Author: James Booth
Nick Carroll, talking about some big East swell, once wrote:
“I jumped into the rip, made it out, and for an hour and a half, I surfed knowing I was at the mercy of this swell, that in my eagerness, I’d walked straight down its throat, and now could only hope it wouldn’t swallow.”
I like to imagine him sitting stubbornly, chest hairs tweaking, locked in a battle of wills. Me? I fidget. Make excuses. Sprint for the channel every time there’s a set.
No sitting calmly on nature’s tongue for me.
However, after coming to grips with my loss of ‘almost local’ status at the pointbreak I used to live near and the flotilla of bodyboarders at every reef ever, I decided to buy a 7’6” Tommy Peterson, and hit up some deepwater.
Ignoring the advice I was given to “go out incrementally” and practice in medium waves beforehand, I took it out for the first time at Long Reef Bombie.
Long Reef bombie breaks over reef, but for some reason, is incredibly shifty. Every set seems to break in a different place.
This day it was working, but not ideal. Think: 10-15ft faces, crosshore, choppy. I’d never surfed any bombie before.
I smacked my head real hard just paddling over one. Felt kind of like I was on a boat.
From the headland you could see waves breaking out over a 1 kilometre from shore.
Rather than paddling out a bit north of the break my mate and I paddled over from Dee Why.
We assumed the swell would push us over from Dee Why to Long Reef in no time.
Nup. After getting caught inside at Dee Why in front of a good hundred people – me on my 7’6” fireball, him on a red 9’4” performance mal – we began.
If you’ve ever paddled from Dee Why to Long Reef on a mini gun – it makes you wish you had a proper gun.
For the first 20 minutes it felt like we were going nowhere. Every now and then random massive lines would break way out past even the German Bank (more than a kilometre out at sea). Most of them disintegrated and reformed into just lines by the time they got to us though.
The whole situation was also not helped by us alternatively panicking at getting caught inside (paddle out!) and getting sucked out to New Zealand (paddle in!).
The result? 45 minutes of zig zagging. Very tired arms.
Waves eventually started detonating in hearing distance. The inside ones were steep and ugly. Almost like wedges, which I thought was weird for a bombie. I had imagined big sweeping lines breaking right to left, in a somewhat consistent fashion. This was just chaos. I was too scared to paddle further outside (see: fears about getting sucked out to New Zealand), but those ones seemed flatter and even more chaotic. Random walls of whitewater etc. We stuck to the inside minefield of random massive wedges that broke in a different spot every set (or as Nick Carroll described it “mega-Sunset type peaks”).
On our way across, Dee Why surf club mocked us. Even three quarters of the way across it still somehow felt in line with us, like we hadn’t moved. An ugly yellow Mona Lisa.
Besides Dee Why surf club, no one was watching by the time we got across there. It was raining and grey. The crew that were there in the morning had gone home (I’m not 100% sure, but from reading this Surfline review of the swell, I’m almost certain Nick Carroll was out earlier this day on this 9’8″ board, the only difference being he was with his frothing world champion brother not a hungover mate who was dragged into it against his will, arrived late from the city and then insisted on eating a cooked breakfast before heading out, ruining the opportunity to surf before the wind picked up).
We’d seen a ski team on it (see the image above) when it was sunny around 8am but from about 9am it had gone overcast. We saw about 4 or 5 specs paddling The Bombie around 10 – 11am while we ate out bacon and egg rolls in Dee Why. Now, probably about 12 O-Clock, there was no one.
We were frothing in Dee Why, but shitting ourselves when we arrived at the Long Reef side of the beach. Two monster wedges rolled through. Then it went quiet for a bit. Between each set we bobbed a few metres closer to the ‘wedge’ zone, pulled by the direction of the swell.
My mate got a couple of thicc left hand wedges, got obliterated on both, came up laughing. No idea how his rusted old legrope didn’t break. I went for a couple and pulled back both times. Started getting pissed off that I had the specialised equipment, had organised the whole thing, had been surfing way more than him lately, and yet was the one not catching anything. Told myself I needed to just get more momentum. Start from a bit further out. Stop having to spin and go at the last minute.
Never before have I coveted a ‘performance’ epoxy mal. In fact I’ve actively mocked this particular piece of equipment many times, including one time when it flew off the roof of my mate’s car while he was driving over Narrabeen bridge, when he forgot to tie it down in the midst of trying to impress a girl.
Time went by. I felt more and more pressure to get a wave, but less and less likely to catch one. A group of 3 or 4 other paddlers also came out, most wearing inflatable vests and sporting 9’ guns. I realised having a mini gun is kind of pointless – you still can’t duckdive it, but you have less paddle power than a proper gun.
Anyway, these guys made us feel a bit like kooks. They sat in the ‘proper spot’ as we hung to the southern edge of the channel. They looked at us with bemusement. A set then cleaned them all up.
It took a long time for any of them to make it back out. Some never came back at all. Eventually it was just me and my mate again, bravely not catching anything.
Realising the longer I spent in my own head, the less chance I’d have of catching a wave, I finally forced myself to go on a fatter, white water from the outside, right hander kind of one. I got it, stood up, survived a couple of speed bumps, and got the reform all the way to the inside.
Full of, as Tim Winton would put it, “sheer f*ck off vindication”. I came in feeling like the brave stepson prodigy of Laird Hamilton and Shane Dorian. That’s right: anything* Nick Carroll can do on a specialised Nazare gun, I can do on a second hand 7’6″!
Oh and as for the board review, I’ve only stood up on it twice, so don’t have that much to say. The only other place I’ve used it is Deadmans, to little success. And as tempting as it is to say that it’s too small for Long Reef Bombie and too big for fitting under the lip at Deadies, it’s probably me that’s the problem. At Deadmans I only got one embarrassingly small one, and it felt ok on that, and then kicked out and almost flew into some kid’s head, who said “saw that coming a mile away.” Ffs.
*catching decent waves not included.
Cone Hunting 
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