pulled onto it and whoosh! vamoosed into the middle distance, all poise and balance. When the next one presented itself I turned and paddled hard, asthmatically and ineffectually, and pulled into the black hole. Acting on well-honed and sharpened instinct gained from long hard years of being bashed over the head and held under by the ocean’s washing machine service – boardies washed, face ironed, ribs pressed, nose starched, testicles blowdried and arsehole bleached – I jumped up in one smooth, fluid movement with all the grace of a koala falling out of a gumtree after being hit in the back of the head by a boomerang that didn’t know it was supposed to return and anyway it didn’t care and couldn’t be arsed. And fell off immediately, so cold and frozen stiff it was impossible to stand up, bend knees, flex elbows or flap hands. A lump of cold meat into the otherwise warm and pleasant water of the mighty Pacific.

   I stuck up my head and snorted. ‘Hmmmpff.’ That had gone exceedingly well. Just what I had planned.

   Meanwhile back at the farm some of the others were still sitting where I had tried to take off from, and laboriously I dragged myself back up there through the water. I could make out the square looking lump of what passed for the head of the Snake Catcher, lined out in front of me against the backdrop of the stars, and made a beeline for that. However, before I could get there the lump moved, and a blood-curdling shriek emanated from it.

   ‘Aaaaaaarrrrgggghhhhhhh!’

   And as I watched the lump rolled over and disappeared into the black water, which instantly started boiling, writhing and heaving, as if something massive under the water was having a particularly spectacular heart attack. I could hear the sound of violent splashing and muffled thumping, accompanied by cursing, swearing, shouting and the occasional cry of ‘mummy help’. Thoroughly alarmed I shook off my hypothermia-induced lethargy and raced over to the scene of the crime, or, potentially, the epileptic fit, to provide such assistance as could be provided with limbs for which bending and moving were distant memories from times immemorial. However, before I got there the mad flailing and thrashing stopped, and an eerie silence descended upon the rolling black water. Then a head apeared out of the water, vaguely lump shaped.

   ‘What was all that about?’ I said through my nose, since my teeth were frozen together.

   ‘Ah yeah. Hummpf.’ said the Snake Catcher, and shook the water out of his ears. ‘Oh, I thought there was a shark in the water then.’

   Bad news. Sharks are not invited here. It’s everyone’s worst nightmare, and the last thing you want to see coming at you through the unscrutinable ink-black water; or rather, in the dark, not see it while it’s coming at you.

   ‘What? You’re kidding! Where?’ I said, worried now, and looked around paranoidly.

   ‘Well, there was this big black shape that was coming right at me ...’ said the Snake Catcher.

   ‘Fucking hell!’ I exclaimed, appreciative of the drama of the narrative and, more to the point, of the fact that apparently the shark was gone, for now.

   ‘Yeah, too right ... It scared the shit out of me’ snorted the Snake Catcher, and blew snot out of his left ear.

   ‘So what’d you do?’ This was shaping up to be a serious matter. Maybe we should consider getting out of the water, or at least pull our feet up a bit higher.

   ‘I punched it!’ proclaimed the Snake Catcher proudly. Ever since an Australian pro-surfer from this area famously punched a Great White that was coming for him during a surfing contest in South Africa and successfully fought it off while the entire world was watching it on live-to-air TV, throwing a good punch has been everyone’s go-to default defence against shark attacks, right around the country. There is an amazing, startling and slightly embarrassing amount of dolphins, tuna, Spanish mackerel and loggerhead turtles walking around with black eyes and broken noses as a testimony to our national bravery in the face of predatory danger, and our lack of expertise in the area of marine species identification.

   ‘Did you? Holy shit! Good on you mate.’ I was suitably impressed. Clearly a good deed well done. ‘So, did you get it?’

   ‘Yes, I did,’said the Snake Catcher. Then, looking slightly shifty, he added sheepishly, ‘it’s just that ...’

   ‘Yes?’

‘It was actually a clump of seaweed.’

   Right.

   We might have to call him The Seaweed Puncher now.