It’s funny how often in this stay-at-home life that’s been thrust upon us, time travel can take the place of real travel, at least momentarily.
A photo in an album, or perhaps found while trolling on-line, and you’re right back where you were a decade or a lifetime ago, reliving moments that meant so much, and still do. That’s what I was doing last weekend, when I should have been working but instead was searching old hard drives and flash drives for a particular shot to do with a rather obscure project, and came across two photos of waves that began my surfing life nearly 60 years ago.
The first was the left at Bellambi Reef on what is now known as the Coal Coast an hour or so south of Sydney. It’s where I grew up, and where I learnt to surf, at Bellambi in the southerlies and around the point past the sewerage works at Brandy’s beach break in the northerlies. Brandy’s often had excellent A-frame peaks in front of the high sand dunes where we got into all kinds of trouble that you don’t need to read about in a family newspaper, but Bellambi was considered to be a higher quality wave.
On the rare occasions I go back there now, I’m never quite sure how it got that reputation. Primarily a righthand point, it’s so fat and slow most of the time, you can barely make it work on a longboard, but on a decent swell the left was always a short, sharp and challenging ride, ending with a brisk kick-out before you hit the baths wall. It was here on the same day in 1965 my surf buddy Peter Tweedle and I both misjudged the kick-out and knocked out our front teeth, causing much hilarity at the beach and despair and crying at home.
The photo I found, and am looking at now as I write, must be one that my wife took of me trying to relive my glory days on an onshore day a few years ago, but you can still see the potential of the left, and I can see the baths wall that left me with a denture plate for many decades until I discovered the marvellous Dr Rudy at Bali 9/11.
I then went looking on-line for an aerial shot of Bellambi and Brandy’s that would show the various other breaks we surfed – like the Poo Hole, named for its dangerous proximity to the sewerage outfall. But that search led me straight to the other great left of my youth, a wilderness break another couple of hours further south called Green Island.
We came to Green Island via Windang Island, after being frightened off by the vicious Port Kembla and Warilla locals, before they all moved to Angourie, allowing us to reclaim it. But Green Island, although difficult to get to, was a much better wave, often with few people on it, and able to hold its form at considerable size, sometimes too much size for this skinny kid, who would scramble for the deep channel as the big wide ones thundered down the point.
But what an adventure the island was, sleeping in swags in the bush at the top of the dune, waking in the pre-dawn and trying to estimate how big the sets were, so far away, as we waxed up and smoked a durrie to calm the nerves.
In December 2019 the south coast fires raged through the surrounding hamlets of Manyana Beach and Lake Conjola, but it’s a resilient community and a beautiful place, and it’s coming back.
One day soon, I will too.
*Vale Ben Aipa*
When I first went to Hawaii in 1975, the scariest local I met was introduced to me by the most timid Australian surfer on the North Shore, a very young Mark Richards, who had struck up a relationship with Ben Aipa who was mentoring him in some radical shaping concepts.
Ben was much older than the emerging crew of tyro pro surfers, and as a former pro footballer weighing in at well over 120 kg, he had a fearsome attack dog presence in the crowded lineups. But his bark was much worse than his bite, and on land he could be quite gentle, once you got over the intensity of his presence. Ben came to surfing late (mid-20s) and to shaping even later, but that year he finished fourth in the Lightning Bolt Pro and started to get very famous very quickly for his split-rail “stinger” (later known as Sting) designs that were being test-piloted by Larry Bertlemann and Buttons Kaluhiokalani, and adapted by Mark Richards.
I wrote some stuff about Ben for the surf magazines, then in the longboard resurgence we connected again in a few places, and I always found him a pleasant and humble man. But I’d never ridden his revolutionary stinger until much, much later, when I was on Tavarua with some friends and struggling on a longboard in a rising swell at Cloudbreak.
A good surfer from California with the unlikely name of Peff Eick offered the loan of his brand-new 9ft 4in Aipa Stinger. “It’s the enforcer,” he said. “You’ll get every set wave and you’ll absolutely fly through Shishkebabs (the shallow inside section).”
Peff was right, although you don’t get every set wave when you’re sharing the break with Kelly Slater and Shane Dorian! But I’d never felt so immediately comfortable on a board that virtually drove itself. So, thank you Peff, and thank you Ben, who died last week, aged 78, after a long battle with dementia. His shaper son Akila continues the tradition.
