GAME ON’
The problem for me was, as is quite often the case, my over eagerness to get the biggest, sickest looking wave possible and try to get an insane shot straight away. No sniffing the place out, feeling my way around. I thought that after my couple of surfs there, I knew the wave pretty well and knew what to line up with on the beach to be in the right spot. What I hadn’t counted on though was the fact that when we were surfing there, due to the crowd of pro surfers, we were only able to get the smallest of waves that didn’t have that much shoulder and therefore didn’t have much of a barrel. Now we were on our own, so I just picked up the biggest bomb that I could find and decided to go really deep so I could get a nice picture in front of the epic barrelling wave. Mistake. I flew down the line on the wave, easily powered up on the 4.8 due to the apparent wind. When I reached the point where it looked like I should drop in to do a deep bottom turn, I did exactly that only to see the wave warp and distort as it bent itself around the reef and threw out a heavy 10 foot barrel about 5m in front of where I had dropped into it. I couldn’t believe the speed of the wave, and in the same second that I realized I couldn’t believe the speed of it, I also realized that I had no idea how to take a wipeout on such a big wave in such shallow water, so I just did the sensible thing and jumped off the board.