Newcastle Bodysurfing Experience
Articles
Wedge Island Surfari
by djr
Up at 5:00am, totally dark. I can feel the light easterly through the kitchen window as I make my double strength super latte and toast.Load the gear into the car, I'm taking all my bodysurf equipment plus my bodyboard. Drive, sipping double strength super latte, to Shane's place in the lightening pre-dawn of a cloudless day. Shane's just backing his 4WD on to the street as I arrive, and I park my old beemer where his car had been. We quickly load my gear, and head off, stopping first to fill up with gas. Shane refuses to take petrol money from me.
Up the northern freeway and right out to the outer edges of suburbia where we pull into a lush, densely vegetated property with hand carved tiki totems lining the driveway. Amid '60's icons (huge two door Plymouth, '60s surf paraphernalia) Josh walks out rubbing his eyes. We load his long-board and head off.
It's a long drive north to Lancelin, about 140Kms north of Perth. The country side becomes barer as we head into the edges of the wheatbelt and then into the scrubby country around Lancelin. We hit Lancelin around 7:30, and find the track heading north out of town.
The track passes huge white sand dunes, with ghostly drifts of sand wisping off the tops of the dunes in the strong easterly wind and early morning sunlight. Pass the dunes, the track degenerates into a heavily corrugated winding track through the scrub. We pass a sign, showing the boundary of the bombing range. The beach we're heading to is inside the range, which is used by the aussie air force and sometimes the yanky air force and navy. A few years ago, the Missouri stood offshore, lobbing volkswagen size shells towards the large square targets standing in the sand dunes.
After 45 minutes of bashing and bouncing on the track, we hit the southern end of the beach. Away at the northern end, Wedge Island sits offshore, a small rhomboid shaped rock jutting out of the ocean, with a point of reefs, boiling in the swell, reaching out to the island from the mainland. Inside the bay of the beach at the northern end, a solitary cray boat is pulling pots in the early morning sunlight. At this end, the waves are tiny, but we can see solid swell pushing in to the beach at the northern end.
It is a further 10 minutes drive along the sand and we check the various banks and gullies looking for the best peeling wave as we go. We stop short of the northern end where we think we can see a bank with lefts and rights and another right on the northern side of the gully.
The strong wind has increased, so we wait for twenty minutes or so checking the waves before suiting up. The water temp has been warm, so I just put on boardies and the hotskin.
The swim out is grand, a solid inshore longitudinal gully, then the shallow shoaling bank out to the main breakers about 200m offshore. The swell is solid, 4 to 6 foot faces with sets up to 8 to 10 foot. I take it easy to warm up and find that there is a solid northerly drift. It takes me another 10 minutes to get back to the peak we'd spotted from the top of the dunes earlier.
In the first hour or more, I bodysurfed and got some great waves. They are a bit hard to catch, because they are almost spilling rather than tumbling, with the crest hitting halfway down the face. I get a few of the smaller waves closer inshore that pitch up harder, and I had one big wave, solid 8 foot face that pitched up quickly into a top to bottom barrel. A few held up beautifully, allowing a spinner or two and peeling well over a hundred metres.
We're sharing the water with plenty of sea life. I see schools of tailor drifting through the break, chasing the smaller schools of pilchards. Shags and terns and gulls pass overhead, swooping in the gusts of the solid offshore breeze.
The breeze is so strong that large curtains of water are flying of the back of the waves, so heavy that it cuts down my vision of the following waves making it hard to position myself for the next in the set.
After an hour or so of solid bodysurf, the northerly drift and the effort of the slower takeoffs makes me decide to change to the bodyboard.
Back in, and the bodyboard gives me better takeoffs and the ability to take off very deep, even behind the peak, due to the way the waves are cresting and spilling. The swell is dropping, but I still have plenty of solid waves, and one or two rides of a 100m or more.
By this time, the crowd had maxed out at six surfers in the water, spread across a hundred metres or so of prime surf break. Shane and I use the car as our marker to hold our position in the northerly drift, trying to nail the lefts and rights from the bank we'd spotted.
Back on the beach, there's a constant although sparse traffic of 4WDs charging up and down the beach, some with tall poles and flags to help visibility on the narrow winding tracks through the sand dunes. Late in the morning, a 4WD refrigerated cooler truck passes, barrelling southwards on the beach carrying the Wedge Island settlement's morning catch of crays to market. Josh says "That's the truck I should've stopped to get some fresh crays!" as it disappears down the long beach.
Mid morning, we head in for a short break, a drink of lime juice cordial, another muesli bar, more sun block and then back out. Josh has pulled down his wetsuit, and for the first time I see his huge tiki tattoo, covering almost all of his back.
We agree, another 45 minutes, and then head home. The swell's dropped noticeably, but so has the wind, and the tide has risen. Despite being smaller, the waves have improved in shape over the already great waves from earlier. In the first twenty minutes or so, I just get non-stop waves - paddle out, and up pops another peak. The waves are awesome, sweet fast peeling takeoffs leading into solid peeling walls that have hollow sections for fast rides under the curl and then sweet cutback sections. The rides are well over a hundred metres, maybe more, taking me from out the back of the break almost to the inshore gully.
Shane is cranking also, catching non-stop waves. I watch dozens of his rides from the back, as he bobs and weaves, disappearing behind the crest, then reappearing as he does a re-entry, on and on for a hundred metres at least.
Josh, being a pommie foreigner, has only been surfing for three years. Even so, he gets plenty of great rides, telling me that he had the best rides of summer.
Eventually, we tire out and head to shore. In the last half-hour, the waves are pure perfection, almost glassy conditions and sweet peaks. At one point, a beautiful A-frame about 6 foot high peaked up, with Shane and I about 10 feet apart on either side of the peak. He grabbed the right and I took the left, a solid steep drop onto the edge of the foam ball and accelerating away to beat the initial curl. It is a wave from a dream, holding up steeply for 20 or 30 metres and then a carving face. Back out in the break, Josh tells me how he could see me through the back of the wave, carving it up. I imagine what it must've looked like from the shore, Shane and I taking off in opposite directions from the peak and both carving our way almost to shore, picture perfect except for the fact there's no-one on the beach to see us!
Ashore, we change, pack the gear and hop in the car. "What's the time?", Shane asks. I guess 11:45, Shane guesses 11:30. Turning on the car, it's 12:52, more than an hour more than we thought! We'd had a four hour session, but it was so much fun, and with so many waves it felt like only three.
Shane repeatedly says it was his best surf of summer. For me, it was the best surf for a few years, at least since I last was down at C-bay, South Point years ago.
We start the long trek home, stopping for Josh to buy some cooked crays in Lancelin. We keep reminiscing on the journey home, both Shane and I stoked that we'd been able to forecast the conditions from the middle of the previous week and then capitalise on it.
djr
16-Mar-06
|
|