Turbo Blast

The Art And Craft of catching waves is governed by practices so inscrutable and impenetrable to the uninitiated as to be akin to Black Magic. Novices such as myself, well and truly noviciated after several years of practising The Craft with little discernible progress, if any, devote every waking hour to the analysis of every perceivable, and, frequently, unperceivable, detail, approach, strategy and angle of the craft. These attempts at deciphering the unfathomable are then followed by commendable if doomed and ineffective efforts of translating formulated theory into successful practice. Occasionally lucky flukes serve to brighten the day and harden the obstinate will to persist in the folly, and they are invariably followed by setbacks the depressive nature of which is only matched by the magnitude and spectacularness of the mishaps, wipe-outs and stacks that they manifest themselves as.

   So, on this day I was bravely and futilely flapping my arms around and kicking my feet into the salt water while, with the inexorable certainty and inevitable catastrophic consequences of a melting glacier crashing into the waters of Antarctica, causing a three metre world-wide rise in sealevel and flooding and destruction of low-lying inhabited coastal areas, including 90% of the populated zone of Australia, impressively failing to catch any waves at all.

   The swell had finally come in, and a spell of winter flatness dictated by southern swell that by and large misses us was periodically brought to a halt. Waves were wrapping around our headland in a pleasing and satisfying fashion, and, for those lucky bastards with the know-how of doing these things, waves were being caught and ridden to the apparent great enjoyment of all involved.

   Myself I sat on my board and gently bobbed up and down, periodically ducking, weaving, and scrambling for the sandy ocean floor as better and more experienced surfers than me came flying wildly around the corner in total lack of control of any kind. Whoosh! Narrowly avoided a number one haircut top and sides. Zoom! Almost got decapitated. Flash boom crash bang! Three people smashed into each other and sank in a trail of bubbles, snot and blood, hands wrapped tightly around each other’s throats and fists flailing violently. In between all the mayhem, murder and massacre I had caught a few middlingly nice waves, and had paddled back up to my favourite take-off spot, a little way down from the first line of impact at the headland. Often waves will wrap around the first set of rocks, swell and rise up without quite breaking into a rideable formation, and then, as an afterthought, pick up a bit of speed, momentum and energy and obligingly rearrange themselves into a smooth surfable slope. My game plan, my Strategy For Successful Wave Catching on that day consisted of floating around there and waiting for something to turn up. It was a sound plan. In the mean time I studied my surrounding carefully.

   I try to learn something every day, about this maddeningly infuriatingly difficult pastime that is my main focus in life at this point in time. So, for instance, I paid close attention to the interaction between the swell rolling in from the open ocean, breaking in front of me, and its interplay with the rocks off to my right hand side, the extension of a long rock wall, a low cliff, that ran all the way from the first set of rocks onwards deep into the bay. Depending on swell direction, period and intensity the water set in motion by the breaking wave would not only move forwards past me, breaking into a catchable wave or not, but it would also move sideways towards the rockwall. There it would crash into the rocks, unsurprisingly, and then would bounce back off them again, causing a very localised counter-current, a movement of water away from the rockline and back into the main body of water, against it would then push and shove, causing a churning, rising and falling choppy motion where outward movement was alternated with inward suction. It had the potential of ruining a perfectly good wave through the combination of so many factors it made my head hurt just to think about it: the size of the wave coming up, the speed at which it was running, the force with which it smashed into the rocks, the distance from it to the wave before it and the wave behind it, the rising or falling of the tide and the speed and direction of the wind. And all these factors were subject to change at no notice. It’s one of those things that require instantaneous mental mathematical calculations of such a complexity that the world’s most powerful computer couldn’t execute it, and yet a human has the ability to absorb all that detail in the blink of an eye, make a judgement in accordance with it, and act on that judgement with, in some people’s cases, glorious wave rides as a result, and, in my case, headbutting sandbanks three metres under water as a result.

   Until my moment came.

   I was in the middle of a long and convoluted story about something that no one was paying any attention to, as is my wont, when a wave stood up in front of me without having the common human decency of announcing its imminent arrival half an hour in advance by bush telegraph, carrier pigeon and bullroarer, and so, in mid-oration, I snapped my mouth shut with an audibly clang, biting my tongue, breaking three teeth and dislocating my tonsils, spun around and paddled. I had just enough time for the magic Two Strokes. This is a technique invented, perfected and habitually flaunted to my great envy and abiding chagrin by a mate of ours known as The Reefshark. This bloke has been surfing since before he was born, and he can catch a wave by blinking his eyes two times and flapping his ears, displaying no obviously noticeable signs of any physical activity, and he’ll be off and away in a seemingly effortless show of fluid grace while the flies pile themselves into my wide open slack-jawed mouth. I have at times, through no conscious skill or perceptible ability, found myself accidentally at exactly the right time and place and have experienced the strange sensation of performing the same miracle myself. When this has happened I have usually had to go home, have a cold shower for half an hour, flog myself with barbed wire, walk barefoot over a ten metre trench of burning coals five times and have a quiet laydown in my best straightjacket to recover from the emotional upheaval.

   This time there was no time for any such luxuries, so I reacted driven by pure terror alone, paddled once, twice, jumped up without thinking or blinking, and, for a split second, hung in perfectly weightless balance on top of the crest of the wave, see-sawing, going neither forwards or backwards. I had just enough time to start thinking “shit, I’ve jumped too early”, and to expect to slide back down the rear of the wave, as happens so often, when, within the next heartbeat, I pitched forwards and fell board-first into the hole. I got to my feet in mid-air, and somehow or other, managed to stay on and hold on, and I slid down into the yawning chasm of the wave. I looked at the wall next to me and started smiling, incredulously, when the wave hit an underwater bump in the sandbank, a section that must be slightly more raised than the bits around it, and the side rose up higher on my right hand side.

   Then I got hit in the face.

   A curtain of water smashed into my face and turned the blue skies white, and, for a short moment, I couldn’t see a thing. Then I emerged on the other side of it, and stared down the wall of liquid green glass stretching out in front of me.

   Next thing I knew the water broke again, this time on my head, and I could feel it running down the back of my head and down my back. Unbelievably, my vision stayed clear, my board stayed firmly wedged into the side of the green wall of glass, and I sped onwards with white bubbly froth raining on me the whole time.

   I shook my head as if to wake myself up. I found it hard to believe it was happening, but I didn’t have time to stop and think about it. Because there, having come through one section of the bay, I launched into another section, and the side of the wave pitched up steeply, without warning, threatening to crest and roll and break forwards and swallow me and spit me out.

   This is usually where I get launched like a rocket and go into orbit around earth before faceplanting into the sandbank and making a round of appointments with a chiropractor.

   Not so this time.

   Without thinking about it, without even realising what I was doing, and without moving even the tiniest fraction of my body, I pushed down on my backfoot. To my astonishment the nose of my board rose up compliantly from the perilous depths towards which it was plummeting, and repositioned itself perfectly on the face of the wave. I blinked. I blinked again. The board was still sitting where it was supposed to be. Unable to believe my luck I held my breath, not wanting to disturb my precarious equilibrium there, and kept flying on along, faster and faster. Next thing I knew I must have hit another alteration in the underwater geography, because the slope of the wave now pitched backwards, and started to fill out, get fatter. Again I reacted without thinking about it, and this time, with no more physical movement than the rubbing of three braincell molecules together, I pushed forwards on my front foot. Again the board responded perfectly, and this time plunged back down again, aligning itself perfectly to the newly changed angle of the slope of the face, and picked up speed as it flew onwards with renewed vigour.

   I felt a grin of incredulity spread over my face, and, overwhelmed by the sheer joy and majesty of the experience, I leaned forward a bit, crouched down a bit lower for greater stability, and sank down into what is widely known as The Baboon Stance, i.e. head down and arse up.

   The moment took on an aura of perfection, as I aligned myself aquadynamically and aerodynamically with the flow and movement of the water that carried me, so that I became one with the wave, one part of the whole, one integral inalienable component of the rolling, moving, heaving water, flying along in perfect poise, a moment of eternal bliss captured in the blink of an eye.

   And then, in that exquisite moment in time and space, head pointed forwards like a greyhound smelling blood, arse pointed backwards like the tail of a big red kangaroo bounding into the desert sunset ... in that perfect moment in time and space, my bowels finally caught up with the rest of me, and I farted.

   A long, loud, protracted bean-fuelled death rattle of a fart, enough to exterminate thriving cockroach populations inside of nuclear fall-out shelters, enough to knock koalas for six and make them topple out of their trees in slow motion, hitting the ground like a sack of shit.

   And that fart came out with such power and intensity, at exactly the right time and place, that it roared and howled like a turbo blast, and, tripling my speed and moving power, it boosted my progress and pushed me on and on and on into the wild blue yonder, into territory never seen, heard of or explored.

   When it was all over and the wave finally ended, I fell off my board into the warm salty water. Sticking my head back out again and scrambling back onto my board, I noticed I had ended up in the middle of the shipping lane connecting Australia to New Caledonia and onwards to the wide Pacific. The bay from whence I had come was a distant black spot on the horizon.

   I turned around and started paddling back. It was going to be a long paddle.