The Barefoot And Baffled Blog

We have had a phenomenal amount of sand build up over the past year or so. With the usual ebb and flow of summer erosion and winter deposit we received a huge amount of sand around the point, and when winter came and went it just stayed there and got bigger and fatter. This is ironic, as not very far down the coast other beaches are battling with huge erosion issues, and buildings are about to topple into the surf.    Meanwhile, our point is almost silted up to the extent that, on a low tide, we can just about walk out all the way to First Rock. This does two things. For one, it makes it a lot easier to paddle out when it’s pumping, since all you’ve got to do is wade out till you’re knee deep, and then paddle hard for two seconds between sets. For another though, it makes the wave that breaks at the point lightning fast and borderline lethal. Especially at the dead low tide. Where once we hugged the rock and got up close and personal with it, using its sucking down-draught t...

  ‘Can you please take your mask off?’      I’m sitting leisurely stretched out on a bench in the afternoon sunshine when this voice comes drifting down from above me. I’m in town getting new tyres for my car, and have got time to waste, so I’m enjoying some rare downtime. Having wandered in and out of a few shops, without stealing hardly very much at all, I’m wearing the regulation Covid-mask required now for entering premises. In spite of the big signs on all the doors and shopfront windows, politely requesting all customers to be considerate, do the right thing and cover their faces, when lining up in the post office, of all places, I hadn’t failed to notice that at least one in every four or five people were not wearing a mask. Judging from the way they were greeted casually by their first names by the staff behind the counter, they appeared to be locals.      Beware the local yokel, because they will always be above the law. Tadati...

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 chu...

  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 ...

     The humble legrope ties us to our board, keeps us from losing it, and provides us with a buoyancy aid when we’re being held down by every wave in a cyclone set. I’ve been in situations where I certainly came close to drowning and may well have if it hadn’t been for the ready access to my board guaranteed by my legrope, and when it was all I could do to hang on for dear life while triple overheads smashed down on my head, with no more than split seconds for a breather between sets. Without that legrope I would have been in serious trouble, and well and truly up shit creek.      Fine-tuned over many years, the legrope evolved from a bit of old rope strung to a sock for elasticity and tied to a hole drilled into the fixed single fin of a 1960s log, to the high performance 21 st century combo of velcro cuff, titanium swivel, polyurethane leash you can bungy jump with, and ingenious soft-fabric rail saver that will prevent our fibreglass tails ...

We’ve had a huge amount of sand deposited around our break for the last few months. It’s been building steadily, to the extent that, where a few months ago we were forced to glide on our boards over knee-deep water washing over nothing but rocks as far as the eye could see to make it to dry land at the very edge of the dunes and the bush, now there is a 100 metre wide stretch of solid sand separating those dunes from the water. We’re walking at an elevation of at least one-and-a-half metres higher than before, and it’s surreal.      At the same time, further down the bay, a huge amount of erosion is undercutting the dunes over there, and there are buildings that are in danger of toppling over the edge. A panic-struck council has ordered a huge sandbagging operation, and where erstwhile there were glorious acres of golden sand carpeted in holiday makers, there is now a wall of sandbags reminiscent of World War I trenches, shoring up a steep escarpment covered in tra...