Words: Tim Baker.

Photos: Russell Ord

One surf writer’s journey to the Margaret River Readers and Writers Festival and the humbling life lessons contained therein

It is fair to say that my photographic collaborator Russell Ord and I have different morning routines. This was never made more obvious to me than when I accepted his generous offer to take up residence in a vintage caravan on his bush block a stone’s throw from Main Break for the Margaret River Readers and Writers Festival.

            COVID had prevented Russ and I from physically being in the same place at the same time since we launched this whacky website venture over a year ago, so we’d got to know each other via Zoom calls and what’s app texts. I was keen to hang out, tap into Russ’s local knowledge and contacts to hunts waves and stories in one of my favourite stretches of coast in the country. But I hadn’t appreciated the dangerous company I was keeping.

            While Russ rose at 5:30 am, an hour before the first hint of sunlight, to train down at Margaret Rivermouth, running sand hills and holding his breath for ridiculous stretches underwater, I hid under the doona in the cosy van and pretended not to hear the throaty roar of his Landcruiser in the pre-dawn darkness. When I eventually stirred an hour or two later, it was to meditate then do a little free writing in my moleskin journal like some Zen literary geek. It was freezing outside, and I had no intention of going out there until the sun was high in the sky.

            When he returned home, I could hear Russ continuing his exertions, re-habbing a busted, post-surgery shoulder with a series of diligent exercises, then immersing himself in the frigid waters of a chest freezer he had re-purposed for his daily ice bath. He was a spartan warrior, an unflinching machine, and I was a bookish nerd hiding from the pounding southern Indian Ocean and the south-west’s endless chain of unforgiving reef breaks.

            At 56, I would claim old age as an excuse, except that Margaret River seems to be inhabited by the most superbly fit, over 60-year-old surfers with enormous big-wave guns and a daily commitment to ride anything the ocean throws at them, this side of Oahu’s North Shore. Even when I eventually ventured out to the local café to procure my morning soy latte I seemed to be surrounded by some sort of crazed super race – senior citizens blitzing their morning ocean swims without any need for thermal protection, young mums running the beaches, standup paddlers venturing to outer reefs, sinewy hikers traversing the marathon Cape to Cape walk like it was a gentle stroll, carrying all their provisions on their backs.

East coasters, I am here to tell you, we are wimps – soft, pampered, wilting flowers compared to the rugged ocean warriors of the west coast. Or maybe it’s just me. I found myself occupying a curious space as a surfing writer at a writers’ festival in the south-west, suffering imposter syndrome on both the surfing and writing front, lacking both the big wave bravado of my fellow surfers and the literary chops of my fellow writers.

The Margaret River Pro had just finished and while most folks assumed I was in town for the event, I delighted in arriving just as the contest machine was packing up and moving on to Rottnest Island. Even when I lobbed into town just as the final was going down in solid waves in front of a packed headland at Main Break, I deliberately avoided the contest site and headed straight to Lefties, which I recalled as one of the less threatening waves of the region for a welcome warmup surf. But this was a different beast altogether. It was crowded for a start, not just crowded for “Down South”, but proper crowded even by my hardened Gold Coast standards. The car park was full of the hulking four-wheel drives of hard core locals and the dilapidated backpacker vans of the dreadlocked Brazzos and Frenchies and Chileans who had chosen to ride out the pandemic in this relatively COVID-free, unspoilt natural wonderland. Ornate memorials to shark victims and cliff collapses stood ominously in the car park. This was an unforgiving coast and paddling out revealed more surprises.

I must have never surfed Lefties at this size before, because instead of playful peaks and inviting tubes, the larger sets were doing this entirely disconcerting doubleup routine, like a mini-Teahupo’o, or a fitness freak with plastic surgery – all lip and no bottom. It was terrifying, and all but impossible to get a wave. Scavenge around the inside for scraps and you risked copping the doubleups on the head. Wait for the sets and there was always someone braver and fitter and deeper spinning and launching over the ledge 50 metres further inside than my cowardly position on the shoulder.

As well as the smooth familiarity of the locals, pros Connor O’Leary, Owen Wright and Connor Coffin were belting the bejesus out of the things as if it were their local shorey. I took some minor comfort in overhearing the American Connor (as opposed to the Australian/Irish/Japanese Connor) confess that he’d ditched his board when caught inside by one of the nastier double ups. For one of the very few times in my surfing life, I paddled in without catching a wave, and made the long walk of shame back up the beach to the car park feeling like a total fraud. I had to redeem myself.

If I were to design a global surf travel itinerary, I would go everywhere the pro tour goes a week after they’ve been there. Because when the contest scaffolding is bumped out and the sponsors banners are rolled up and the fancy hire cars piled high with board bags roar out of town, the surf inevitably pumps. I have a theory, a product of magical thinking perhaps, that when you build a large contest structure on the beachfront it somehow repels surf, perhaps tilting tectonic plates off kilter to interrupt the arrival of swell. Sure, they had waves for the event but three days after it was all over and on the very day the pros were due to board the Rottnest Island ferry up in Perth to their next event, the real swell hit.

I’ve never gotten over the peculiar mix of excitement and terror that the arrival of a fresh, ruled-edged groundswell generates, even when I have no intention of meeting and riding the brunt of it. I try to convince myself that it is entirely reasonable, at my age and stage of life, to forego 10 to 12 foot Margaret River Main Break or Bombie or Boat Ramp. Yet I always feel like a piker as I scout out a more forgiving, user-friendly, protected corner. When Russ hitched up his jetski the night before in preparation for an assault on the outer reefs with his teenage son Kalani and asked if I’d be joining them, I could barely meet his gaze. “Ah, yeah, nah, probably not,” came my mumbled response.

Russ was beyond gracious. “Fair enough. You can’t expect to come over here from the east coast and just jump in the deep end,” he offered charitably. Now I understood what all that sand hill running and breath holding training was for.

I’d recently written an article for this very website about an organisation called Surfing Mums, which allows young mums to get their surf-time in by sharing child-minding duties and taking it in turns hitting the waves. I’d assumed a group of mild-mannered learners trimming on softboards, riding gentle peelers at some piddling kiddy corner, before retiring to a local café for their lattes and baby ‘cinos. Yet one of the women I’d interviewed Rio Clark, I later discovered, had been training with Russ with the express goal of surfing the Right, the fearsome outer reef slab Russ has made an art form of photographing. Even my condescending assumptions and stereotypes were out of their depth in the south-west.

While I skulked to the protected, rolling lefts of South Point, pinching waves off kids and the genuinely elderly, Rio was charging North Point, the freight train, shallow, rock ledge barrel, and complaining that the swell was too south and the waves too small and inconsistent.

The next day, as the swell dropped to what I deemed a safe level, I ventured out at Southside, the peaky right just south of Main Break, just for the relative ease of going right. This is where no less a surfer than the great Ian Cairns reckoned he prepared for surfing Sunset Beach in Hawaii back in the early ‘70s and I soon understood why.

Among the handful of locals negotiating the boils and ledgey, rearing take-offs I spotted none other than the Queen herself, the seven-time world champ Steph Gilmore, who carries herself with an effortless regal ease wherever she goes.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “Are you living here now?”

I explained I was here for a writers’ festival. This seemed to awaken her artistic curiosity.

“What happens at a writers’ festival?” she wanted to know.

Surf journalists, it needs to be said, are mainly glorified groupies, accepting the poor pay and job insecurity for the thrill of basking in the reflected glow of their wave-riding heroes. I scoured my mind for a witty reply, desperate to impress.

“Writers’ Festivals are sometimes described as a bunch of drinkers with a writing problem,” I wise-cracked, mining the oldest cliché in the writers’ festival lexicon and passing it off as original.  Steph chuckled and I felt inordinately pleased with my small victory.

When I found myself in position for a set wave just as Steph was paddling out, this same, childish desire to impress compelled me to overcome my natural instinct to pull back and instead hurl myself boldly and unsteadily over the ledge. All of a sudden, I was a small boy again trying to impress my mum on the beach at Cottesloe 45 years ago when I took my first tentative steps on the wave-riding journey during Summer holidays on a “Little Nipper” foamie.

“Steph is watching, I need to do a laid-over, committed bottom turn,” my infantile brain insisted, despite the boiling impact zone in front of me. I somehow managed to hold an edge as I leaned precariously on my inside rail, harnessed the speed of the drop and re-directed it back up the pitching face, yet completely out of control, colliding with the lip like a high-speed auto-wreck. Steph must have been extremely impressed … that a man who could apparently barely stand upright on a moving surfboard had paddled out at all. I went in rather than have to face her again.

At the writers’ festival I could pass myself off as the brave wave hunter, impressing the bookish, nerdy authors with daring tales of my morning adventures in the ocean, my nasal saline drip, my salt and sand encrusted hair. But while their CVs boasted of prestigious literary awards and international releases and best seller lists, my biggest flex was the dubious achievement of the Surfing Hall of Fame culture award, an honour I shared with a preposterous rogues’ gallery of semi-literate surf scribes and self-taught “filmmakers”.

And yet, I adored it all, the fumbling surfs, the mid-morning “gentleman’s earlies”, hosting author sessions with literary titans, going for dinner and drinks with a glorious cast of eclectic wordsmiths,  their witty repartee. These were the kids who would have been in book clubs and theatre groups back at school whom my sporty mates and I would have once mocked, but who turned out to be the truly cool kids.

There was wine and waves and ripping yarns of ancient mammoth skeletons and faded rock stars and jaded music writers and a shambolic session about a surf anthology with two of us live on stage, two authors joining us via Zoom and a pre-recorded clip from local surf hero Taj Burrow (about to make an inglorious return to competition at Rotto), and the multiple realities somehow melding and coalescing into a dazzling kaleidoscope.

The whole humbling, fumbling, hilarious experience left me determined to be a better writer, a fitter surfer, a less pathetic and self-deprecating human, with a more robust self-esteem unaffected by the mercurial vagaries of the ocean and publishing industry.

Yet, give me a lanyard, an airfare, a few free drinks, a diet of canapes, a vintage caravan in the bush and the chance to rub shoulders with my literary and surfing heroes and I’d do it all again in a heartbeat. Now, excuse me, I’m off to do some sandhill running and breath-hold training and procure myself a chest freezer.

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