Hippie Beatniks and Me

Km Driven: 7074

This is a picture of me at the eastern-most point of Australia, so that is the closest that I can be to you guys. Well, I was in the water and I paddled a bit further out to surf and technically that was the closest that I could be to home. But on land that is the eastern-most tip of Australia. And if I didn't look like an absolute serial killer in that photo then maybe it'd be nicer. Moving on!

I've described surfing to people as similar to golf (yes back to surfing). That's because when you play golf you have days where everything goes right and then others, or in my case 'most', where you feel like you're swinging at the golf ball with a wiffle-bat. Surfing is the same but more 50-50. Sometimes I feel on top of the world and then there's times where I paddle out and then procede to look like a blind drowning cat: wet, hairy and unable to see anything around me.

The past two days have been sort of like the cat routine. I'd been getting thrown over-top of waves over and over again. I smashed my head on my board a couple of times, swallowed tons of water and had a hard time putting anything together. You guys know those days where nothing goes right and you just look at the sky and go 'what the shetaki mushrooms is happening to me' ? So after yesterday's 3 hour drowning lesson and a couple of hours in the water today I was beginning to think that maybe I wasn't as hot shoot as I though I'd been. The waves kept beating me up and at one point I even thought that I'd been stung by jelly fish all over but that just turned out to be pieces of sand that had embedded themselves into my side after I faceplanted in the shallow water too hard.

And then, just as quickly as my skills had dissapeared I suddenly felt something click and had one of those epiphanies where one small change, like a 2.72 change in the angle of my foot, suddenly made everything work! It was like I'd reached a peak before, then bottomed out, and then gone way past my peak again. Suddenly I was riding the wave from start to finish instead of just struggling for a few seconds. Suddenly I knew what I was doing and I wasn't flying through the air only to crash into the water.

The lesson is, never let a blind cat swim. And always keep trying.

Tomorrow I leave Byron Bay and head closer to Sydney. I'll miss this place, it's my own little haven. The best way to describe the atmosphere is to imagine the government putting all the hippies and beatniks of the world in one beach town, giving them free reign to do anything but work, and then parking 100 campervans sporadically through the streets. It's a beautiful little place and I don't think anyplace, besides Banff maybe, compares to the relaxed nature here.