Three weeks. For three weeks they were waiting. Chanting. Calling on Tangaroa to work his magic. And nothing. Nothing. Inverted swell. No one was walking on water. Flat as.
It came creeping on the horizon from the east. A rolling. A heaving. A green and blue looming. The swell of the year had finally arrived.
Anyone who could was out the back, ordering up their own private waves of the day from the bar. Anyone who couldn’t was at risk of drowning in the rapid-fire, eight-wave set, double-overhead conditions.
At mid-low tide late Wednesday afternoon, the waves were breaking at Clarke Island. By 9 am Thursday morning, the channel was closing out. By 4pm, the beach was nearing its limit. Club shred was on the loose and amazing spectators with their awesome manoeuvers along the heavy walls of water.
So might read a rather poetic report of the surf at Whangamata these last two days, from the safety of the beach.
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| Tangaroa, God of the Sea. By Rongo Tuhura. |
As I made my way into the water in the 6ft conditions Wednesday afternoon, I was speeding through the whitewater section and rapidly approaching the last hurdle: the booming, watery curtain that marked entry to the undulations of the open sea. My pride was high, I was doing it, bro! and besting a couple of dudes who were haplessly paddling to nowhere. And then ...
The breaker seemed to leap up out of nowhere, growing bigger and bigger. It appeared ridiculous, dumpy, and unforgiving. Although I’ve been challenged by waves of this size before, at that moment finding myself face to face with a huge green monster set while belly-down on a flimsy piece of foam and glass set my nerves on overdrive.
A split second decision in favour of fear set in motion a bad sequence of events. My paddling slowed to a crawl. My eyes were too wide. My brain was taking over. I made a half-hearted attempt to duck dive. I was too slow. I did not go deep enough. The wave had its late lunch.
I was ripped off my board, sucked up, swirled around, dumped, tumbled, and held down. I came up for air only to have just enough time to gulp down some oxygen and dive deep under the next wave. And so on for three more 6ft shots of dense liquid horror.
In the past, when confronted with this scenario, there was only ever one option for me in my striving, competitive way ... work harder, dive under, and push forward to freedom because I could always rest out the back, and receive serious kudos from the boys!
But I was caught in the impact zone called HESITATION. Boom! Boom! Boom! “Out the back” kept getting farther and farther away. On and on I tumbled like a rag doll, waiting for the light to appear, waiting to take the next breath, telling myself not to panic. Which of course made me start to panic.
With panic comes loss of oxygen, reduced lung capacity, bad desicion-making, and fatigue. Check, check, check, and check.
I was tiring out, I couldn’t get a good breath, and at this point there was only one thing on my mind: land.
I went into survival mode. Between waves I managed to grab my board, hop on and boot it to just beyond where the wave was coming down. I made for shore, borne aloft on metre-high white foam. The wave reformed behind me, and with much more kick than I thought it would have, threw me up on shore. Gasping for air and yelling “oh my God!”, snot everywhere, and eyes bugged out, I was a poster-girl for “not a good look” and duck-dives gone wrong. Did it mean something that on my way out of Auckland I was behind a transport bus that advertised the grim consequences of summer drownings for New Zealand families?
Before I went out into that near-epic Whangamata swell I said to myself:
“Man, I’m going to get destroyed out there!”
Oh dear reader, beware! Tangaroa is listening, and he loves to take the piss.
FYI: wave heights in NZ are reckoned on the “Hawaiian” system whereby the measurement is taken from the back of the wave to the crest, not the wave face from trough to peak. Face height is generally reckoned in reference to a surfer’s anatomy while standing on a wave, i.e. waist-high, chest-high, overhead, double-overhead, etc. Also, surfers are notorious for exaggerating wave heights to make themselves look like heroes. Except Laird Hamilton and his crew, of course. But seriously, they were 6ft waves. Huge. OMG! And I have more work to do .... Click here for resources on water safety relating to surfing!
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