WINDY MILLER said...
apart from when i jybed in front of you or windwarrior without looking,...whoops

WindWarrior said...

Before I get lynched by my WA brethren... I'd like to point out he new where the place was before I took him there

But you clearly forgot to explain the golden rule of surf location etiquette!

Mark _australia said...

Don't post lesser known, ripper wave spots on internationally read forums

Just a guess

Downtheline said...

You still dont go posting places on forums. Waves or no waves. Whether its your first time or 100th time. Its respect to the people who have been there long before you.
The point is SSSHHH!!!

stehsegler said...

1) delete my post which mentions the post... so Mark, now you are the only one with a post that mentioned it! hahaha... now the joke is on you.

Mark _australia said...



How juvenile.

Tim Winton
I came to surfing at the peak of this period and it had a lasting effect on me. Admittedly, we thought we were special when really we were only very lucky. But we surfed, many of us, with a sense of awe and a feeling of kinship with each other and the sea that sustained us. This was before surfing became merely another occupied territory, before it was completely commercialised and just another colony of the business world. How eager surfers were to surrender their freedoms. They wanted to be like everyone else. We had years of dreary contests and chest-beating and sponsor chasing and brawling in the surf. Surfing became nasty and macho and nationalistic. How many five year old boys were introduced to surfing in the ‘80s by girls? None, probably, because women were driven out of surfing almost completely. The dominant mode was aggressive, misogynistic, localized, greedy. Surfers became jocks, morons who trashed beaches and beat the crap out of each other. For anyone whose idea of surfing was different there was nowhere to go. I just gave up and walked away out of shame, to be honest. I went diving. At least underwater you don’t have to listen to anyone’s bull****. I’d always loved being underwater as much as being on it and it was my main connection with the sea for most of the ‘80s. But I missed surfing badly. I lived in Europe for a couple of years and when I came home I moved to the country and went back to surfing and found a bit of that old vibe among the more intelligent fishermen who were my neighbours.

Looking back I think there were plenty of people like me. They really came out of the woodwork in the mid-’90s when fun returned to surfing. Some surfers were old enough not to care about being self-conscious. Others simply rebelled against the slavish conformity of the ‘sport’ and paddled out on weird craft and did nice things with them. Women returned, thank God, and little girls took to it in numbers unseen since the ‘60s. You paddled out and people in the line-up were actually smiling, talking to each other. The slit-eyed surf-punks were still out there, slashing and snarling and scowling, but they were no longer the only game in town.

For me surfing is about beauty and connectedness. Riding a wave to shore is a lovely, meditative thing to be able to do. You’re walking on water, tapping the sea’s energy without extracting anything from it. You’re meeting the sea, not ripping anything out of it. Few other water pursuits have this non-exploitative element. As a boater, fisherman, shell-collector or whatever, I’m always taking something away from the sea, having an impact on it. But as a surfer I’m riding energy that the sea is expending of its own accord, the way a dolphin or seal or sea-lion does. The actual physical sensation of sliding down a wall of water, feeling really awake and alive and in the moment, is hard to describe to the non-surfer. It looks beautiful and it feels beautiful. Knowing that you’re not doing any damage just makes the feeling better. For some men in particular, whose lives require a kind of utilitarian mindset that can be pretty unfulfilling, this is one of the few activities they undertake in which they can do something pointlessly beautiful. There’s no material result, nothing they can show themselves or the boss. There’s just a bit of a rush, an elevated heart rate, a buzz that lasts all the rest of the day.

hug-hes said...

Well done for the post wind warrior.

A brilliant piece of writing from a great writer.

Hopefully it may change the ‘locals only’ attitude of few on here.

It’s a big state with lots of water, lots of sea and lots of wind and it would be near on impossible for some of these spots to get overrun with newbies.