Colin MacLeod drags himself up the rocks onto the remote beach on the Nullarbor coast. He collapses into the sand, and he starts to cry. There is no one within two days’ drive to comfort him. He is alone and almost ready to give up on life and surfing, as intertwined as the two are for him.
At 34 years old, Col has given everything to surfing, and surfing is no longer giving anything back. This last session proved it. He’d hurled himself over the ledge of a wave he’d spent years trying to find, only to hit the reef, collide with his board, fall on take-offs, and get hammered by the lip. Adding to his terror and frustration was the sight of a giant stingray floating through the lineup with its wing bitten off.
Trying to come in over the reef, Col deliberately hurled himself face-first into the limestone. For so long, surfing had been his salvation – his answer to work problems, heartbreaks, and family struggles – but now it was just another addition to those frustrations.
“I remember in that moment thinking, ‘whatever, just brain me’. Just everything I had been going through: the difficulty of trying to fit in, finding this thing I thought was the answer, but hitting my limits with it. It was super emotional, man. I realised, I’m not f***ing good enough. I just wondered what the point of all this suffering was,” he says.
“I packed the car and drove all the way to Perth. The whole way, I was thinking about surfing and what I loved about it. It was the progression. I needed progression, to get better at something and keep learning. And I realised I had reached my limit as a surfer. I thought to myself, I need to find something else to do, or I’m going to die.”
Col had two days on the road to think about what that ‘something else’ might be. He cast his mind back over his life, it finally settling in 2012. New Zealand. He was working on an oil refinery and living in a little bungalow in front of the inlet at Ruakaka Beach.
He remembered the hours he spent after his 12-hour shifts, whittling down a piece of paulownia timber to create something he could ride on the peaky beach breaks out front. It occupied his mind and helped settle the freneticism of his ADHD. There was a simple joy in hand-shaping something he could use to harness the ocean’s energy. He recalled the primal ecstasy he felt too, when he used it for the first time in solid cyclone waves at a remote Maori reservation, usually off-limits to Pakeha, or foreigners.
“It was pretty solid, probably about five feet, with lots of kelp, and the water was dark and brown after the rain. Pretty spooky. It was cool being on the bod, not even having fins, and getting hung up in the kelp. Like scooping into these real dark barrels, just gliding over the kelp, getting these crazy visions,” he says.
“It’s all vibrational. Waves, swell, sets: it’s all vibrational energy. Breaking waves are a physical manifestation of energy vibrating and correlating into wavelengths. As humans, we’re harnessing that. The same chemicals that reward behaviour that helps us survive – like the euphoria of spearing a fish – you access those chemicals by riding a wave and transferring energy.
“Bodysurfing is definitely spiritual in a way. Surfing is too, but with bodysurfing, it’s amplified. The board, in a way, is a barrier, a medium between you and the ocean’s energy. With bodysurfing, that’s completely removed. It’s just a pure, naked thrill.”
Back in Perth, Colin picked up a labouring job and moved into a beachside shack in City Beach with a few mates. Bodysurfing was the perfect way to extract maximal pleasure from the crappy beach breaks out front. After a day’s labouring in the searing, WA sun, Colin would head to the beach and hurl himself into little one-foot closeouts beside a local groyne.
Whilst satisfying his craving for self-improvement, bodysurfing also fuelled Col’s desire for recognition. He figured all he had to do to become the best bodysurfer in Western Australia was move up north and ride one eight-foot tube. On a whim, he committed himself to the mission, relocating to a small, coastal-outback town built around the fishing industry and a heavy rock-ledge-cum-point break, which he declines to name out of respect for the local crew. The wave was heavily localised, and many of the town’s tight-knit, conservative crew questioned what the f*** Colin was doing out there on a piece of wood.
“There were some crew who didn’t like it. But I try to treat everyone with respect. I had a few people get a bit eggy or say some weird things, trying to make me feel bad for being there. But I don’t buy it. I decided pretty early on to give myself a code of ethics. ‘Kill them with kindness’, was one. And the other was to be undeniable. There wasn’t a day where I didn’t go out. I never shied away from a swell,” he says.
“I’m never going to pull back if a local calls me into a set wave, even if I know it’s a f***ed one. If you don’t go, you don’t get another chance. I respect who the locals are. Even if some of the guys in town don’t feel I do – I do.”
Soon enough, Col began to find his place in the lineup. He realised that as a bodysurfer, he could modify his approach and take off right over the ankle-deep barnacle-encrusted suck rock. He began to earn respect and credibility from other surfers but reminded himself that this was purely something for him.
“I’d be lying if I said it didn’t gas me up a bit being the only one out there at a slab where there are a bunch of dudes on boards. I kind of get a little smirk on my face when I get a crazy one, and people are like, ‘What the f***?’” he says.
“But the great thing about bodysurfing is that it’s nice also to not really be measuring myself against other people. Of course, I do find myself doing it from time to time; it’s hard not to with social media and stuff. But I check myself pretty regularly. Just remind myself that, yeah, it’s my thing.”
Always determined to progress, Col began to think about where he could take his bodysurfing next. After a conversation with a local board shaper, he became enamoured with the idea of heading to Hawaii. Western Australia’s northwest was the perfect training ground, and the shaper suggested Col had proven himself to be ready.
Col shaped himself his second hand-plane, this one specifically for Pipeline. It was low volume, with a big concave for lots of hold. He had underground fin craftsmen, Justin Kalisch, foil him up a custom fin, and the shaper who suggested the pilgrimage glassed it on for him. Col arrived in January 2023 with $860 USD in his pocket. In keeping with his budget and low-key approach, he found digs in an old military tent on a farm. It was walking distance from Pipe, and Col helped cover his rent by working in the orchard.
“I had f**k-all money. I just walked to Pipe every day, rode a pushbike to and from Foodland, and got a big plate of fish and rice every day from the food carts,” he says.
“The first day at Pipe, I hung out at the lifeguard tower. I was talking to a few lifeguards about it. I wanted to show my respect and also not have them think I was just some kook they would have to save. There was this guy, George Waddington, who bodysurfed a bit.
“They were filming some TV show at Pipe that day, doing mock rescues with heaps of Jet Skis running through the lineup. George told me they were taking a break in filming for 40 minutes, and we swam out together. It was kind of junky, like four feet, onshore. Nothing special, but it was cool to jump in the water with him and swim out there in the rip between Pipe and Ehukai Beach Park.”
For the remainder of the trip, Col focused solely on Pipeline. He sat deep and ingratiated himself with the pack. Unlike in Western Australia, locals were curious and encouraging of his chosen mode of wave-riding. They even welcomed him to the top of the pack, something that would never happen to a first-time boardrider, he says.
“I thought I was gonna get told to get back on the shoulder, but people were actually really generous. Some of them were even frothing for me. Mark Healey was like, ‘Oh, dude, you’re out here on a handplane? That’s pretty sick,’” he says.
On January 20, Colin woke up in the dark and walked down to the beach. A thick, northwest swell was thumping onto the reef. The sun rose into clear blue skies and light offshore trades.
Just a few days before, Col had scooped into a good wave at Aints (between Backdoor and Off the Wall) and couldn’t help but wonder if any photographers had captured it. But as he donned his fins on the beach, he reminded himself why he was here. He was here to surf, not get photos. It was vital he focus only on his surfing and the opportunities the ocean presented him. Midway through the session, one of those opportunities arrived. Col was sitting a little in from the pack when a thick, set wave slipped under everyone.
“I scooped into it, made the drop. And it was a nice drop too. I didn’t disconnect from the face but stayed connected the whole way. I scooped up, and I remember looking up and just seeing the most perfect, huge, crystal-clear tube. I could see the reef and everything. I didn’t see Brent Bielmann and his water housing at the end of the wave; I had no idea. I got smoked. I didn’t make it out. I just swam back out and kept surfing.”
That wave could have easily receded into the hinterland of Col’s memory, only resurfacing as a defining episode during quiet moments of reflection; fleeting validation for a life dedicated to surfing. But it didn’t. Later that night, Colin’s mate, West Australian big-wave charger Owen Schultz, introduced him to Anthony Walsh. Walshy showed Col an Instagram story from revered North Shore photographer Brent Bielmann.
“He goes, ‘I think this is you. That’s sick.’ And he agreed to link us up to see if I could get a hold of it. If there was ever a f***ing sign that the universe was showing me a little bit of truth, that was it, just an hour after I decided to let things come,” he says.
Col and Brent agreed on a fee they were both happy with. After his trip, Colin went straight back to the mines and slogged away for two weeks, sending his first pay-check back to Hawaii in exchange for a clip and sequence of the wave.
“Seeing the image in all its glory really floored me. A few days after that wave, I had bumped into Brent’s uncle, Brian, who said to me ‘that’s the best bodysurfing shot I’ve ever seen’. To get that kind of feedback and accolade from someone who’s been looking at surf imagery for that many years…” he says.
“I mean, I wasn’t seeking validation, but I guess it is part of what soothes my soul. We all want to know what we’re doing is real and right. And yeah, for me, that moment was it. I think every surfer has it. A moment when all your frustrations and disappointments become worthwhile. And yeah, for me, that moment was it.”
