Flat Out

It’s dark when I get to the beach, by myself. It’s a new beach, a new break, a new hang-out. A new challenge for me, as a aspiring, enthusiastic and talentless beginner surfer, to try my hand at and see if I can learn some new tricks. I leave my car in the deserted unfamiliar carpark and wind my way down to the beach through the dunes, the sand cold underneath my bare feet. I feel morally obliged to check the conditions before paddling out, because this is unknown territory to me, and I can’t just navigate blindly like I would at my home break. As it turned out I can’t really see anything, because, true to form and habit, it’s dark, still half an hour before sunrise, and the first faint glimmer of the dawning day on the horizon doesn’t really shed much light on the situation. peering into the middle distance I figure I can make out a bit of bubbling and frothing white water near the point, and that will do me. I turn around and head back to the carpark.

   Ten minutes of doing battle and wrestling with a recalcitrant wetsuit later I’m back and I walk down to the water’s edge where the sand and the air are always warmer, even in the middle of winter time. The seawater holds its temperature much longer and better than the land, and, as a result, now in the heart of the cold season the water is still really nice and warm. Especially in my brand new fancy fandangled wetsuit of reinforced concrete. It takes forever to squirm into and longer to worm out of, and once inside you’ve got about as much movement and flexibility as a stone statue with rigor mortis, but it’s bloody warm and cosy.

   I wade into the water, duck and weave around the submerged rocks in my way, and, launching myself onto my board, I strike out into the twilight, aiming for the point ahead of me. In the world of surfing there’s an infinite variety of waves that can be surfed, from beach breaks to reef breaks to river mouth breaks and a million others that I’ve never heard of and wouldn’t know what to do with if I found myself in them, but my long-standing personal favourite is the point break. I love the way the ocean lines itself up with the land, rips itself to pieces on the hard fingers of rock that the earth points into its face, and tears along one side unfolding in a beautiful regular and continuous wave. I like the feeling of having something to line myself up with, a point of reference, a handle on the mysterious unfathomable workings of the ocean.

   There’s no one else out here, and I draw a deep breath of fresh, briny air. Ahead of me the horizon is starting to light up, and the sky is being painted with all the brilliant, hard colours of a dry season sunrise: stark blue, cold orange, icy yellow, shot through with wisps of snowy white. Not a cloud for miles around. The wind whips around from behind me, and tickles around my collar. I shrug it off. Nothing can penetrate my bulletproof wetsuit, save a bazooka. Waves wash over me once, twice, three times, and I’m through the shorebreak, and am paddling alongside the low lying rockshelf of the point. In contrast to my usual point breaks, which are made of bulky, towering headlands, this one here is just a long low shallow plateau of rock that stretches out into the mighty ocean, fringed with flat, squirt-topped rocks that lie to its side.

   While expanding my comfort zone and extending my learning experience in my ongoing bid to, one day, advance to becoming a bottom-of-the-range mediocre surfer, is one part of my motivation for coming out here, to this desolate outpost of the land, there is also a more sinister reason. Back in our home break of Eagle Bay crowds have been exerting pressure, tempers have flared up again and fights have broken out in the line-up, more specifically with one of our crew. Therefore the notion has been aired to try and get some peace and quiet somewhere else, and that’s why I’m here. Some of the rest of the crew will be turning up before too long.

   Meanwhile I’m alone. I pull up where I reckon I can sit for a bit and have a stickybeak at the way the waves are working in this neck of the woods, and have a good look around. In contrast to our home break, which sits nestled cosily inside of a sheltered bay, this break here is facing the wild open ocean. There is absolutely nothing that stands between me and the roaring swell rolling in from across the Indian and Antarctic Oceans. As a matter of fact, this modest and humble piece of jagged rock that juts out like a spearhead into the water has got the often contested claim of being the absolute western-most point of Australia. Steep Point, much further south along the coast, has the official recognition as the extremity of the land here on this side of the country. However, there are those who insist that, on an exceptionally low tide, when the moon is full, Orion aligns with Venus, the dingoes come in from the back-country for their once-yearly corroboree, and witches dance around in the nude up to their knees in mud and up to their necks in gin, this unprepossessing rockshelf does in actual fact stick out just a bit further than Steep Point. No one really knows, and, more to the point, no one cares either.

   What is relevant though is the fact that, just two beaches down from here, is Periwinkle Beach, Shark Attack Capital of Australia. In the last five years something like sixty percent of all shark attacks in the country have taken place on that beach, and a couple have been fatal. People have been coming from far and away to give it as wide a berth as possible. And sitting out here, by myself, I can feel the nearness of the Mighty Ocean. The waves that roll in from the deep are big and tall and strong, and they rise up, stand and break in a way that is totally unlike the waves back home in the bay. When the sets come through, the water heaves hard against the submerged rock, and when it gets pushed towards the sky it metamorphoses from something that is soft and warm and salty and cuddly to a monster that has death and destruction in its eye. The colours are different too: right there in front of me a bomb come blasting through, and it curls up tall and steep, with solid walls of pale green and white, that, somehow, look much colder, harder, more vicious and uncompromising than the placid user-friendly waves of the bay. The slope it takes on is steep, with an overarching umbrella roof of boiling white that reaches high to the sky and then comes thundering down like an avalanche in the snow.

   I try to catch a few of these monsters on the shoulder, the way I like to, just outside of the critical line of the pocket, that fine and invisible line where, if you get stuck across it, you go over the falls and get swiped sideways into the washing machine down below. So I prefer to hang just a bit outside of it, line up a nice fat shoulder and jump on that. Not so today, here and now. For some reason the shoulder doesn’t break, even within inches of the critical line, and I float down the backside of the wave in frustration a fair few times. Clearly this is not happening, and there’s something I’m not doing right. These waves are big and powerful, so surely there’s got to be a way of getting on them. I sit back on my board and watch the way the water moves some more. There, I now notice, is a pool of concentrically outward-moving water, where the waves breaks on the rock and it’s energy refracts against its surface and dissipates, not towards the beach, but sideways, across its own trajectory. I nod knowingly to myself, cos there’s no one else out there, and exclaim ‘Eureka’ in a self-satisfied and smug way. I reckon I got it. So I sneak further in towards the rocks, and position myself just inside of the edge of that half-circle of concentrically moving water. Too far inside and I get my head blown off. Too far outside and I won’t get on.

   I line up the next bomb coming through in front of me, all seemingly gnarly green ice, and calculate where I think it’s going to land, to come home to roost. I start paddling, quickly and strongly, and nudge myself just a little bit closer inside of that Circle Of Doom, paddle harder again, and sure enough, the wave breaks on my head with all the power of a hundred days of running away from the wind across the open ocean, and as it engulfs me I jump up, blindly, foam in my eyes, my mouth, my hair, my ears, and I drop down in front of the wave, cut right and move smoothly from the white into the green. Hah! It worked!

   And as soon as I get to my feet I feel the wind. The wind that had hitherto been a mild niggling around the back of my collar, now hits me in the face with full force, like a blast from a cold-air turbine, and it whistles and whooshes past my face, making my cheeks tingle and my eyes water. I crouch down so I don’t get blown backwards off the wave, and that icy wind streams around my forehead, my nose, my mouth, and it digs deep down into the pockets of its mad-scientist’s lab coat, digs out a hacksaw, and with lightning speed slices off my ears and throws them up to the terns wheeling overhead. They snavel them up into their hooked beaks, flap their boomerang-shaped wings, and veer back up into the stark blue freezing sky, satisfied at having secured prey.

   Earless I put my head down between my knees to kiss my arse goodbye, and I ride that wave out, carving up and down, and cutting back into the white occasionally. When the wall next to me starts to crumble and break, and the prospect of getting stuck in the shorebreak rears up its ugly head in front of me, I do something I’ve often see other people do but have never actually done myself before: I race to the top of the wave, punch through the crest, turn right more or less half in the air, and slide down the back of the wave. Just in time too, because as I turn to look the wall closes out on itself and disintegrates into the shorebreak. Good move, I reckon. I want to stay out here a bit longer, on the happy side of the shorebreak, out in the open, where there’s going to be more waves coming my way.

   I look around me. Behind me, windswept dunes of cold sand. In front of me, the borderline of the ocean, the final frontier. Above me a murder of terns fighting over my ears. All around me in the water, no one else but me.

   What a glorious day.