The old blue 1970s Toyota Corona had gone as far as she was going.

No amount of spinning the wheels or stuffing dead branches into the muddy hole was getting her out. We’d chanced a two-wheel-drive vehicle on a track we were warned was for four-wheel-drives only, and the track had won.

And with no other cars around, we were left with little choice but to abandon the old wagon and proceed the rest of the way on foot. Getting ‘the blue bus’ out of her predicament was a problem for later.

Battling flies, heat, and dust, we lugged our surfboards up a giant hill that seemed to go on forever. We heard it before we saw it, nervous chatter subsiding as the unmistakable roar began to reach our ears.

When we finally arrived at the precipice, the sight we were greeted with stopped us dead in our tracks (and has been burned into our collective consciousness for the three decades since). Six-foot corduroy walls, marching through the deep blue of the Indian Ocean and bending toward the beach, spray from a crisp offshore lifted into the air in a golden kaleidoscope of refracted sunlight.

The bogged car in a time before technology ruled surf trips.

The moment will never be forgotten. Shades of Robert August and Mike Hynson cresting the dunes at Cape Saint Francis to be greeted by perfect lines reeling down the point in ‘The Endless Summer’. And the sight of those seemingly never-ending swell lines brought with it a primal surge of adrenaline, stirring up the butterflies in the gut and igniting an almost nauseating blend of excitement and trepidation.

Looking back, it is hard to deny that the moment would not have felt quite as surreal had we known what to expect but with literally ...