A 5-metre ground swell is rising, fuelled by an intense low hovering in the deep south. Willy Weather revs everyone up with 17-second period predictions and light offshores. It’s on. We meet at first light down by the boat ramp. I climb onto the boat – a happy spectator – while others saddle skis in wetsuits and bear the half-hour ride around the wind-worn coastline to the bombie, their fingers and faces stinging in the south-westerly that comes straight off the snowies. These guys aren’t pro’s, but along this isolated stretch of coast, ability comes second to balls.
Half a kilometre off shore the ocean is all-consuming. I watch as my buddy Joel is whipped into a set wave. The lip pitches over his head, until he is standing, somewhat awkwardly, in a wide, tall tube. He negotiates a few large bumps, and punches through a chandelier. At the final section, just as he’s about to get shot out of the heaving beast, his board catches on chop. He skids off and is swallowed. I search the churning white-water for his bobbing head or for his board. The seconds start to feel like minutes as my eyes dart around the impact zone. The wave has rolled on, dissolved into the deep water beyond the reef, and the next one looms. Nothing. Just swirling, fizzing water. Then way down the line I see him – his curly mop – and he’s grinning! The mad bastard.
It amazes me to think this guy has only been surfing for two years. I’ve been surfing since I was 10 years old, and on a wave, I’m probably a more capable surfer than he is. But out here, it’s a different story. I’m glued to the boat. It’s not only the thought of taking a beating from one of those monsters, it’s also the idea of bobbing around as he is now, a half-a-k’ from shore, like shark bait.
Joel comes from a long line of abalone divers, and his perspective of the great unknown is unique, to say the least. ‘When you grow up with your old-man diving everyday,’ he tells me back on the boat, ‘being stuck under water becomes a very normal thing.’ At 12 years old, when Joel went for his first real dive, there were no butterflies in the belly – it was always something he would do. He’s clocked a good thousand hours in the drink since then, and if nothing else, it’s a sure-fire way to learn how to handle a long hold down.
His surfing ability, he suggests, doesn’t really warrant him surfing this place. And as I look back into the undulating line-up, I realise how wild it is, him surfing these waves. This is a case of mentality overriding physical capability. It all comes down to fear or familiarity; to how comfortable you are in a particular environment.
Joel encourages me to have a go. ‘You’ve got the lung capacity to do it,’ he tells me, ‘everyone has.’ ‘You’ve got about a minute to a minute and half,’ he reckons, and the likelihood of being held down that long out here is slim.’ Joel’s lung capacity may be a little bigger than mine, considering what he does, but the real difference lies in the fact that I’ll panic… he’ll stay calm.
I consider his pitch, but the more I think about it the more I psyche myself out. I’m not the only one; another surfer, all geared up to tow next, steps on a soggy biscuit that’s been dropped on the floor of the boat. Now he has slippery biscuit foot, and is not feeling so confident.
As it happens, ol’ Biscuit Foot does slip, and cops the wipe out of his life. After four slabs on the head, he climbs back onto the boat ghost-faced and wide-eyed. He’s seriously rattled. But it’s not all bad, as several of the boys get spat into the channel one after the other from reeling barrels.
After a gusty, chap-lipped morning on the boat, it’s time to follow the curve of the headlands back to where we started. Everyone’s buzzing from a big dose of adrenaline. And as they reminisce about the waves they made and the beatings they took, I look over the side of the boat, at all that water gliding by. I imagine Joel down there on any given day, 30 kilos of abs slung around his neck: at home. And I wonder… if I’ll ever have the balls.
