Photo courtesy of Jay Laurie
They watched the ocean for a while.
“Hey think I’m gunna get some brekkie and head out while it’s offshore… see you in a bit,” Randall said as he started to wander off.
“Ok, no worries,” Will said.
Randall stopped after a few steps and said: “Hey Will.”
Will turned and put his hand up to his face to shield against the rising sun. Randall was pointing at a burnt orange VW combi covered in dirt parked with its roof raised up on an angle, “I’m camped over there… that’s my bus… drop in anytime.”
“Sure, thanks… we’re just there,” Will said pointing at the tents and the four wheel drive nearby, “might see you in the water in a bit.”
“Yeah, cool, we’re neighbours then,” Randall said and turned and took slow lanky strides down the track with his hands balled in the pockets of his hoodie and his dog trotting along beside.
Will stayed looking out at the ocean. It was ruffled on the surface from the offshore wind and in the sunlight, now cobalt blue. Lines of evenly spaced swell were stacked way out into the sea to the southwest and marched in parallel with increasing speed towards the shore where they broke and rolled, frothing white chasing down walls of blue. When those lines had finished their long journey from a low somewhere far away in the Southern Ocean and expired on the beach, more marched in to take their place. Will hopped up and balanced on the broken post to get a bit more height, looked down the coast at the low cliffed brown headland about a kilometre to his right and watched the spray fanning high off the back of the waves breaking out beyond the headland. He thought he could make out a couple of black dots in the ocean already out there. Behind the headland, the dunes that they’d seen from the road yesterday reared up majestically and, off their blindingly white peaks, fine sand whipped by the strong northeasterly wind streamed out in smoking plumes in the direction of the sea.
“Hey Riley, wake up, it’s offshore… it’s going off,” Will said giving Riley’s tent a gentle shake.
After a delay, Riley groaned sleepily from inside the tent: “yep… be up in a sec,” and stretched… “geez I slept like a bloody log. How big is it?”
“It looks a bit overhead on the sets,” Will said pulling the esky out from under the car and getting some things out of the back of the car for breakfast.
“How long have you been up for?” Riley asked from inside his tent after a while.
“Got up just before it was light… couldn’t sleep any more. Did some stretches… are you getting up?”
“Yep.”
A few moments later, the zip slid down the front of Riley’s old khaki canvas family-sized tent and Riley stepped out in shiny trackies and an old white t-shirt. They had breakfast in the deck chairs with the sun on their backs and looked at their surrounds. Scattered here and there through the terrain were other camps and a few people moving about in the dirt in the early morning, squatting to blow life back into fires from the night before and wandering unhurriedly along tracks to the beach.
“Where do you wanna go out?” Riley asked.
“Maybe we could try the left out in front… there was no one out when I checked it, looked clean and fun,” Will replied.
“Ok,” Riley said and chucked his banana peel into the fireplace a few metres away, “could you see the righthander?”
“Yeah, kind of from behind… it’s a fair way down the beach… in front of that headland we could just see last night so it was hard to tell what it is like, there are a couple of guys out already. Maybe we could check it out later on this arvo.”
“Yeah, sure.”
They unstrapped their boards from the top of the car and picked out one each and put the other boards inside Riley’s tent. After digging around in the back of the truck for a few minutes, wetsuits were tossed out the back door onto the dirt and leg ropes followed and Will clambered back out. They struggled with their dry shrunken wetsuits for a while and eventually got them on up to their waists and leant down and grabbed their boards and leg ropes and, after rubbing a bit of wax over the existing covering, trotted down the track to the beach.
They stood on the beach looking at the wave for a few minutes while they pulled up the rest of their wetsuits. They swore as they stepped into the water, surprised by the cold in stark contrast to the heat of the desert. They paddled out feeling the cold biting into their hands, keeping their heads above the whitewash rolling in, trying to put the first duck dive off for as long as possible.
