The Barefoot And Baffled Blog

The old people used to say that the river went up and down faster than a hooker’s knickers.    They’d watch the storm clouds roll around in the sky, grab their deck chairs and stroll over to the banks of the river to watch the spectacle, with beer cans in their hand. True to form the river, fifteen metres below down a steep bank, would grow from a placid collection of pools of still water to a fat mass of brown water, swirling and foaming and thrashing just below the rocky edge they were sitting on. Only to drop back down again to its previous level within an hour, when the discharge from the storm, sometimes far upstream, had washed through, leaving it more or less exactly like it had been before.    They’d finish their beers and their chats, pack up their deckchairs, and amble casually back to their houses, content with an afternoon’s entertainment.    This time they ran for their lives. Deckchairs and beer cans alike were abandoned in the mad rush,...

  We study the conditions. We observe the weather patterns, analyse the swell, time the frequency, watch the wind, and, above all, monitor the tide like a cat stalking a particularly juicey mouse. If all else fails we sacrifice small furry animals to Huey, The God Of Surf And Violent Hangovers.    Here in our often-forgotten corner of northern WA the surf is unpredictable at best. Long flat spells in the dry season will be broken by cyclonic monsoon swell, and we’ll switch from knee-high wind-blown close-outs, our regular daily fare, to triple-overhead man-eating bone-crunching monsters at virtually no notice. It’s very much feast or famine.    As always there are the tricks of the trade, the bits of jealously guarded Local Knowledge, acquired over painfully long periods of trial and error, and divulged only at knife-point. Hogged with all the parochialism, narrowmindedness and petty avarice only True Localism can breed. If you don’t have five grandparents i...

  Lightning flashed across the sky. Black clouds were piled up like an avalanche of rocks waiting to crash on our heads, and rain streamed down our faces. It was coming down vertically. I stopped in mid-sentence and started counting under my breath.    one thousand, two thousand, three thousand ...    The age-old method of roughly calculating how far away the core of the thunderstorm is: count the “long seconds” between the lightning and the following thunder. Each second counted is considered to represent one kilometre. As a general rule of thumb, if it’s any closer than eight, get the hell out of wherever you are and take shelter.    four thousand, five thousand ...    As someone who takes people out bush for adventure activities for a living, this is a crucial concept, especially where water is concerned: any closer than eight kilometres to the storm lightning comes precariously close to where you are, and if you are in or on any k...