Rocking off is one of the greatest elements of the
surfing life and perhaps the only true method that exists of
delivering cosmic justice to the VAL hordes.
We missed a trick after the recent footage was released
of our VAL pal getting himself involved in a slow motion
trainwreck on the north side of Sydney harbour.
It called for a long overdue essay on the rock jump,
even if author Chas Smith
in a recent Dirty Water podcast (mis) identified it as a
mostly Australasian phenomena.
Rocking off is one of the greatest elements of the surfing life
and perhaps the only true method that exists of delivering cosmic
justice to the VAL hordes.
With the “democratisation” of tuberiding at Kelly Slater’s Surf
Ranch the rock-off remains the one thing that cannot be celebrity
faked or bought.
Some first principles can be elucidated.
A war on rocks, like a war on drugs, is unwinnable.
Therefore, efforts to arm yourself against mishaps and accidents
are self defeating.
Booties are a particular abomination.
Cuts heals, broken bones knit, shame is a much more persistent
affliction.
The rock-off is where the unstoppable force meets the immovable
object, at least on a human time scale.
The explosive energy released when wave hits a rock ledge allows
for tremendous drama. You can be vertical one second, ten feet in
the air the next. Knocked over like a ten pin.
Nothing offers such a visual feast as the sight of human beings
getting fucked over on a botched rock jump.
Of course, I don’t take (much) pleasure in seeing people get
hurt and for the most part the ocean remains very kind to a botched
rock offer.
Missing fins, cuts, maybe a broken bone is the usual size of
it.
How does the VAL proceed?
Slowly, then quickly, or not at all. A walk of shame is no shame
at all if the mind can’t figure out what to do.
And what the mind has to figure out is how to construct a mental
map of reality and then formulate a plan to navigate that map in
between waves.
In layman’s terms: pick a path, walk it, then jump.
It’s a dance move, essentially.
Choreographed to the millimetre.
Like every dance you don’t stop till the music stops and the
music don’t stop until you’re in the water.
The common VAL mistake is to choke halfway through the
dance.
You gotta move and keep moving.
Counter-intuitively, moving forwards, towards the apparent
danger, is usually safer. If in doubt, jumping of some description
is almost always the best option.
The worst option is freezing or attempting a late flee like a
wounded animal.
Don’t do that.
I got caught flat-footed when asked on Dirty Water
about botched rock-offs.
My phone was flooded with texts reminding me of epic fails,
including one from my cuzzy bro, which I think serves a purpose to
share.
We get a certain type of day here in late autumn, deep fall if
you like.
Grey, cold with a massive swell from a close range storm. In
this case, twelve-to-fifteen-foot at Lennox Point. A rock-off up
there with the most heinous.
Three foot of foam covering rocks, walls of whitewater smashing
in, six-foot sidewinders, thirty-yard suck-outs, total detonations
on dry rock.
Horror show.
You don’t want to look at it because it’s ugly but you have to
look to figure it out.
I’d borrowed my Bribie pal’s board, a prized 8’5” Brewer gun
he’d dragged back from Hawaii.
He’d loaned it under extreme sufferance.
During the transaction we rolled up and got on the end of one
too many. May, as well as being prime time for big surf, is also
harvest season and while the local bush bud doesn’t have the
knock-out of the hyge it still packs a punch for a lightweight like
me.
So, I’m standing on the rocks, greening out. Thinking a little
spell in the foetal position under the pandanus might be in order,
but walking forwards instead, through foam to rocks I knew were
there.
A big drain-out, step, step, hop, hop.
Now a wall of water is coming, step, step (a little slip) then
jump. Sailing in the air, over the top of the oncoming wall of
whitewater.
The forward momentum stopped.
I’m going backwards at the same speed I went forwards.
Huh?
I’ve bunjee jumped.
The fucking legrope is caught around a rock.
Now, I’m in the worst place in the world.
Looking up I see my pal. He looks very, very unhappy.
I get hit and smeared across the rocks.
My cuzzy bro is laughing.
I try and sacrifice my arse and hold the board up. I get pushed
up the rocks then dragged down. Pushed up again, banged up all
over.
Dragged, pushed, rolled. Hit. Hit many times.
And my pal is yelling,“Get the fuck off there!”
Well, I would if I could y’see.
I got a little break, put the feet down, felt that fine hot
slice of barnacles through skin and jumped.
Out. No longer greened out. And the strategy had worked. I was
bloodied, but the Brewer was intact.
Well, it creased later on when my pal rode it, which he blamed
on me, but that was never proven.
Of course, when it comes to surfing rocky coastlines, what goes
up must come down.
I think Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bill Finnegan takes
the cake here.
In his memoir Barbarian
Days he describes a session at Jardim do Mar in
giant surf that goes very, very wrong when he and his pal are
forced into a night-time exit from the ocean onto dry land, being
smashed by walls of whitewater into a seawall and emerging half
dead onto a mossy boat ramp.
Finnegan then details getting his balls memorably busted in the
post-surf debrief by an elder Portuguese lady who accuses him of
having “no respect for your family and friends… no respect for
the generations of fishermen who have risked their lives to feed
their families”.
It does sound a bit overwrought and scripted to be true, but
even if it’s apocryphal it still tells a story of how rattled
Finnegan was, of how he saw himself reflected by the local
culture.
Have I persuaded, via this guide, a single VAL to abandon the
noble art of rocking off?
Put your hand up, no-one will judge.
Well, that’s good.
And also bad, because it’s the best live entertainment going in
this strange Covid time.
Rock-off stories below, pls.
