C38. When the luck of the draw is REALLY lucky. Photo: Alexander Cleland.
When was the last time you were really lucky? Now, I don’t mean scoring your local peak with a light offshore, and an empty line up.
Or not even putting all your chips down on black thirteen at the casino, which nearly makes you break even after all the gambling you’ve done.
I mean, real luck. Where your life has been severely altered unexpectedly, by the ever-addicting game of chance. Well, that happened to me.
The anti-whaling organization Sea Shepard recently put on a fundraiser night in my hometown of Dunsborough. Businesses from all over the place donated prizes to either go into a raffle or an auction. My mates and I decided it would be a good excuse to waste our beer money on a good cause and to see some of the local musicians strut their stuff.
Being the penniless university student I am, I decided that my fifth pint should be my last. I was left with ten dollars in my hand, and I found myself pondering the worthlessness of money in comparison to life itself. So I threw my last tenner it to a mate who was selling raffle tickets, oblivious to what the prizes were.
The night wizzed by with a colossal blur of music, laughter, booze and frothing at the things on auction. The last event of the proceedings was the raffle. Within my group of mates, we flew off banter every time one of our tickets didn’t come out as the winner. By this stage, I had thought I’d won only to have heard it wrong and thrown my ticket on the floor in dramatic frustration – I thought I’d pick it up just in case.
Our boozey, short-attention-spanned brains had lost interest in the raffle by the end of it. It was then that the grungy, croaky voice of our veteran local MC articulated the heavenly sound of: “C-38.”
I dismissed it at first, as I had become accustomed to not winning raffles on that night, and over the course of my life for that matter. Only when he said it a second time did it click. I held the winning ticket. Everyone around me erupted. I was drowning in white-wash of congratulatory embraces as I made my way to the stage to present my winning ticket.
So what did I win? To be honest, I had no freaking idea. The mixture of copious, crisp local beer and minimal attention meant I was completely ignorant to what I had just won… and man-oh-man, I was in for a treat.
I was squeezed onto a make-do stage that had a fragility which closely represented a paper mache project. To my surprise, it managed to support me and my freshly enlarged ego. I willingly accepted the kisses from the models as I was passed an array of envelopes that had “winner” splashed all over them – but I still no idea what I’d won.
The weather-beaten hands of the MC handed me the microphone, a rookie mistake. My brain had long ago lost its fight with the Devil’s water, and in turn the filter to my mouth had been turned off at the source. I’m still not 100% sure what I said, but, it made the crowd cheer and my ego was loving it.
With my mates sharing the stoke around me, after receiving a personal congratulations from just about every frother in the establishment, I opened my arsenal of envelopes in a journey of almighty discovery. I had won an all expenses trip to head to Sumatra and surf the Telo Islands while staying at Resort Latitude Zero with Matt Cruden at the helm.
Most people would erupt with volcanic celebration after hearing news like that, but we just laughed until we cried. It was so incredibly unbelievable that it became a joke to us. To this day, some of us still regard it as the funniest night of our life.
Three months later, I got to retire the wetsuit and surf the perfect, secluded blue canvases that the splatter of Sumatran Islands. I ate amazing food, surfed myself out every day and bonded with radical travellers and staff from all around our planet.
Resort Latitude Zero’s fleet of speedboats offered a wider commitment to the search of waves, unlike anything the charter boats at the Mentawai islands could ever offer, which meant crystal-clear waves every day along with me riding a permanent stoke wave.
