Middleton - Bouncing your Stoke

We arrived at 7:00AM to be greeted by what at first looked like the ideal conditions that I had predicted, four foot plus, clean waves with a slight off shore breeze and about a dozen blokes out. I jumped out the car, full of motivation, as these are the conditions I love best and voiced my enthusiasm to a fellow surfer who was standing at the rear of his vehicle. "Lose your board?" I jokingly asked, as he was standing there with his leash in his hand. "Nah! It’s in the back of the van" he replied, to which I added, "How’s it looking?", referring to the quality of the surf. "Not that good", as he threw the leash back into the van. I then said, "It’s a lot better than what they’re getting on the East Coast at the moment", to which he replied. "But not as good as what they’re getting on the West Coast". I proceeded to get ready and go out for a session, thinking to myself, why do some blokes bother even coming down here.

We eventually paddled out through the rip in the bay at 10 past 7 without getting a hair wet. The tide was a bit too full, making the waves in the bay hard to catch. So the first half-hour or so were spent in frustration, as we were not able to get any good rides. So we slowly moved over towards the point where the waves looked easier to catch.

"It was a glorious morning with a slight offshore breeze, and the waves were coming through at about 3-4 foot. After a while a set came through and I found myself in a position where the wave had already broken and I was confronted with whitewater, so I turtle-rolled. When I popped back up, there was another one and another and another. It was getting rather tiresome. When the next one came towards me, it didn't look so bad and I decided to sit it out, my board facing towards shore. Bad choice, as the board got ripped out of my hand and I got dragged under. As I felt the turbulence above me it appeared as if I was going to pop back up again any second but no such luck, I got rolled again and struggled to get to the surface. Just as I thought I would run out of breath, I surfaced and immediately knew I had to turn around and check for another oncoming wave. And indeed, there it was, a wall of whitewater rolling towards me. I felt quite weak and was aware that I probably wouldn't survive another hold-down, so I tried to pull my boards towards me on the leash as quickly as I could, dragged myself onto the board and caught the whitewater all the way to the beach, lying on my belly. Walking up the sand I felt quite dizzy and decided to give it a miss for today".

I hadn’t seen all of this that happened to her, as I was way out the back, scratching to get over this big set that got her but I saw her going in. She had been out there for an hour and I just thought she had, had enough and gone in. Mind you, watching her going I saw that she got extremely close to the point and I had a few anxious seconds there. My recent bad form in the water over the last few weeks continued right throughout this session, only catching a number of mediocre rides by my standards and after about two hours I decided to go in.

John Hardy

When I got back to the car I took off the top half of my wetsuit and sat around soaking up the rays of the warm spring sun with a durrey and a can of Cola. After about half an hour of sitting there and checking the surf, I noticed that it was starting to look a little bit better with the outgoing tide. As it was getting close to 9:30 and a lot of the "Weekend Warriors" were starting to turn up, I thought that now would probably be the best time to go out again as conditions were not going to get any better. So I picked up my board and marched to the point, as I didn’t want to waste time by going through the bay. I was out the back in less than five minutes with no problems at all. There was hardly anybody sitting where I was, which was just right off the point and about fifty metres out, until I was joined by two of our club members, John Hardy and Chris Bowen. This session turned out to be quite good fun with each of us getting some reasonable rides with the odd, occasional friendly dropin. One particular wave that John and I both went for was an absolute bottler with good shape and potential. Unfortunately for me we both caught it, and as I was the outside I had to pull off and let him have it. I was a little disappointed, as I thought that was the wave of the day and this session of mine would continue to be another disaster.

John Hardy

A short while later another larger wave came along, similar to the one that John had caught and I was in the perfect position to grab it. As I picked it up I realised its potential and with grim determination I decided to work off weeks of frustrated surfing sessions on that wave. I won’t go into great detail of how I rode it but I used every quirk and tricky section of that wave’s mood and danced with it accordingly. Then just as I was starting to feel superior to it, it jacked up when I was in the middle of a bottom turn and a rise to the lip of it. It jacked up so steeply that the board and myself were left in mid air where I eventually fell to the right of my board and fortunately enough the wave carried my board shoreward and away from my body. I of course got the full washing machine cycle of all its energy as it rolled me around but I didn’t mind as I got my ride of the day and nothing else mattered. I eventually grabbed my board and paddled back out and even though I got a few more decent rides none of them compared with that glorious one. When I finished this session and got back to the car the girl told me she had seen my ride and thought it was good but never got a pic of it as she was talking to one of the guys. "Who cares!" I said to her, "I’ve got my memories of riding it and you’ve got yours of seeing it, and nothing else matters".

By now the time was marching on and along with the crowd that was turning up and going out was the sea breeze that was starting to affect the surf conditions in general. So we packed everything up and headed home. Along the way I wondered whether the glassy conditions would return and prevail on the next day, Sunday. They did and even though it was smaller we enjoyed an almost family session with most of the locals out. If there was one outstanding feature to come out of Sunday’s session, then it was the girl’s achievements. I would say that this was one her most notable performances into becoming a good surfer.