The swell of 74'

[macgreggor]

With all the lack of size and power on the east coast lately the feel is that when it breaks it's going to be very interesting, which in this part of the world brings the topic of discussion to the swell of Saturday the 25th of May 1974. An unprecedented east coast weather bomb caused carnage which hasn't been seen since.The "Sygna" was driven ashore in 90knt gusts on Stockton beach. I believe wharfes were destroyed in the Harbour at Manly,Windang had a 25ft+ left running down the beach and 7m waves inside Jervis Bay removed a sand dune and left waterfront residents sandbagging homes. The real tale of survival was told to me recently by an old wharfie mate of mine about two friends of his sleeping in a panno at what was the Terrigal haven caravan park when waves crashed over the cliffs filling the basin with water and giant boulders and washing the panno into the ocean.When the car sank they took refuge on a floating caravan before it sank somewhere off Wamberal.Only one of the boys survived, eventually being washed into a stormwater drain on the beach.I have no doubts about the authenticity of these claims no matter how far fetched they seem. The question is "what conditions caused this freak of nature?", hopefully Thermal Ben may be able to shed some light on the subject. What other stories or memories do some of you older crew have of this event (NC??)?

[PDK]

The question is "what conditions caused this freak of nature?",

A massive intense low off the coast of NSW that hung around for days I believe.

Saw a set wave close out from the point outside Maccas to way outside Bronte Point that resembled Waimea Bay and Bronte surf club was badly damaged. Apparently Chinaman's Beach inside Middle Harbour was eight foot and there were swell lines moving under the Spit Bridge.

Where I live at Nth Bondi an old geezer said the waves' spray was going over three story appartment blocks perched right on eighty foot cliffs.Sh#t eh! You wouldn't want your Aston Martin parked in the driveway then would you Dinosaur?


Actually would be very interested to hear some tales from that swell in 74.

[Colonel Fiction]

Good thread Mary.

No idea what caused the storm, but I believe the storm itself caused a drastic change in the banks at Newport Beach.

If memory serves, there used to be quite a few breaks at Newport, but after that storm the Peak was basically all that was left. Maybe the changes weren't evident straight away, I don't remember, but when I drive past Newport these days the Peak looks like the loneliest wave on the Northern Beaches, whereas before the '74 storm there seemed to be a couple more useful breaks between where the Peak is now and the stormwater drain/pipe/thingy south of the clubhouse.

Anyway, that's how my 10-year-old eyes saw it at the time. Nick Carroll would probably have a clearer memory since he's older than me.

Come to think of it, did "The Peak" - in name or substance - even exist before that big storm?

I also remember there was a huge tree at the southern end near the pool that had all its roots exposed by the storm - creating a great cubby house. A great place to hang out if you were "running away from home" - now there's a pastime that's gone out of fashion.

An exciting time.

[Longygrom]

this topic will serve a real interest for me as it expands. On these forums, and as a youth working in the surfing industry- you hear alot of crap about the future and present of surfing etc,

but on the rare occasion when the 'good old days' are remincsed about- is really when my whole mind becomes totslly absorbed in the story and setting. the smallest details seem to make the biggest difference in making a story amazing, or just plain old boring.

so lets here them guys.

[halfy]

seen a photo of that swell you mentioned at "The Haven" in Terrigal. this massive wall of dark green ocean coming right over the channel. there is a paddle skiier climbing the face of this beast and he's about 1/8th the size (ski and all). great image and one that i will never forget

[kreepykrawly]

If anyone is interested in seeing some inner harbour waves during that swell of 74 go to Surfection Mosman. Julian has/had a awesome collection of pictures there. 8ft Grotto Point !!! and Balmoral and Chinamans Beach going off !!!
There is only one problem. You have to fight your way past all the Mosman sugar mummies buying clothes for their poor little Johnny Mosmans.





and for the smart arses out there....



I dont shop there.

[DeeWhyguy]

I remember the swell of ’74! Stood with my mates at the bus stops on West Esplanade watching the old pool at Manly get destroyed! We missed our bus, sat watching for hours and ended up walking home. Not the biggest swell I can remember thought.
Think it was ’76, a cyclone came down the coast and sat about 300 miles of Sydney. I was sanding boards at Bennett’s at the time, somebody at the factory got a phone call and we all downed tools and jumped into Nat’s van. The Bower was 30’plus, Queenscliff bombie was huge with not a drop of water out of place. Biggest tubes I’ve ever seen in 40 years of surfing all over the world!
We ended up surfing Grotto in the morning at about 8 to 10’ and Chinamans at about 6’ in the afternoon. Grotto was a very intense left and Chinamans was a fun right, you had to dodge the moored yachts which made it interesting!
The most amazing thing I remember about that swell was watching the waves close out between Sydney Heads! Wish I’d had a camera

[Longygrom]

The Bower was 30’plus, Queenscliff bombie was huge with not a drop of water out of place. Biggest tubes I’ve ever seen in 40 years of surfing all over the world!

now 30' foot plus wall of water is prettty huge. im guessing your talking about the face as well.

And you say that Queeny bombie was not a drop out of place, im assuming the wind direction was offshore or non existant?

if so,
What were the Long Reef Bombies and Box Head doing?

thanks.
nice stories

[surfin39]

I was young but remember it pretty well ...

We were living on DY headland and had a box seat view of days of gigantic surf breaking in places I've not seen since.

Long Reef bomby started breaking in front of DY headland and was colliding with the german bank that's a few 100 metres east of the point and needs to be 20' before it breaks.

Looking from DY past longy there was another bomby breaking in in front of collaroy but further out from longy headland. Sometimes it was so big the three waves were almost conecting, so nearly end to end 500m out.

I remember one of the days when the storm was at it's worst a tornado type effect where a huge circular section of a cloud was spinning and below there was a huge patch of ocean right where the bomby was steaming through where waves were being twisted in all directions even back out the sea.

DY beach front was trashed, huge concrete steps just simply collapsed after a week of giant surf. The Strand was closed because the surf was so big the waves were washing over he steps, across the park and onto the street. My best mate lived in a ground floor unit in DY parade nearly 1 block back from the beach and the waves made to their door one night and left sand all over the street and in peoples front yards.

Even though we could see it all from our house I remember each day my Dad took us down for a closer look and to see what damaged had been done overnight. One morning we got to DY pool car park and there was a huge rock as big as a van sitting in the middle of the 50m rock pool. Obviously the surf was so powerful it somehow washed the rock loose and up and over the point into the pool.

After the storm the beach erosion was massive, there was a sand cliff from DY to Longy for months. I also remember going to Manly to see the damage to the wharf and the old fenced of pool, which was wrecked.

We also had a house at Forresters on the central coast which was lucky to be standing as it was missed by an actual tornado that went through and knocked over huge 70'+ trees. Forresters was one giant end to end close out and the beach was completely covered in drift wood that washed out of the Hawkesbury River.

I remember one story of the late great Fred Lister who lost his board surfing the bower and after swimming in, went to the old Pacific Hotel for a beer and found his board laying on the beach in front of the pub. For those who know Manly the surf would have to be massive to wash a board from the bower to the beach.

I also remember just after the storm and the surf cleaned up standing at DY pool watching Warwick Taylor and Peter Crawford jump off the point and proceed to detroy probably the biggest ridable DY point I've ever seen. Warwick Taylor was an animal, it was the first clean day after the storm, he jumped off, took the first set that came through and pulled straight in, and I'd say the biggest barrel I've ever seen riden at DY point.

I know my Dad took photo's of the surf and the strom and I'm gonna see if he can find them...

[austeve]

I'm lovin' this thread... pics would be great to see

[moreorless]

Grotto Point became a long left-hand point break, breaking over 500 metres all the way from the point through to the beach at Castle Rock. Shame about the strong Southerly ripping it to pieces. Dobroyd Point was massive and out-of-control.

Corduroy lines marched into Middle Harbour, feathering across the whole stretch between Grotto Point and Middle Head and sometimes even breaking.

[thermalben]

Great stuff fellas - really enjoying these accounts. I was born in '74, so I don't have much to add, except that the system itself was (unsurprisingly) an East Coast Low. I'll see if I can dig up a little more weather info later on, but here's a few things I pulled up quickly.

According to the AMSA, wave heights of "over 17 metres" were reported at the entrance to the Port of Newcastle. With regards to the Sygna (the 53 000-tonne Norwegian bulk carrier that was grounded at Stockton Beach), the Port Stephens tourism website reports that "The wind was 165 kilometres an hour when the Sygna raised her anchor at 1 a.m. Even with engines at full power, the Sygna was unable to get her head into the wind. In only half an hour she had drifted sideways eleven kilometres and grounded a hundred and thirty metres off the beach."

The ABC has some great pictures of the Sygna here, taken just days after the storm, and some more shots and an indepth article here. Graeme Andrews has an interesting account from a yachtie's perspective at afloat.com.au.

[homebush]

I think that was also the time when there was an awesome left at Sir Joseph Banks Park at Botany. This was before Port Botany & the 2nd Airport runway were built. The wave ran for at least a kilometre. You could also get a nice 1 metre wave at Sans Souci out near the channel marker.

[kreepykrawly]

Surfed North Avalon on Monday. It was the swell of 7.4 inches.









P.S I one point i thought dinosaur was Greg Anderson. NN local who moved to Avalon.... but he is a reborn Christian and wouldnt use some of the words Dinosaur uses.
I think Wanto unearthed Dinosaur(no pun intended) when he said that there was some weirdo in Avalon who collected poodles for under the house.

[Nick Carroll]

That storm changed everything for me regarding surfing. It blew up on the afternoon of May 24, an ECL right on the coast off Sydney. The weather was unbelievable. I was 14 years old, Tom was 12, our mate Robert Hale was 13. We got together and watched the storm form out over the ocean from the safety of Carroll Mansions on the hill behind the beach. You could feel the air being sucked in toward that low pressure centre; the atmosphere was vibrating with crazy power and energy. A lightning strike hit not far away and everything in the house shivered and hummed like a plucked guitar string. Then the wind began, and howled and screamed all night, you couldn't sleep; bits of wood, rubbish, tress etc flying through that air outside. It blew like that for around 10 hours, and died away on dawn, turning southwest. We got on our bikes and rode in amazement through Newport's streets, they were deserted, flooded, crap absolutely everywhere. At the surf club, almost all the front paving was gone, eroded away, and the gear shed doors were blasted out, not able to withstand the combination of the ultra-high overnight tide, the storm surge, and the absolutely huge swell. That's what we looked at, the swell. We stared and stared. It was a solid 18-20 feet, lighting up all the bombies two miles out. Giant lefts were peeling from 800m off the middle of the beach back in toward the pool, then closing out on the pool reef right. The light southwester was brushing it clean as it could manage given the circumstances of this massive swell which was made of everything, windswell, groundswell and all in between. Overnight the ocean had pushed the beach up into the bitumen carpark, laying a foot of sand over it all the way to the main road, and blitzing much of the old dune and dirt cliff structure in the process. A solid sandstone block toilet shed at the south end of the beach was completely gone, nothing left but foundations, and nothing but rock was left south of the Pipes; the three big Norfolk Pines you can see in some guy's front yard at that south end had six or eight feet of their roots exposed. Almost no sand was left on the beach generally; later, as the swell and its chasers (two more massive ECL's followed this bombshell, but neither quite as crazy) began to back off, you could see where it had gone -- into a big sandbar well outside the Peak, and another rather grand oval sandbank encompassing the whole surf club area; some great rights broke off that sandbank for the next few weeks, until it reformed into a left funnelling back toward the Pipes.

It took two and a half years for the old sand patterns to re-establish themselves and for the Peak to reappear. (Colonel Fiction: the Peak's been around since before anyone surfed up here; the old school locals used to call it "Neptune Street break", after the road that's part of the lineup orientation for the Peak on bigger days, whoops, did I give something away?) We really learned to surf on those odd post-storm sandbanks, and we used to ride our bikes flat chat down the sand-laden carparks and do huge brake-free taildrifts, until the council cleared it all out a year or so later and resurfaced it. The council also undertook "dune stabilisation" work, which totally changed the Newport beach profile, and you can see the results today -- a much flatter-lined beach, where rips and rip bowls now rarely form. The small dunes and cliffs where we used to light fires to warm up after winter arvo surfs are a long gone memory.

But the way in which May 74 lit our imaginations -- about waves and how big they could get, and about the ocean in general, about the possibilities -- that's stayed with us right through.

Actually Tracks magazine did a fantastic issue on that storm, it put the Bureau's synoptic chart on the cover and filled the magazine with great pics and very well written pieces about the storm, its aftermath, etc. One piece by Captain Ron Ware still stands out strongly in my memory as one of the best I've ever read in a surf mag. It was an encouragement to me to get into surf mag writing for sure.

[oldman]

Alas, I did not get to see any of the swell, but I was witness to the carnage that it did to Cronulla, particularly North Cronulla beach which was basically gone, and that was by the next summer when I was seeing it for the first time.

What was a beach became a cliff which threatened to undermine the road. So much sand was moved that there was literally no beach left. It took ages for the sand to gradually build up again.

I also recall waves breaking in the middle of Botany Bay. As homebush says, that was before the 2nd airport runway. No idea whether a wave would break any more in the middle of the bay.

I also recall one of the daily papers had a picture of a surfer in the middle of Botany Bay, up on a wave, with a very large tanker in the background, although that may have been one of the other very large winter storms which the 70's seemed to specialise in.

At Brighton, Ramsgate and Sans Souci the waves were sometimes coming over Grand Parade. It resulted in huge erosion, part of which resulted in the council fortifying some parts of the shore with boulders.

I have been saying for years that we are overdue one of these storms, as I had heard it described at different times as a one in 25 year storm, but maybe it was a 1 in 100 years, or more.

If we got that storm again imagine the reaction these days in relation to climate change discussions.

In 1974, scientists were predicting we were looking at an impending ice age!!!!

Nice work Ben, you certainly know how to research that intermanet thingy.

[Kunji]

Guys,

This is a great thread, i love hearing the stories of this Hundred Year Storm. I hope im alive to witness the next one.

I deeply enjoy hearing about strange new breaks like up Middle Harbour, new bombies that join weird headlands etc. If anyone has more please post. Im eating this shit up.

Oh, and pics too!

[Borris]

God I hope WA gets one....