“We lost Kirra a long time ago.” I hear that in the car park nearly every time I’m getting ready to paddle out on an average day. If I see a man aged 60+ walking towards me to strike up a chat, I can predict what he’s going to say: He’s going to talk about Kirra like she was the finest woman the town had ever known, and then he’ll look out across the lineup with the same twinge of sentimentality that you get when looking through an old high school yearbook. “Anyway,” he’ll say, snapping out of the daydream. “She comes ‘round again a few times a year. Takes a proper cyclone swell. That’s when you can see her.”
She arrived on Monday linked on the arm of Cyclone Alfred, who we’re still waiting to see if is a beast or a blowhard. His full scale of force is forecasted to hit land on Friday; as of Thursday, we’re all bunkered down in our homes with sandbags lining our doors, using our last hours of electricity to watch clips from the past few days. Alfred’s the biggest storm to come through since 1974 — with the floods of 2021 still a sore memory, the people are taking preparedness more seriously this time around. As per, the Gold Coast was a circus this week. Family supply runs to decimate Woolworths were proceeded by stop overs at the Kirra Groyne to spectate what was, ironically, a more skillful control of the chaos. Surfing’s upper echelon of names and faces came out from the woodwork, and for three days, Kirra was proper Kirra.
Among the cycle of familiar faces on the promenade making the loop in and out of the water, McKenzie Bowden’s was the first I saw on Tuesday, which was the best day of the swell. His eyes are bloodshot, and his smile is wide. “They’re about to fall out of my brain,” he tells me.
Somehow his voice isn’t shot as well, because he also tells me that he had been “screaming my head off like a little girl” at Tom Carroll. “I could see him coming from a mile away. Tommy Carroll just fully standing in one — a blatant big sort of hollow thing. It was a close-out, and he just packed it. And it was like, ‘how old is he?!’ He’s 63. 63, standing in massive pits.”
“And then I saw Jay Davies inside this thing that landed straight on my head. I wasted all my breath on being so stoked for him and screaming at him in the barrel that I forgot it was landing right on my head. I completely cooked myself. It hooked me down. He got up and he’s like, ‘oh my God, that thing was so big and square.’ He didn’t even hear me screaming because it was so loud and gurgly in there.”
The next morning, Nathan Hedge and Mick Fanning sat wide of Kirra, taking turns throwing each other into step-offs. “There were ten-foot tubes with about four sections,” Nathan says. “M.F. was keeping up with me on the ski like, ‘woo woo woo.’ And just high drama, like wind up the face, getting over white water, and fuck, it was just so much energy. It felt like Hawaii.”
“The first day of the swell was more like Indonesia, like clean on the bank. Each day seemed like it got a bit more unruly and bigger and a bit more raw. And then it had its moments with the tides or the winds when things settled down, and it had its peak moments. The first day was really ledgy and the second day was more almondy. Today was just fucking nuking in amongst the big sets.”
“I think Mick got the best one today,” he reflects. “It was ten feet, and he was going as fast as he could go on a surfboard. It was so tall in there and the wave was so long. The distance covered was the thing. It was crazy how he was keeping up with me while I was on the ski. You go down, you’re watching, and you’re sliding along while he’s keeping up. He’s pretty excited. I haven’t seen him that excited after a wave in a long time.”
If Kirra is in fact working mystical strings this week, maybe that was her reward for Mick; the day before, he was giving lifts on the ski and calling the girls into waves. Ellie Harrison was one of them. Her buzz from the swell is powering the twelve-hour drive back to Victoria that she’s on while we speak on the phone Wednesday night.
“I was riding a 6’4” so I got in pretty easily. I knew it was going to barrel, so I just tried to hold my line and pump about three times. I have this thing where sometimes I jump when I’m in a barrel — I was like, ‘Ellie, don’t jump, don’t jump,’ and then when I came out, I went to fix my hair, but it kind of looked like a claim. It was the best feeling ever,” Ellie reminisces.
“It was definitely hard for everyone to get waves but I really respected the guys that called us girls into ones. There were probably 15 of us out there. Piper’s wave was out of this world — that was one of the best waves I saw on day one. The whole lineup was talking about it when she was paddling back out, like, ‘Piper just got a sick one.’ The guys were really supportive. I was stuck on the inside at one point and saw Mick coming towards me and he told me to get on. Then he was like, ‘that was a sick one’ and it literally made my day. Watching him was a highlight, too — watching him navigate the lineup, knowing which ones he wanted, and getting barreled off his head.”
As Ellie’s buzz propels her away from the approaching storm, McKenzie gets a moment to come down from his high as he settles into his couch in Kingscliff. He reckons he spent 16 hours in the ocean over Monday and Tuesday.
“On Monday afternoon, it was just like a rainbow: there’s so many different elements. It’s the crazy thing with the cyclones — the rain squalls come through, then it stops and it’s sunny again and it’s beautiful, and it’s like the calm before the storm. Then the rainbow will shine out and the rain swell will come in and get all meaty and scary. It’s so moody but it turned on for that afternoon. I got a rainbow-ed barrel that just kept going and going. I hopped off and just behind me was Occy, standing up tall with no hands. It’s like, ‘are you freaking kidding me?’ The Occ-dog, the absolute weapon, still dominating.You just see so many good surfers — so many old dogs and legends. It’s like an amphitheatre. There’s so much going on — like four waves in a row or more on that stretch at the same time, and they’re the waves of people’s lives. It’s actually like the eighth wonder of the world.”
“The whole thing has been intense,” McKenzie concludes. “Whether it’s jet skis flying around or the storm blowing cars around. This is all like a full trip in itself; my eyeballs are shot, my body’s hurting, and it feels like a dream. It’s almost like I’m on the come down. It’s the laws of nature. But this kind of come down is an intentional, beautiful thing you can do.”
As the eye of Alfred gets closer, we might soon be accepting that the Superbank surfing was a display of our last legs of control. For the next few days, you should hope not to see Mick Fanning approaching you on a jet ski; if he is, it means you’re sitting on your roof like 2021 all over again. Alfred may not be the kindest new boyfriend Kirra’s brought home, but at least we know he’s no kook.
