Written by Tom Clelland.
Have you ever felt rain so heavy that the drops make an audible drumming sound on your skull? The coastal footpath is submerged as the outer tendrils of a tropical cyclone belt Darwin’s northern suburbs. I run in the gloom, shoes sodden, headphones inundated and producing warped underwater music. It’s three in the afternoon, but it looks like the terminal stages of dusk. A wayward bird cartwheels past my head as I try to cram in a jog before it all turns to shit.
The roads are empty. The wind makes an eerie whine as it whips through the cyclone fences. They dance to the mournful song. Palms bend, pandanus leaves rip. Lightning arcs across the sky. The tableau is apocalypse-lite. And yet, here and there in the carparks along the coast, there are solitary cars idling with their headlights turned seaward and their wipers set to full juice. These are the hard-core. If you squint through the onslaught, you might see that the wind is somehow belting off-shore, if only for a few minutes.
Welcome to the Northern Territory of Australia, where the tiny surf scene is uniquely positioned to offer participants extreme risk and maximum exertion for the most fleeting prospect of passable waves. I know this, because I have participated (once), leaving me with an enduring respect for the hard-bitten nub of frothers in this northern outpost.
Darwin has the set-ups. The tropical coast is wreathed in reefs of white-stone (known to the Larrakia people as Garramilla). With the right swell, those reefs produce waves. However, there are some volatile factors at play. First, floating in the swell window are a few thousand islands in the Indonesian and Papua New Guinean archipelagos. That means that the only real swell is whipped up by close-range storms and cyclones, creating conditions that are both heavy and chaotic due to the short period of the waves and the accompanying wind.
Second, the water is populated by predatory saltwater crocodiles the size of four-wheel-drives. It is not uncommon to see a large dinosaur lurking in the shallows at the city’s dog beaches, hoping that Fido gets a bit too fixated on the frisbee and strays beyond the threshold. The various common species of jellyfish, including the Box and Irukandji, possess stings that can make you wish you were dead (before you actually do die). There are also bull sharks, but to be honest they are an afterthought given the murderers’ row of aquatic pain in the bath-temperature water.
Of course, the local devotees don’t see those things as a problem, in the same way that cold water surfers accept the necessity of thick neoprene and boots. Years earlier, when I had my first-and-only cyclone surf on a left-hand reef at Nightcliff, I was blithely reassured that the crocodiles don’t like the rough conditions, and that the jellyfish migrate into the creeks during a tempest. Neither assertion is supported by any authoritative source that I can find.
When prior to that surf I asked my friend whether I should at least wear a rashie, a passing surfer laughed. And thus, we paddled out into murky orange-brown water, mud-coloured from the sediment stirred up by the storm, wearing only boardshorts. Rain pounded, and detritus flowed past from an engorged creek discharging nearby. I had trouble concentrating on the waves, given the game of ‘is-that-a-log’ going on in the lineup. My mind put teeth on all of them. Each one created tension and anxiety until someone called it ‘log!’, and there was a collective release of breath. The respite was brief, lasting until the emergence of the next wooden croc from the creek mouth. The soupy water obscured both the creatures lurking beneath, and its lack of depth. I soon found myself and my board pounded into a sharp reef, leaving us both with a few little holes. All that for three-foot slop.
The surf community in Darwin coalesces around a single Whatsapp group to which I was added (proudly) after my pathetic one-time cyclone surf career. In it, locals share videos, reports, forecasts, second hand board listings, and croc sightings. The last is not a detail borne of poetic licence. I recently saw a message warning people not to paddle out at Dripstone Cliffs, accompanied by a grainy photograph of a croc submerged in the whitewater of an A-frame peak. Hard-core.
The level of stoke is not eroded in the slightest by the imminent risk of dismemberment or the objectively average quality of the waves on offer. Close your eyes and the place on a good day is indistinguishable from Lowers at Trestles or pumping Winki, with people calling each other into waves and hooting the good ones. It is the same drive that on occasion had my brother and our friends paddling out into Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay to surf one-foot windslop after school, despite the freezing wind and shit waves. It is, in a way, surfing at its purest. I think that’s why I am glued to the Whatsapp whenever it pings.
