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.
