Kirra Miracle: Mark Mathews returns to surf!

Told he'd never surf again! Wraps himself inside Cyclone Gita!

One year and a half ago, the Sydney big-wave surfer Mark Mathews wrapped up his pro surfing career with a wipeout on an eight-foot wave that dislocated his knee, tore an artery, fractured a shin and ruined the nerves in his foot.

Doctors told him he wouldn’t surf again.

“I was lucky not to be a wheelchair,” he says.

Mark was working with the go-behind-photographer Leroy Bellet on a project for Red Bull. 

Leroy’s speciality is the double-tow where both photographer and subject are towed into the same wave, a technique pioneered by Laurent Pujol with his famous monkey-on-the-back angle. The pair were towed into an eight-foot ledge on the NSW South Coast. The wave went below sea-level, as the ledges Mr Mathews favours are prone to do, and he jumped off when the lip in front of him started to crumble. Mark was sucked over the falls and landed foot first on the reef.

“I thought my leg was broken,” says Mark, whose nickname “Chalk” references his innumerable injuries including a shoulder injury at Jaws that had kept him out of the water for the previous nine months. “I’d only just started surfing again.”

Mark was put in a full-body brace and taken by helicopter to hospital. Doctors told him he might lose his leg .

“The first op was an artery transfer. After the surgery the doc came out and told my girl he was sure I would keep my leg.”

But surf? Probs not.

Miracles? They happen.

Mark got the leg and, yesterday, got tubed for the first time in eighteen months. Fortuitously, Mark and his girlfriend, Britt, who is from Queensland, had moved to Kirra three days earlier.

The cost of living, the mostly shitty waves, ooowee, it gets a brother down. For a hundred bucks more than the rent he was paying to live in a small nineteen forties-built flat in Maroubra, he could have swinging luxury at Kirra, a sauna, gym and gun-barrel views straight into the Supabank.

On the Sunday, as Cyclone Gita flicked the switches, the frustration of watching other people get drained got the better of him and he took a longer-than-usual board out at Snapper to see if he could somehow drag himself onto his feet and into a tube.

“I shit myself and didn’t want to wipeout. I went over the falls three times and came in,” he says. “I was fucking salty looking at photos and footage of people getting pitted. I sat there on my balcony and watched Parko get ten after ten after ten.

That night, his ol pal Ryan Hipwood called him, told him to be at the West Tweed Head boat ramp at five-forty-five in the morning and he’d deposit, via step-offs, Mark into the first tubes he’d been near since October 2016.

“We came out on dark, we were the first ones out. I had some epic waves, most I didn’t make. On one I got lit up, smashed the bottom and my leg was sweet as. Fuck…yeah! When I got home I jumped on (weather forecasting site) buoyweather.com thinking, where are the waves, where can I get pitted again? I’m still fucked, and surfing so bad, but it was sick fun.”

How did it feel to see the world from the inside of a wave again?

“It felt like home,” he says.