It is virtually and practically impossible to compare past eras, mainly because everything will always be compared to what is happening right now, but also due to the fact that the further you go back, the less people there are who are still alive to tell the tale.

Along with the internet came a kind of quantum multiplier, where communication and technology quickened the pace of inventions, discoveries and technological advances. When you thought everything was incredibly dynamic and in your time, the whole process doubled down and took another quantum leap into the future. 

This rapid fire progression also had the effect of making things obsolete, seemingly overnight. What was one day cutting edge became consigned to the dustbin the next as ground breaking technology eclipsed time honoured procedures.

There are now thousands of examples in our world. Two that come to mind are the accessibility of music and how it is presented and the moment photography went digital and consigned the darkroom to the dark ages. 

So it is with the story of the humble leg rope and how the purists held out to the final breath before leashing up to this umbilical cord that was for many years totally unacceptable for the accomplished hardcore.

My first encounter was during a powerful cyclone in 1972. There had actually been back to back cyclones with 20ft surf for weeks on end. Hard to imagine now seeing we have hardly had any cyclonic activity south of the tropics this century.

There had been such a violent movement of sand that it had shifted across to form this massive left bank off the reef, just to the north of the Kirra Surf Club. On the first rideable day it resembled 15-18ft Himalayas and only a few surfers who had Hawaiian rhino chasers, including Wayne Deane and Neil Turner, were sitting way out to sea. 

Gordon Merchant walked past with this crude attachment, a length of rubbery chord with a sock attached to it to wrap around his ankle and at the other end a piece of string threaded through a hole in his fin, connecting the whole shebang. We did we have a chuckle, only thing being that Gordon made it out and Tom Peterson and I got nailed next to Big Groyne Kirra and washed in at Bilinga to begin the search for our only board.

That was the thing, even for the top riders, there was no issue of six and eight boards at a time. Surfboards were made from scratch and you got one at a time and hoped it was a magic wand. One had to surf differently, particularly in front of gnarly rocks, before leashes, because one wipeout meant ding fixing in the garage for the rest of the day.

Take for example surfing at six to eight foot Burleigh Cove or Lennox or Boiling Pot Noosa. Eating it or getting caught in the impact zone and watching your board smashing onto the Burleigh rocks inside the Cove was hectic. For starters you had to time the surge and deposit yourself on the rocks to retrieve it before total destruction, then depart the perfect surf because absolutely nobody was loaning you their prized surfboard to wreck.

A long forgotten technique was to pull into a barrel and on realisation that there was no light at the end of the tunnel, time the dismount so that the blowback from the detonation took your board with it out the back of the wave. This may sound ridiculous and I expect scepticism. However, this technique is real and it works, it had to. You still had to get yourself to the surface and sprint to your board before the next wave but it gave you a fighting chance of continuing the session. 

Even though rudimentary leashes of all primitive form were being experimented with since 1972, they were still banned from competition until 1977. Plus they were deemed a step too far from pure surfing, kind of like cheating, especially in Hawaii, the ultimate big wave arena.

It payed to study the line up to gauge where your board went, especially at arenas like Sunset Beach. For example, on a big West swell there was every chance your board would congregate with the other 15 or 20 in the dead water just off the beach inside Val’s Reef. I kid you not when I say it is a terrifying sight to see a dozen boards coming at you like missiles after a clean-up set on the West Bowl. 

Conversely, on a big north swell your board would generally drift out into the channel courtesy of the surging current emptying back out to sea. If you misjudged either it spelt trouble. If you went straight to the channel and your board was floating in the calm waters of Val’s reef then you went out to sea and by the time you swam all the way back over from Kammieland to the West peak and copped the impact zone to get to the beach there was every chance your board had disappeared, a kind of unspoken local tax had been collected haha.

If you swam directly to the beach and your board drifted into the channel then someone might kindly point to the horizon at the speck disappearing into the wild blue yonder. No jet ski assists, it was a long haul swim for your prized Parrish Lightning Bolt. One time I found myself swimming far beyond Kammieland as the sun was setting. My fellow swimmer, the great Sultan of Speed Terry Fitzgerald, was also on the sea hunt for his prized Hot Buttered gun. We didn’t seem to be making ground and I informed Terry that I might give up the pursuit and head for home. ‘Too late Rab, we have no choice now,’ and onward we swam. 

My first surf at 10 foot Honolua Bay was leashless. Wow, for such a pleasant looking set up, a Hawaiian point break no less, it sure was spooky unattached. Not only was there a scary cave but like all things in Jurassic Park the boulders lining the bay were oversized. The Burleigh Cove dismount with the blowback technique could not be trusted in this raw power, being caught inside or even straightening out meant imminent disaster because board retrieval itself looked life threatening. What an adventure into the unknown.

Surfing big Bells before leashes was also daunting. Like Sunset, sometimes the only option when faced with a 12 foot exploding white water was to turn your back to the wave,  wrap your legs around your rail and hang on for dear life. There was no choice in the matter, as big wave legend Darrick Doerner would hammer home, ‘you had to be ready to swim an ocean mile, every surf.’ 

Whenever I am besieged by grommets the first question to them is; ‘How confident a swimmer are you?’ It’s important to ascertain how reliant they are on the umbilical cord connecting them to the buoyancy of their craft. I mean, leashes do get nicks in them, they do snap in impact zones, and while grommets are not expected to swim an ocean mile, they need to be aware by way of a rolling assessment of changing conditions so they know where their surfboard goes, and more importantly, where they go.

On a cautionary note, I know one salty old seadog who snapped his leash and only had to swim an ocean 40 metres and found to his dismay that the shoulder injury had not healed enough to rotate the arm in a freestyle swimming motion and found himself going round in circles, all the while being carried by current out to sea. It was more like Gammyland and he required help from the very grommet he had been coaching in ocean education, quite the humbling experience.

18 year old Riley Munro, the last surfer between me and a more troubling  scenario, saw me struggling and as he approached I said yes when I was your age I swam for everything, and knowing he was super surf fit, I asked Riley to perform the by then 60 metre swim over the Superbank while I paddled his 2.2” board to the gutter. 

While the walk back to Rainbow was humbling I flashed on how in ‘92 my mate Eddie Valladares and I, marked with the mission to get Dean Morrison, Joel Parkinson and Mick Fanning to school, approached the school Principal with the objective of introducing PBC to a Surfing Sports Excellence Program.

The irony was not lost on me that young Riley, who threw me a life raft 32 years later, in my minute of need, was a straggler from the PBC Sports Ex program and had no business being down by Big Groyne Kirra when Bugalugs got into strife with his beloved ocean. 

Call it want you want, I remember a saying on the  North Shore; what goes around comes around.