“When you work, you work, but there’s a lot of time off in between so it’s really good,” says surfer and miner Tim Stevenson. Photo: WSL/Ed Sloane
After a 12-hour night shift in the mine, Tim Stevenson is exhausted. He’s been repeating this work pattern for days now, and somehow needs to manage the drive from Melbourne to Torquay to log some water time. His head is still swimming from working night after night, which doesn’t help. Stakes are high: he’s competing in the Bells Beach trials in just over 24 hours. He pinches himself to make sure this is really his life, but the cold hard facts of his situation are hardly dreamlike: If he surfs at the 55th Rip Curl Pro Bells Beach, he might lose his job.
While the prospect of trading shifts as a crane operator at the oil refinery in Melbourne for the life of a professional surfer doesn’t seem like much of a decision at all, Stevenson, 28, is realistic. Surf stardom is still a few thousand heats and a couple contracts away, and he actually likes his current situation. He’s an excellent freesurfer with a gritty job that enables him to surf. A lot.
“We’ll see,” Stevenson, a native of Jan Juc, the small Victorian town just east of Bells, said with a chuckle and a shrug as he ascended the famous Bells stairs after his Round 1 heat, where he bested Michel Bourez but lost to reining world champion Adriano De Souza by less than a point. “This is a once in a lifetime opportunity, so we’ll just roll with it and hopefully they still have my job for me when I get back.”
“I love doing what I do. But I do it because it allows me to have a lot of time to go surfing,” Stevenson said. “In the last five years I’ve probably worked two, two and a half years and just traveled and surfed for the rest of the time. When you work, you work, but there’s a lot of time off in between so it’s really good.”
His work schedule in the mines can be a grueling seven straight days of shifts exceeding 12 hours each, which carries on for a month or so before he gets a week off. Then it’s off to the Mentawis, Fiji, Peru, Europe, the U.S., or he just hangs here in Victoria where he honed his powerful style as a grom.
“I try not to follow the CT just because of the crowds,” he explained of his travel. “I like to find waves where there’s not many people around and it’s kind of a bit of a mission to get to. There’s a lot of waves along the Ocean Road that there’s no one around, so I just like to go hunting.”
Stevenson began competing in junior events at the age of 13 and partook in the pro surfing life until he was 22, competing on the WQS for a year before dropping off the contest scene. At Bells, he savored every moment of this sampling of what he calls “the dream life” of CT surfing, from the simple pleasure of surfing with old friends like Mason Ho and Jeremy Flores to the “humbling” feeling of hearing that his Round 2 match up against 2015 Rookie of the Year Italo Ferriera had the young Brazilian notably intimidated. Ferriera overcame those nerves and edged out the Australian by a narrow margin, ending Stevenson’s fairytale run at Bells.
It’s hard to digest losing to Adriano by 0.6 and then to Italo by a point, but it’s also really good at the same time. I got some scores on the CT and didn’t look like an absolute kook,” he said with a laugh. “I just did what I normally do: go surf with my friends.
After catching up on some of the Easter Weekend partying he missed out on by staying focused on the competition, Stevenson will get back to work in the mines and focus on his newest passion: big wave surfing.
Stevenson says his shaper at Clay Crafts is already working on a few big wave boards for him, which he is keeping relatively short — between 8’6” and 9’6” — taking a page out of innovator Albee Layer’s book, a wise choice since the monster Stevenson is frothing to have a go at is Jaws.
With any luck, we’ll soon see Timmy charging Pe’ahi alongside some of his heroes like Layer, Mark Healy, and Shane Dorian, who he calls “the king…the man.” Stevenson himself is keeping his plans relatively open-ended and casual, though. After all, when he ushered in 2016 he was recovering from serious hip surgery and unable to expect even a proper session at Bird Rock, let alone a spot at the Rip Curl Pro. The future could hold anything: illustrious contest surfing, unending night shifts in the mines, full-time wave hunting around the globe, or some path Stevenson hasn’t even considered yet.
“I’m still not 100% sure on what I want to be doing in five years,” he said, gazing off as his mind thumbed the possibilities. Then he smiled broadly and quickly added, “apart from surfing.”
The phrase “work hard, play hard” comes to mind. Photos: Tim Stevenson
