Dave Rastovich practising his promised party
dress code for his sunglass sponsor Electric (in an advertisement
that appeared a few years ago). "I'd have to be naked. I'd pretty
much have to ask everyone else to be naked too. At the door you've
got the option of Barbarella, like some weirdness from the 60s or
70s, or just… nakedness."
Hypothetical: Rasta’s Nude Space Party
By Derek Rielly
What happens in space, stays in space, says
Rasta
The great misconception about the New Zealand-born
surfer Dave “Rasta” Rastovich is that he’s some kinda
pious deadwood. It’s a misread that makes me weep more than all the
children in the world.
What fun might you wring from the neck of an event run by
the thirty-five-year-old libertine?
Let’s investigate.
Where: On a space station. Everyone there
would be held captive – if you’ve got people prisoner, you’re
guaranteed time with people you want to be with, and you’re seeing
something that only a handful of people have ever seen. Like way,
way out, past our atmosphere and all the planets.
Interiors: It’d have to be a lot of
windows, and a lot of Hubble space telescopes, looking thousands
and thousands of light years away into other galaxies. The
telescopes would move around so you could see all through the
galaxy, and you could zoom in and go “Yeah, what about that distant
star?” and just trip out on that. It would also have a sound system
of sorts, beaming inside the station and also out, so you can
imagine it’d be going through the outer galaxies and back down to
Earth.
Theme: It would be Barbarella themed. It’d make a
great theme, there’s so many costumes and creatures and all kind of
things.
*Interviewers note: Barbarella is a 1968 film in which
Jane Fonda plays a “highly sexual woman” who is tasked with
rescuing Doctor Durand Durand from the planter Tau Ceti. Along the
way she discovers penetrative intercourse for the first time,
having only experienced sexual pleasure through pharmaceuticals,
and overloads the “Ex-sex-sive” machine, a torturing device which
kills through sexual stimulation.
Charity: I think it’d just have to be a
decadent gathering. Actually… you could use it to raise awareness
about planetary issues like climate change and deforestation,
because you’d get a perspective (from space) that not everyone on
Earth can get. For example, the Amazon – you can see all the run
off now. Deforestation has caused all the top soil to run out into
the river.
Music: Well, it’s my dream party… so I’d
have to have Jimi Hendrix play. Probably not even playing songs –
just jamming.
Special guests: As a short list –
Barbarella herself, and some big thinkers – Einstein, Nikola Tesla,
John Lennon, Ghandi. From the surfing world, Tom Blake, Duke
(Kahanamoku). Jesus – I’m sure if you brought Jesus onto a space
station, it’d be interesting.
Dress: I’d have to be naked. I’d pretty
much have to ask everyone else to be naked too. At the door you’ve
got the option of Barbarella, like some weirdness from the 60s or
70s, or just… nakedness.
Drank: The Kool-Aid from the Kool-Aid Acid
Test (A group of American activists put LSD in Kool-Aid, as part of
a bid to legalise the hallucinogenic). Back in the day, Timothy
Leary was the main proponent for political LSD testing. He was
kinda the frontman for psychedelia at that time. So he’d definitely
be behind the bar, serving it. There’d also be some super-health
elixirs. They probably wouldn’t need to be alcoholic or
hallucinogenic, everyone’d already be tripping, looking down at
Planet Earth from Space.
On the walls: There’d be screens all
around showing what the Hubble telescopes were looking at. That,
and the huge glass windows everywhere so you could see all
around.
Filmmaker for the night: Alby Falzon
(Australian-born filmmaker). We’d have to see the sun come around,
so we could get some kind of tripped-out, Morning Of The
Earth type thing.
Pals to hang with: I’d already be based on
the Russian Space Station, so I’d just drift across from that to
meet everyone.
Speech: Dave Chappelle.
Surprise guest: It’d have to be Miki
Dora.
After Party: No, I think it’d be good to
just keep going, and not come back down to Earth.
Sponsor: SETI – The Search For Extra
Terrestrial Intelligence Institute. Set up way back in the 60s,
with radioscopes and scanners and everything.
Party photographer: Nope. What happens in
Space, stays in Space.
Sex and love and beauty, in audio, by the noted
author Jamie Brisick…
(A note from Jamie Brisick)
I grew up among sexism and misogyny. Not from
my father — he’s a first-rate respecter of women — but from my
surfer pals. In 8th grade, Ronnie Merkel skated up to me
on the basketball court. He grinned sardonically.
“Where you been?” I asked.
He pulled his hand from his OP corduroy shorts pocket, brought
his fingers to my nostrils.
“Finger fucking!” he said, and burst into cruel laughter.
When I was 15 and starting to feel things, Steve, a 24-year-old
who I looked up to, told me to Never, ever, whatever you do don’t
do it! Never tell a girl you love her, for that will be the end of
you, Slick! (He called me Slick.) When I was 19 and trying to find
my way as a pro surfer, one of my heroes declared in a
Surfer magazine interview that “boards and broads don’t
mix.”
In the late-‘80s I read the book Diary of a Genius by
Salvador Dali. In it he regards his wife, Gala, with tremendous
love and admiration and respect. I appreciated this. I recognized a
similar yearning in myself, though I lacked the courage or the
trust or the right girlfriend to express it.
A few years later I saw Il Postino, the movie about the
Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. I couldn’t imagine a better way to spend
a life — writing love poems from high up on a hill. For most of my
twenties and thirties I gushed to great effect. I was fearless with
my heart. But I have since become more cynical, more terrified.
Most nights I shiver myself to sleep.
But occasionally it comes and washes over me, unfettered,
conditionless Garden of Eden love. It’s in these moments that I
mentally rehearse Valentine’s Day. We’re sitting on the stoop, the
late afternoon sky is clear. I present my girl with a lap-sized,
heart-shaped box. Chocolate, she thinks. She unties the bow, peels
off the lid, and out fly a dozen Purple Sapphire butterflies,
imported from West Bengal, India.
what secret knowledge is clasped between your
pillars?
What primal night does Man touch with his senses?
Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars,
through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain:
Love is a war of lightning,
and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.
Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity,
your margins, your rivers, your diminutive
villages,
and a genital fire, transformed by delight,
slips through the narrow channels of blood
to precipitate a nocturnal carnation,
to be, and be nothing but light in the dark.
Loading comments...
Load Comments
0
Restock! World’s Best Surf Trunks
By Derek Rielly
Want the world's best surf trunks? Here you
find!
We just had a re-stock of our Superlative Black Virgin Mary
surf trunks. Four extra pairs. Two in a 31-inch waist, two
in the 32-inch waist.
BeachGrit places a great deal of emphasis on surf trunks.
We believe that a pair of trunks must be flattering, a little
sophisticated, has some edge and follows these design
principles:
1. It is made from the soft cotton. Nylon is so… retro-future
don’t you think? Oh, it doesn’t dry as fast? Do you really care
enough to wear the same material factories use to manufacture
tents?
2. The leg is short. Do you really desire a muumuu?
3. Button flies. With custom buttons that announce the designer
(Rama McCabe) and the puppeteer (BeachGrit). Velcro
catches, zips corrode and threaten your vitals. Buttons? A
little extra work, at times, but as reliable as the continual
victory of capitalistic democracy over facism.
4. It must be designed by the best in the biz, in this case, a
Mr Rama McCabe, a Byron Bay-born surfer of impeccable style. How
else can we be assured of the perfect silhouette and detail?
Size-wise, they fit a little big. (Forget the other sizes in the
drop down menu, it’s either 31 or 32 only. Any questions
email [email protected].)
Surf rumors are very good and I have one that might
change your next board purchase. 11x world champ R. Kelly
Slater is said to be sniffing around Firewire and not just to ride
but to buy. Like, the whole company or at least part of it.
Our hero has always been very prog when it comes to his
hardware. He was an early adopter of removable fin systems, rode
his boards very undersized in very oversized surf and once carved a
chunnel in the bottom of his Merrick to make it a hydroplane racing
boat.
Firewire has been around for a while now and recently introduced
a new, greener surfboard technology called TimberTek which
includes…
“…The combination of a lightweight EPS core, sustainably-grown
wood deck skins, Firewire’s proprietary parabolic rail
construction, and anEntropy bio-resin hot coat yield an extremely
lightweight, durable surfboard with ALL of the high performance
flex characteristics of Firewire’s existing technologies. Even more
impressive, the physical properties of the raw materials involved
have allowed us to reduce exterior lamination significantly,
furthering the reduction of the board’s carbon footprint.”
????
A greener surfboard would definitely match Kelly’s elan. I once
rode Taj Burrow’s Firewire in Bondi but that was, like, lots of
years ago and I only remember thinking I was pretty cool for riding
Taj Burrow’s surfboard (thanks Sam McIntosh). But that was long ago
and now Taj rides for Matt Biolos.
If Kelly buys Firewire will you buy one too?
Loading comments...
Load Comments
0
(Excerpt) Derek Hynd on Westerly
Windina
By Derek Rielly
A taster of Jamie Brisick's remarkable new book
Becoming Westerly…
The book Becoming Westerly is released in Australia
today. It’s the rough-ride of the surf superstar Peter
Drouyn as he morphs into the top-tapping showgal Westerly
Windina.
It is the best work of Jamie Brisick’s career. His other books
include Roman and Williams Buildings & Interiors:Things We Made (Rizzoli, 2012), The Eighties at Echo
Beach (Chronicle, 2011), Have Board, Will Travel: The
Definitive History of Surf, Skate and Snow (HarperCollins,
2004), and We Approach Our Martinis with Such High
Expectations (Consafos Press, 2002).
The chapter extracted, below, is the second-last in the book in
which we find the author (a former pro surfer) under the spell of
the former pro surfer and writer (so many similarities!) Derek Hynd
in the Australian coastal town of Byron Bay.
“I wasn’t necessarily thinking my visit with Derek Hynd would
becoming a chapter in the book, I was merely catching up with an
old friend and going for a friction-free surf,” says Jamie. “But
Derek’s a rare individual, he’s way out there on a limb the way
Westerly is. He’s a fine specimen of what’s a big question in my
life: Where do you go with surfing in midlife and beyond? Derek’s
been a huge inspiration to me for decades. I learn from him. And
free-friction surfing is a great metaphor for the unanchored,
tenuous life that’s a big theme in the book.”
Free Friction
Derek Hynd rides boards with no fins, which means that
instead of a firm, reliable connection with the wave, he slides all
over the place, sometimes riding backwards for a spell,
often twirling into 360s. On the one hand it’s completely
childlike, an eight-year-old sliding down a snow hill on an inner
tube. On the other it’s laden with big metaphor: life is out of
control; wanna make God laugh, tell him your plans.
Derek personifies both extremes. In the water he is playful,
fishlike, a slave to the slide. On land, over a cold beer, he
pontificates and philosophizes, he is the quintessence of the
thinking man’s surfer. His boards are sculptures, albeit functional
sculptures. Like Michelangelo’s “Every block of stone has a statue
inside of it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it,”
they are forever works-in-progress. He’ll start with a big plank,
test pilot it in the surf, make mental notes, hack away at it with
chisels and files, ride it again, make more mental notes, make more
hacks, and on it goes. They’re crude. Grooves and gutters and
channels feed out the tail, beads of resin stripe the rails. If
Fred Flintstone had surfed his boards might have looked something
like these.
Derek does not own a cell phone, so when I arranged to meet him
in Byron Bay it’s done via email.
Looks like a tiny surf but a surf nonetheless.
See you at The Pass at 3pm –
I’ll be under the shady trees on the new grass by the boat
ramp.
I’ll bring a board – of sorts.
The drive from Labrador to Byron Bay takes a little over an
hour. I had plenty of time on my hands so rather than get straight
on the Pacific Highway I decided to hug the coastline from
Broadbeach to the Queensland/New South Wales border. For me, the
trip was a sort of revisiting of my teens. JJJ may have been
playing the latest alternative rock, but in my head I heard
Sunnyboys, Hoodoo Gurus, Mi-Sex, Lime Spiders, GANGajang, and, of
course, Jimmy and the Boys’ “Dr. Cairo,” a song about an M-to-F
transgender that now, fully immersed in Westerly World, feels
weirdly prescient: His name was Wayne/Now it’s Jane; When the knife
wipes/Scraps are thrown out/Unwanted pieces down the spout; I’ve
got to get to Cairo for my operation
The previous year I’d had a Holy fuck, you’re getting old!
moment with JJJ. At 6 am I was driving from a friend’s place in Uki
to Westerly’s. I turned on the radio and got sucked into a debate
about education. A male voice—urgent, fabulous enunciation—spoke
about a national vision and a national curriculum.
“And that was Peter Garrett,” said the DJ when it finished.
Midnight Oil Peter Garrett? Yes. He’d become a cabinet
minister.
I remember seeing them play the Whiskey-a-Go-Go in 1983. At
6’4”, Peter Garrett is already a tall man, but on stage—veins
bulging from his shiny cranium, monster left hand with splayed,
reaching fingers—he was sixteen feet tall. He sang about U.S.
Forces, world history, the great survival mechanism that is having
a short memory. Prancing across the stage on tip-toes as if
sneaking up on a sleeping animal, he sang about the outside world.
If Barton Lynch and Cheyne Horan and Richard Cram and Gary “Kong”
Elkerton were ushering me into higher self-mining in the water,
then the bald, blade-handed, politically-erudite Peter Garrett was
spurring my intellectual curiosity. The message: You can shape your
life into whatever you want. What does that same inspiration look
like at age 50? I wondered.
Gold Coast point breaks peel from right to left. Rabbit once
joked that he’s “got a crook neck, can’t look left,” which was his
excuse for dropping in on fellow surfers. At Burleigh Heads I
watched a set of chest-high waves cascade across the shallow
sandbank. At Currumbin at least 100 surfers dotted the point, but
nary a breaker in sight. Kirra more resembled a long rock pool than
the spot that dazzled my imagination in the 1976 film In Search of
Tubular Swells. Bathers leapt off the groyne and swam languorously
down the point. Dads walked their water-winged children into the
big turquoise. Superbank—the sandbank that ties together Snapper
Rocks, Greenmount, and Rainbow Bay—looked ridiculously fun. The
head-high waves zippered machine-like under the blindingly bright
sun. It elicited thirst. It was like something you gulp down in a
hurry.
It created its own traffic. Cars with boards on the roof
puttered, turning signals ablink, searching for parking spots.
Surfers changed alongside their cars, a yard sale’s worth of gear
spread about the sidewalk. Bare-chested grommets scampered across
the road, logo-bedecked thrusters under arm. Cyclists overtook
joggers, joggers trotted past power walkers, power walkers shuffled
around leisurely strollers.
I passed the Tweed Heads apartment building where
twenty-six-year-old, five-time world champion Stephanie Gilmore
lives. In 2010, Stephanie—fresh-faced, innocent, eternally
smiling—was walking up the steps to her place when a homeless man
attacked her with an iron bar. According to news reports, the
assailant, Julius Sterling Fox, twenty-seven, “was suffering from
paranoid schizophrenia which was worsened by homelessness, cannabis
and heroin abuse and a failure to take anti-psychotic medication.”
Luckily, Stephanie got away with only a fractured wrist and a cut
to the head. On Ten News: “Locals believe a widening wealth gap in
the area has sparked increased violence, sometimes deliberately
aimed at surfers.” Oh, the stupefying irony! In Peter Drouyn’s
heyday, and for the latter third of the 20th century,
the Gold Coast was where surfers came to drop out, live on the
dole, and surf their way into great joy and deep poverty. Now the
surfers are the ones in the shiny SUVs with big houses on the
hill.
I arrived in Byron Bay right on time. The streets were packed
with tourists. The Great Northern Hotel advertised a gig with the
Sunnyboys.
In the late sixties, Vietnam War kicking off, shortboard
revolution in full flight, hits of orange sunshine dissolving on
the tongues of many an ace Aussie surfer, a movement known as
“Country Soul” emerged. Disenchanted by city life, surfers moved to
the northern NSW coast, settling in old cottages in Angourie,
Lennox Head, and chiefly Byron. The living was cheap and
stress-less. The waves were so good you could center your whole
life around them. Much has changed in the last half century—crowds,
real estate hikes, retro hipsters making a travesty out of the
whole enterprise—but vestiges of genuine Country Soul still exist
around these parts.
Flicking across the radio, I found a local station. “Step Right
Up” by Van Morrison played, and for a moment it seemed as if the
sights out my car window could be the song’s video: a braless,
dreadlocked woman, flowers in the basket of her pushbike, pedaled
across the crosswalk; a Nimbin tour bus, spray-painted psychedelic
like the Merry Pranksters’ “Further” bus, rolled down the street;
an unwashed hitchhiker stood on a corner, a stoned glaze over his
bearded face.
I found Derek on a low wood railing under a pandanus tree, eyes
fixed on The Pass. Waist-high waves of light turquoise crashed
against the headland and winded down the point. There was something
anachronistic about the scene, every surfer on a longboard,
wetsuitless, riding in hood ornament fashion. It looked like the
late fifties.
Derek’s greeting was the same coldish one I’ve known for nearly
thirty years. No hugs, no exuberant great to see yous, little eye
contact, just a “Hi Jim” (he calls me Jim) and a limp handshake.
“It’s not looking so good,” he said, referring to the waves.
Derek’s hair was long and tangled. He wore a white T-shirt that
draped loosely over his wiry torso, black knee-length boardshorts,
and no shoes. He has the short, knock-kneed legs of a lead
guitarist who mid-solo drops seamlessly to the floor, say Hendrix
or Prince.
In front of us a couple of bush turkeys pecked at the grass. A
few seconds later a goanna, gnarled and ancient-looking and about
two-feet long, dawdled past. It took its time, paid no mind to us
sitting just a surfboard’s length away.
“He’s a local,” said Derek. “I haven’t seen him in at least two
years.”
It crawled across the grass and across the boat ramp as if it
were a crosswalk. A sunburned surfer, exiting the water, stopped
and watched. After the goanna disappeared into the bushes he
continued on, looked at us.
“We don’t get much of that in England,” he said with an English
accent.
“That was the Byron Bay version of The Beatles’ Abbey Road
cover,” said Derek.
The English surfer laughed.
A sturdy, Hawaiian-looking girl walked up, dripping wet from the
surf, powder blue longboard under arm. Derek and her were pals. He
introduced us. Her name was Izzy.
They talked about mutual friends, the best burrito in Byron Bay,
and sharks. Judging by their nonchalant tone, it seems they see
sharks pretty regularly at The Pass. Derek talked about a shark he
actually had a name for—“Wobbegong”—that rides waves the way
dolphins do. Izzy said she sees schools of sharks, and recently
paddled way outside the break to warn a pair of unsuspecting
swimmers of the dangers lurking below.
“One afternoon I paddled out, took off on a wave, looked down
and saw this shark right under me,” she said. “I rode to shore and
thought, ‘That’ll be my surf for the day!’ I drove home with dry
hair.”
“How big was it?” I asked.
“Bigger than my board,” she said.
Her board was 10’6”.
Derek and I decided to pass on the surf. We drove into town to
the Mexican takeaway place he and Izzy had talked about. We took
Derek’s mustard yellow van, a 1981 Toyota HiAce. The back was full
of surfboards and a box of shaping tools. Hanging from the roof was
a military coat and a dress shirt, should Derek go from the surf
onto, say, a nice dinner. On the dashboard was a little stick
figure made of dreadlocks Derek pulls from his hair. At my feet was
a packet of flea bombs and a surf leash. Hi-Lux rode half on my
lap, half on the center console. Traffic moved slowly. Probably one
in five cars had surfboards on the roof, and that’s not counting
the ones that rode inside. In the last decade Byron Bay has
exploded into one of the world’s great surf destinations. It’s
beginner friendly—the water’s warm, the waves are soft. Artists and
fashionistas love it. The lineup at The Pass is full of pretty
girls.
We got two large burritos each (one chicken, one vegetarian, “My
shout,” insisted Derek) and drove back to The Pass. Derek parked in
what I would learn is his usual spot: under a canopy of trees on a
verdant little side street. He got out, dropped a towel on the
pavement, and sat down on it. I joined him. Into the burritos we
wolfed, chunks of tortilla and rice and beans falling on the
leaf-strewn ground. We were like something you’d have seen in the
parking lot of a Grateful Dead show, circa 1974. Derek is
vehemently anti-drug, but he can be stonerish in his trippy quirks,
his rose-sniffing digressions.
“A little Hercules,” he said, pointing to the pavement.
An ant carried a flake of tortilla at least three times its
size.
The chicken burrito was better than the vege; the chicken was
charbroiled and crunchy at the tips, the vege was bland. Derek sat
with his knees tucked into his chest, the way a child watches
cartoons. For as long as I’ve known him he’s surprised me with his
elasticity, his freakishly loose and electric movements (he dances
spasmodically, like Ian Curtis from Joy Division). We chewed in
silence, me in awe of Derek, Derek in awe of the tortilla-hoisting
ant. Birds chirped in the trees. A butterfly flitted above our
heads. Derek put his hand on my calf.
“Watch out for the little guy, Jim,” he said, nodding at the
moving flake of tortilla, which was now within dangerous proximity
to my foot.
In the golden sunlight, passing beach cottages and cyclists and
dog walkers, I followed Derek back to his house in Suffolk Park. It
was a two-bedroom prefab, bare bones and lackluster. We pulled
along the side and around the back and parked in the crabgrass.
Derek, it turns out, lives not in the house but in an adjacent
shipping container that doubles as sleeping quarters/surfboard
laboratory. He unlocked the bolted door, flicked on a light. It was
densely packed. Two-thirds of the windowless shoebox consisted of
stacks of pillows and rugs topped with a tatami mat—his bed. The
other third was a mess of boxes, tools, wetsuits, and boards short
enough to stand in the corner of the low-ceiling space. From the
roof hung his longer boards.
“You can sleep in here,” he said, opening the rear down to
ventilate the space.
“Where are you going to sleep?”
“I’ll sleep in the car,” he said, pulling a mosquito net from
behind one of the boards.
He set up my bed then went outside to set himself up in the van.
I followed. The sun had just gone down, the backyard was cast in
shadow, you could smell the ocean just a few blocks away. He pulled
the boards out. Underneath was a cushion.
“You sure you’ll be OK sleeping here?” I asked.
“I do this all the time,” he said.
He arranged pillows and blankets, hung the mosquito net over the
cushion. He pulled out a rolled-up kilim, spread it out on the
ground, and fed Hi-Lux on it, scraping every last fleck of food
from the tin. I asked him where he got Hi-Lux. He looked up to the
stars.
“When Tony Abbott became prime minister I had to go for a drive
to find out if Australia still existed. I had to go out and touch
the earth.”
He went on a tirade about how horrifically conservative
Australia has become. He delivered his words in a way that felt
final, indisputable. He talked about his cross-country trip.
“That’s where I picked up this girl,” he said, nodding at
Hi-Lux. “Hi-Lux was a junk yard dog in Halls Creek, in WA. She
slept under the shade of a Ford Hi-Lux.”
When Hi-Lux was finished eating Derek strapped a surf leash to
his collar. “We’re going to go on a little walk-y, Jim. See you in
the morning.” They walked off into the darkness. I lay down in
Derek’s bed. It was awfully hot in the shipping container, despite
the fan on full-blast. The smell of resin and surf wax reminded me
of my teenage bedroom. I kept a little wooden box full of wax on my
desk (banana or coconut or, later, in the mid-eighties, bubble
gum). My boards, stacked regally in the corner atop a pillow to
protect the tails, were forever being fixed with marine resin—the
nicks and chips and spider dings. Marine resin has a strong, brain
cell-killing chemical smell. I thought about Derek’s passion, how
he can talk at length about a single ride he’d gotten ten years
ago, how at age fifty-six he still travels halfway across the world
to chase a swell. I looked up to the brightly colored boards
hanging above my head. They were like a mobile in a baby’s crib. I
was tempted to touch them, spin them, suck on a tail.
In the late seventies Derek was ranked in the Top 16. His
knock-kneed carves and zingy 360s featured prominently in surf
magazines and movies. He had a reputation for being a shrewd,
merciless competitor. He was vying for a spot in the Top 5 when the
tour rolled into Durban for the 1980 Hang Ten International.
Derek held a solid lead in his crucial quarterfinal against the
gentlemanly Mike Savage of South Africa. He took off on a glassy
waist-high wall and proceeded to tear it apart. In the shorebreak,
as the wave dashed across a shallow bank, he pumped his orange and
yellow twin fin with all his might. Suddenly he was on dry sand. He
jumped off running, as if from a skateboard, his urethane leash
stretching taut behind him. When he turned around the tail of his
cocked board leapt at him. He saw a flash of orange and yellow and
felt a horrific pain in his left eye.
Knowing that he was seriously injured, but knowing also that if
he held his opponent off the good waves he could still win the
heat, Derek paddled back out. He sat as close to Savage as
possible. Savage was forced to look at him. The ooze running down
his face was not blood. And while another man might have responded
to Savage’s recoil by going into shock, Derek was hoping it would
work the other way around. He moved in closer. Only after Savage
and water photographer Paul Naude screamed at him to go in did he
do so.
Derek was rushed to hospital and taken straight in to surgery.
He had severed his optic nerve. There was no recourse. Two days
later he stepped out on to the street with a patch, countless
stitches, and a glass eye.
He returned to competition the following year and finished
7th—the first one-eyed surfer in ASP history.
Disillusioned by poor judging and a system he was at odds with, he
retired from competing, but continued on tour, this time as a
coach/journalist. As a coach he employed a heavily tactical
approach, and took great pleasure in watching lesser surfers
outsmart giants. As a journalist he wrote snappy, contentious
pieces that often enraged the pros in question. His column in
Surfing World was called “Hyndsight” and bylined with a Cyclops
logo.
I met Derek in 1986 on my first trip to Australia. He was an
anomaly amid the pro surfing community. He read fat Russian novels,
had friends outside the “Bro-muda Triangle” (you get sucked into
the surfing whirl, you never get out). For a couple years he was my
coach, but mostly he was a mentor, feeding me books, reading me
aloud his dispatches from the pro tour. Had the Peter/Westerly
story emerged during Derek’s writing heyday, I suspect he’d have
been all over it.
For a few years Derek drifted away from actual surfing and into
the marketing side of things. He worked on advertising campaigns
for Rip Curl, came up with the IS Tour, an alternative contest
circuit. For a while he worked from an office in suburban
Warriewood, had an actual desk with memos and a calendar and a
Rolodex, kept regular office hours. But his pilgrimages to Jeffreys
Bay—one of the world’s great waves, in South Africa—won over. He
started experimenting with strange and vintage boards, putting in
marathon sessions, finding oneness with the water. His hair grew
long and unkempt. He wore shoes less often. The weight of adulthood
seemed to wash right off him.
He turned his back on the commercialized surfing world. In 2006,
in what might be a seen as a kind of surrender, he started riding
finless (or, as Derek insists, free friction). I’m fascinated by
Derek because he challenges my perceptions of the surfing life.
Most of the pros that have had successful middle years have done so
by, as Mark Richards put it, “expanding their horizons.” I moved to
New York because I was beginning to feel surfing’s diminishing
returns. I can remember reflexively running to the beach every
morning in my late twenties and feeling a sense of dread. If the
surf was good and my friends were there it was uplifting, but on
flat days my empty life was reflected back at me.
Derek, meanwhile, has burrowed his way deeper into it; a kind of
regressing that has miraculously almost de-aged him. He is the only
surfer of his generation who is actually improving. In a YouTube
video that got a lot of play a few years back, Derek flies across
the freight-train waves of Jeffreys Bay, drifting sideways at long
length, spinning drawn out 360s that last for several seconds,
exulting in his rubbery, pouncing low crouch. It inspired me and it
sparked the seedlings of midlife crisis. When I heard that Derek
and a twenty-three-year-old had fallen in love, a surfer girl, an
occasional finless rider in fact, I thought, Ah, makes perfect
sense.
We woke at dawn, drove to The Pass. Hi-Lux rode on my lap. Along
the way we passed a golf course, a jam-packed corner café, a
towheaded grommet peddling swiftly on his pushbike, board under
arm. The sky was pale blue, the trees aglow in amber light.
“It’s jazz, Jim,” said Derek, a way of introducing what was to
be my first free friction surf session. “Good friends of mine
basically lead the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Anyway, the deputy
chair, her brother, Osmo Vänskä, came up with the Far Field Theory,
which is the physics construct of what happens at the point of
infinity when it is reached by particles. There’s a mass
scattering, before everything is in chaos. Just before the wall is
hit, everything comes in and enters in perfect harmony. So that’s
the feeling of free friction surfing to a great degree. And I think
it applies to life and death also.”
We parked in Derek’s spot, got out. The air smelled fresh and
earthy. A symphony of birdsong played overhead. Derek opened the
rear gate, pulled out his 11’6”, handed it to me. It was a faded
lemon yellow color, plankish. The tail had crude channels and
grooves carved into it.
“Let the board lead, just give over to it,” he said. “May be
wise to ride prone on your first couple to get the feel.”
“Aren’t you coming out?”
“I’m going to take Hi-Lux for a little walk-y first.”
I took to free friction surfing fairly easily. The rudderless
feeling was akin to sliding down a snow hill on an inner tube (“If
free friction was an Olympics sport, it’d be in the winter
Olympics,” said Derek). With a fin(s), the nose of the board is
always pointing the way forward. Not so on Derek’s board, which
would just as happily go sideways or backwards. The waves worked in
my favor: waist-high, super-forgiving crystalline rollers over a
shallow sandbar. Derek’s thick, long, heavy board mowed across the
flats like an ocean liner. Rides carried on for what felt like
minutes, a surging swell backing off then reconnecting, the wall
wrapping machine-like down the point.
Derek paddled out. I watched him high-line along a tiny peeler
that grew. He rode so low it was more like sitting. As the wave
sectioned he aimed the nose at the crumbling lip and drifted
sideways at great speed. It reminded me of the rock ‘n’ roll slides
we did on skateboards in our early teens. I felt a burst of
vicarious stoke, let out a whoop that sounded more like a
giddy-up.
A few minutes later Derek paddled up. “Tell me about your best
wave, Jim,” he said, prayer hands rested on the nose of his board.
The surface was all shimmers and diamonds. Derek repressed a
smile.
“Well,” I said. “I took off on what was a tiny little foamy
thing, and it reeled along the sandbar, and I dropped to low tuck,
almost parallel-stanced. And the tail released, and I wanted to
grab onto something, like when you’re sliding down a steep hill,
you want to grab a shrub or a branch or something. But that’s
what’s so cool about the feeling, it challenges all those learned
reflexes. And then the drift let up and I was mowing forward, still
in a low crouch. And no bullshit, Derek, I farted! I let out a
full-on fart! I don’t think I’ve ever farted while riding a wave
before. And then I thought, I just farted while riding a wave, a
sort of meta-moment. And then it got steep again, and the drift
kicked back in, and I slid my way shoreward, almost backward, for
the rest of the ride. You know that famous Shaun Tomson quote about
time being suspended when you’re in the tube? Well time is
definitely suspended when you’re riding finless.”
“Free friction, Jim.”
“But the magic was that weightless, giddy feeling. It’s like
when you go over a hump at high speed in a car, it’s kind of
orgasmic.”
“Daytona 500,” said Derek, elbows on board, hands a pair of
blades. “The leading car, the green car, at best a meter behind the
four others. It’s doing about 199 miles an hour, and it lost it on
one of the speed banks, and it started going like that.” Derek’s
hand slides sideways above the water. “From half a mile away I
could see it put a faint gap on the rest of the field, in losing
all the friction. That made me just go, Fuck! How was that? I
wonder what it’d be like to drift a board?”
We surfed for a couple of hours. The water was bathtub warm. The
sun was hot on our backs. Every out-of-control sideways drift on
Derek’s board felt like a lesson from a Zen master.
I spent three days with Derek in Byron Bay. Each morning was the
same: drive to The Pass, park under the trees, surf in the soft,
balmy, cradling waves, discuss the giant philosophical and
spiritual connotations of free friction wave riding on the walk
back up to the car, hang about Derek’s van for a while, usually
sitting directly on the warm pavement.
Derek would change out of his wetsuit and wring it out at the
bottom of a steep driveway. He’d watch the rivulets of water
(rivers, metaphors, nothing is without higher significance when
you’re with Derek), follow them as they wrap around grooves in the
cement, cheer on the little surges.
One late morning, dripping wet from a long surf, ambling back up
to the car, Derek asked what it was like hanging out with
Westerly.
“She’s the most narcissistic person I’ve ever come across,” I
told him.
“How so?”
“Well, since I arrived it’s been all about her voice. She
believes that it’s divined that she’ll become a famous singer, and
so every conversation begins and ends with her voice. It’s as if
she’s Judy Garland and tomorrow night she’s got a sold out show at
Carnegie Hall.”
Derek talked about Peter’s surfing achievements. “The
breakthroughs at Sunset, the big wave at Bells in ‘67—I think he
went right down through Winki and walked all the way back, making
the comeback post-Wayne Lynch as the ultimate visionary.”
We walked in the shade of trees, cars stacked with boards
passing slowly on our left.
“You couldn’t get a greater pinnacle than the Stubbies. That was
enough to step back and be satisfied for life,” he said.
I told Derek that Westerly’s both proud of and embittered by
Peter’s surfing history, that she often doesn’t want to talk about
it.
“Westerly Windina,” said Derek. “In Australia, on the eastern
seaboard, the westerly wind rules all. It’s as if she’s saying,
‘Hear me, for I am the westerly wind blowing.’”
“I didn’t know this.”
“Yeah. The westerly’s a clearing wind. It clears away all the
humidity.”
“Sounds like our girl.”
“Does she still surf, Jim?”
“Oh, yeah. Really well. Perfect positioning, great style. And
she rides every wave right up to the sand.”
Derek laughed. “Perhaps Peter’s sex change is the ultimate
metaphor for draining himself in the sand.”
We arrived back at the van. Derek opened the passenger door and
out climbed a very happy Hi-Lux. He scratched her back, soothed her
with that private language they share. Hi Lux’s tail wagged. She
licked Derek’s salty hands. He looped the surf leash through her
collar and fastened it to the side mirror. He grabbed his towel,
dried off.
“What does Westerly dream about?” he asked.
“That’s a really great question.”
“Are her dreams female?”
“I’ve never asked about her literal dreams. Most of our
conversations involve the showcase finale.”
I explained to Derek what the showcase finale is, how it came
about, the comical proportions it’s taken on. He listened intently,
head canted slightly sideways, brow creased. With his knotted hair
and wiry frame he camouflaged into the trees behind him.
“Could he get it up?” he asked.
“No clue.”
A cockatiel shrieked from a high branch. Dappled yellow light
showered down on Derek and Hi-Lux.
“Maybe he fucked himself out and couldn’t get it up
anymore.”
I laughed.
“What?” he said, serious-faced.
“Fucked himself out,” I said.
“He very well might have.”
“I’ve just never heard it put that way.”
Derek wrapped his towel around his waist and shimmied out of his
boardshorts. He picked up his 11’6’ and slid it into his van.
“How big was his dick?” he asked.
“Never saw it.”
Well, it’s not too late to ask the surgeon, Jim.”
Derek grabbed his other board, shorter, narrower, a pleasing,
soft sky blue color. He ran his hands over the grooves in the tail.
He talked about his commitment to friction free surfing, how he’s
been willing to give everything else up in order to explore it.
“I can really relate to Westerly in that respect, to fully
embrace a concept and run it from the conceptual to the completely
physical and then beyond to as far as it can possibly go.” He slid
the board in the van. “Surfing has become the most conservative
activity. The herd mentality has just imploded the lifestyle.” He
shrugged, held out an upturned hand. “Where is everyone? Where is
the individuality that spawned the Stubbies? ‘Cause without a lot
of people thinking that way, the Stubbies never would have been
born.”
Derek scooped up his wetsuit, shuffled over to the steep
driveway.
“The age of explorers is perhaps somewhere in the
19th century. I don’t know what happened to society to
dumb it down so much. Maybe it was sport. Maybe it was family.
Maybe drugs have dumbed down people’s need to explore, which is an
irony. At any rate, it’s always interesting to find another
explorer out there, because they’re increasingly rare.”
He held his wetsuit above his little raceway and wrung it out.
The saltwater streamed down the pavement. It bumped into a rise and
bifurcated, one rivulet much thicker than the other.
“Ah, look Jim, it’s on, it’s a race.” He cheered for the little
one. “Go, go, go, go, go!”