By Phil Jarratt
It’s funny how the world goes round. Here I am in Tauranga, New Zealand, as a guest of the wonderful Tauranga Arts Festival, catching up with a bloke I haven’t seen for 44 years, since we free-camped at a lonely beach in Portugal for weeks on end back in the northern summer of ’73, and Russell Smith says, “I wonder what it’s like in Peniche now.”
I pull out my phone and switch on the live stream from the MEO Rip Curl Pro in Peniche, Portugal, where ten foot bombs are exploding close to the shore and thousands of people are lining the beach, screaming for their heroes. Occasionally the camera, in following the arc of the surfer on a left, will pan across the distant rock wall that separates Supertubos from our old camp and the fishing village beyond.
“It’s a bit like this,” I say, handing him the phone. Russell shakes his head in wonder, I’m not sure if it’s at the changes “progress” hath wrought in Peniche or because he doesn’t own a smart phone. (It is New Zealand!) Maybe it’s a bit of both. We sip on our Hawke’s Bay
pinot gris, contemplate the delicately assembled plates of delicious food on our table at Tauranga’s best restaurant, Macau, and grin at each other as we recall that wonderful, carefree time.
Russell was a successful hairdresser who had established a chain of salons in New Zealand and decided to take a year off and travel across Europe in a campervan with his Dutch-born wife Maria and their tiny daughter Mia.
I was a 22-year-old surfing vagabond hitching rides from beach to beach with my mate Neil, both escapees from the gritty newspaper world of Newcastle, Bilbo surfboards under our arms – the legacy of the high summer season spent working in Cornish guesthouses – and very little money in our wallets.
If July and August had been the high season for tourists in Cornwall, September and October was high season for surf tourists on the Bay of Biscay, and beyond, along the surf-rich coasts of Spain and Portugal – the season when Atlantic swells gathered force and pounded rocky headlands that stretched into long bays with lined up waves of chilly grey-green water.
We were travelling with an Australian couple in a beaten-up campervan. Well, they were travelling in the van, we had a leaky pop-up tent we’d erect nearby in fair weather, or in foul we’d lay it beneath the van and roll out our sleeping bags, carefully avoiding the downward trajectory of the greasy chassis when our hosts got amorous.
The relationship was getting a little tense when we first encountered Russell and Maria at a place called Somo in Spain, and we travelled in convoy through Figuera da Foz and down to Peniche, where we all settled into the dust bowl of a free-camp next to the rock wall and Madam Sirly’s shabby little cafe.
He might have been a businessman in New Zealand, but in Europe Russell was a long-haired, bearded hippy with an ironic sense of humour and a laidback attitude to life, both of which he needed as we made lame attempts to hit on his gorgeous blonde wife. We all got along like a house on fire that summer, drinking cheap wine out of plastic bottles, eating grilled sardines at Madam Sirly’s, or around a campfire, surfing the friendly waves beside the rock wall or hiking down the beach to the more challenging beachbreaks in front of the sardine processing factory, from which a river of blood trickled into the ocean and the stench was horrific whenever the wind blew hard offshore. This was the break that would later become famous as Supertubos.
And then the money ran out. Russell, Maria and Mia headed south, bound for Seville and ultimately Morocco. Russell bought our boards for ten quid each and we started hitching north, bound for London and winter jobs. We never saw them again. Until I dined with Russell and new wife Susan last week.
“You know, I sold those boards in Agadir for fifty quid each,” he dead-panned as we ordered another bottle of pinot gris in the Macau. “Saw you dumb Aussies coming.”
Which takes us back to the Peniche Pro, in which the competitors have had to endure waves about twice as big and powerful as anything we ever encountered on our Bilbos back in the day.
As I watched boards being creased in every heat, I wondered what we would have done if a Supertubos monster had creased the Bilbo. We were the only surfers in the camp, and it would have been a long haul back to Biarritz to get a replacement.
Anyway, as I write, John Florence is on the charge, his nearest rival Jordy Smith eliminated early. Julian Wilson still has a mathematical chance, but John John could close the door tonight.
Wherever we’re eating and drinking in Tauranga tonight, Russell and I will be watching it on my phone.
Footnote: Noosa International Film Festival is in full flight this weekend. Don’t miss the special screening of Men of Wood and Foam with live soundtrack performance by the Band of Frequencies, Saturday night at The J. This is a rare treat indeed. Tickets at niff.com.au
