365 surfing short stories in 365 days

[LONGINUS]

Hey Crew,

I have had a rush of shit to my brain and have decided to embark upon a challenge to write 365 surfing short stories (1000 words each) over the next 12 months. So one story every day for the next year. First one is up now...364 to go

[Animal_Chin]

Hey Crew,

I have had a rush of shit to my brain and have decided to embark upon a challenge to write 365 surfing short stories (1000 words each) over the next 12 months. So one story every day for the next year. First one is up now...364 to go

Beer will cure this affliction.

[LONGINUS]

LIFE ON MARS

IRAN, 1998

No lamp burns till morning - PERSIAN PROVERB


The border haze of Pakistan fades in the rear vision mirror as the heat bloom of Persia erupts and boils over the coast. We were steaming west to the dead coral points of Chabar in a Russian Lada purchased in Karachi, Pakistan - there are 250,500 kilometres on the clock.

The coast road threads about 100 yards from the beach - leaving the beaten lead shape of the Arabian sea to our left and the towering red mesa frame of the feature the locals know as 'Mars' to the right. It looks like Mount Doom, I wonder how many people have died trying to climb it. The border guard had specifically instructed us not to stop until we hit Chabar, but that was about to go out the window.

The north Arabian coast is one of the most ancient in existence. Alexander The Great has plied it and Sinbad and his crew has foundered along its reefs. For the past 100 million years the entire mass of the sub continent has moved north at the rate of 5 centimetres per year, leaving behind in its wake a shoaling sea of chalk and crumbling limestone. There isn't a lot of action to stir the banks along this coast here and so when I saw that the recent rains had shredded through the head of a dam and had gouged a triangular bank made of sand, shale and silicate mud, I pulled that piece of mid eighties russian middle class crap we were driving off the road in a heartbeat.

A clean, sharp 4 foot swell that had pathed all the way from the bottom of the world dumped as a shorepound to the east and west, but here it was different.

We pulled the car to the side of the road, brambles and briars scraping like fingernails on the Moscow factory finish. There was a small clearing with the remnants of a fire, a few rusting tins and a car battery. The acid had been tipped or boiled out of the battery and it left the pungent sting of chlorine gas on the offshore breeze. We kicked through the brambles to the beach.

'Do they have snakes here?"

'Yeah, vipers I think...desert or horned vipers they call them...can't remember"

"kay..."

We hit the berm and scurried up a crumbling chalk ridge and there it was. In front of up, 100 yards from the beach a 4 foot drainer was busy demolishing the newly created sand bank. The limestone content gave the water an eerie green until it broke over the red sand bank. As the entire wave broke it shifted from blue to green and then finally to orange - I had never seen a colour gradient shift in water quite like it.

We grabbed the boards and started heading out. I looked over my shoulder and realised I couldn’t see the car - worried me a bit. It took a long time to find our place on the bank. As it turned out the long period juice was coming in as sets about every 10 minutes. We missed the first ones totally. Four grinding orange bowls passing by in succession well to the east. In their wake though they left a stain on the surface that was impossible to miss. We planted right on top of it and waited. The first set was mine. I overpaddled for the wave by a long way. I ended up angling across the face on my belly before I could even think about getting up. I only ever got up into a semi crouch before everything took on a weird orange glow. The lip threw over an instant later flecked with streaks of burnt copper - lights out.

Sitting out the back I could see that someone was coming along the road. Dark skin contrasting with a white fez cap and tunic. I think he was on a donkey. A few minutes later he pushed through the clearing to the beach and sat to watch us.

"Think he's going to rip off the car?"

"Not sure"

"Lets wave at him. If he waves back he's cool and we stay out"

"kay"

We gave him a wave and for a second my heart sank - nothing. A moment later he sprang to life and gave us a double fist pump...so we stayed out. He watched us for about an hour and we waved each other goodbye. The first Iranian on our trip that we never quite met. It started to get dark and I wasn’t that keen to spend a lot of time on the road at night so we opted for the next set in. I got cleaned up in a shorebreak that left me tasting chalk and grit for the next hour. My buddy grabbed the last of the barrels; they weren’t breaking square anymore, the bank was slowing grinding away. By tomorrow it would be flat...same as it ever was.

We clambered back up the berm with the warm desert sand clinging to every drop of moisture. The guy on the donkey had dropped a massive crap right in the middle of the clearing which I narrowly missed walking right into but the car was fine.

"Why would he crap right in the middle of the path like that you think?"

"I don't know mate, at least he didn't key the car though"

-AJJ Waldie-

(Story 1 of 365....364 days left, 364 stories left)

[Trev]

Day 2 ????

[LONGINUS]

one sec

[Karlos]

I envy your lifestyle Longi.

There. I've said it.

[purple pyramids]

that was great.
although listening to the ELO song brought on a strong desire to smoke a doobie.

[jimmy]

Awesome Longy.. About time you directed your talents back towards writing quality surf yarns.. Instead of trying to stir up those poor souls at ASL..

[LONGINUS]

Awesome Longy.. About time you directed your talents back towards writing quality surf yarns.. Instead of trying to stir up those poor souls at ASL..

Yes Jimmy, you are right - back on track now mate..back on track

From me to my friends at Burleigh Heads...

[daisy]

nice story, curious to see how far you get with this.
any chance of adding a little note on the bottom of each story: XX% true?

[LONGINUS]

UNION CITY BLUES

Berethon III, 2512

In the people of Earth we have found a great ally - SEALING OF THE GREAT TRIUMVIRATE, 2055

My name is Athol Hitchiba. I am a Grade 4 Mobile Mine Operator currently stationed on Berethon III and my Psych Officer has ordered me to keep this diary.

I have never seen her, only ever talked to her on the comm link. This makes me suspect that she isn't a primate species, probably an insect or a lizard and the human voice synth has been designed to give me something to jerk off to during the next six months on remote station.

I am a failure.

I broke my fathers heart when I washed out of the military aptitude course three years ago on my eighteenth birthday. He had tried to teach me himself every spare moment he had. My mother held back her tears when she looked into my eyes but she knew then and there that I was only ever going to be a miner...like everyone in my family for the last five generations. I tried to tell her I could rise through the ranks and some day run my own mining colony world but the sadness never left her eyes.

I know the history of our race. I know we paid our fee to join the Union in the sum of 100,000 men for the war in 2055 and that none of them ever came back. It's time like this though, sunset on a clear night when I pull the rig up on an endless beach set on a jade ocean that my mind wanders. The ARC 53J is a fully mobile mining platform, capacity - 950,000 cubic tonnes of refined ore. Crew - 1...me.

We do 6-month field rotations remote from the main base of Union City. UC is a typical outer colony shithole. There are no free settlers here - only sand and ocean and nothing to spend your credits on but whores, drugs and dice cards. I was in no hurry to get back to it. The only thing going for Berethon III was its surf. It must have been incredible to the fathers when they discovered that surfing was unique to Earth. It took no time at all to spread throughout the galaxy and it's discovery took Earth from a minor world to a full member of Legion. Waves far more advanced than many on Earth were soon discovered but Earth never lost its status as the cradle. There was a great story from just after contact when a Silusiam visited Eath, saw people surfing and said to a human "what could make your people think of this?"

Then the human visited his planet, saw the massive network of tidal and kinetic energy capture devices along the entire coastline and said, "what could make your people think of this?"

It didn't matter, only a few years after contact, surfing became an official recreation within The Triumvirate and a major hyperlane directly from Junction was pathed to Earth. Earth achieved major world status and her oceans, the home of surfing - became a treasure.

I kept my own board in my cabin on the rig. I would surf at morning or dusk usually. Berethon was a sad world. Like so many we found during the crossing it was once home to a sentient race but they were long gone. It was probably only a stepping stone world for some long forgotten species swept aside by the cosmic wind. At some stage it had become sterile -massive solar flare event probably. It was a sand and ocean world. It had been classified as lacking any current sentient species or species likely to re-evolve such capacity and hence was classified a candidate for 'resource collection' over a hundred years ago; we had been strip mining the surface for rare mineral ever since.

I had found a few pieces of civilization over the past months and kept them in my cabin like a miniature museam, things from the deep sand, stone tablets caught in the teeth of the cutters on my evening rounds...strange symbols on metal disks...markings on obsidian cylinders.

Night was the easiest, when I shut down the rig and sat on the beach under the stars. Waking was harder, alone. I thought of my mother a lot lately. I couldn't wait for the dawn, that and the surfing that went along with it. A massive, shallow grey / green ocean… never flat but never over 3 feet. The lithium content gave the waves a soft focus, metallic glow. Whenever I came off I would hang underwater - no sound from the rig, the graters and the cutters. Nothing from the furnaces or the glaives, only the sad whisper of an ancient sea.

Another day comes and goes, I am sure my Psych Officer is an insect now. She asks me when I plan to start a family and sometimes there is a pause and a click before the translator overlaps the word 'hive'. I have a weird vision of me trying to ‘fertilise’ her clutch of eggs. Her face is beautiful with wet black spider eyes but as I touch her lips it becomes clear that they are just hardened pieces of exoskeleton shell. I kiss her passionately now, placing my hand behind her head – it sinks into a patch of sticky, alien fur, insect ganglia and intelligence pulsing beneath her skull.


I walk out mid counseling interview, lines of silver waves ratchet across an extinct bank. Something massive stirs the water at the bottom of the ocean...

-AJJ Waldie-


(Story 2 of 365....363 days left, 363 stories left)

[lessormore]

Sounds like there is a bit of a recent $500mil movie in there

[LONGINUS]

really? which bit?

[Trev]

Good reading Adam.
Bit short on the thousand words, though.
911 and 938.
But you've got 363 more chances to get your average up.
Seriously though, I wrote 1000 words, once a week for the Brisbane Sunday Sun for about 12 or so years. Daily for a year is a big ask. Keep up the good work.

[LONGINUS]

Thanks Trev. There's no way out of this now...363 to go.

[LONGINUS]

Fumitsuki Maru

Chuuk Lagoon, The Carolines; 1996

'Perfect purity is possible if you turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood.' - Yukio Mishima (Runaway Horses)

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

"What time did he say he was pickin us up?"

"Eight"

"What time is it now?"

"Twenty past...give it another 5 minutes"


I only had one day here in Port Weno, defacto capital of the Chuuk Islands, about 1500 kilometres west of Pohnpei. The whole island group was wrapped up in a beautiful atoll with surfable reef passes on every point of the compass. The truth was that surfing wasn’t even on the radar in Port Weno. In 1944 the Japanese Pacific Fleet had meet their Waterloo here when the Us Navy caught them at rest and put everything on the bottom. 3000 Japanese sailors and over a hundred US airmen called the cipher blue waters of the shallow lagoon their final resting place. With around 50 ships and about 300 planes within 20-30 metres of water, the whole lagoon was a popular drawcard for divers.

I had picked out a great reef set up on the western reach of the atoll that looked like a reverse version of Sultans in the Maldives. So it came to be that the only way to get a boat across to the other side of the atoll was to hitch one with a dive trip. The Fumitsuki Maru was a line Japanese destroyer that took down 10 US Aircraft trying to race for the reef passage in '44, she went down with three air launched torpedoes in her side – went down with all hands. The wreck was in less than 50 feet of water and lay right next to the reef pass we wanted to surf - we signed up for the trip immediately.

A minute later, Martine and his dive tender rounded into the harbour. A dozen fully dressed dive tourists sat lined on either side of the boat ready to enter the water. I could tell from their body language that they were pissed off to have to stop to pick up two surfers. Martine welcomed us heartily and had to help us lower the boards down himself, the divers acted as though the whole thing was an inconvenience for them. They were all French, as Martine motored out across the lagoon at speed I saw one of the guys screaming into his ear something about this not turning into a surf trip...something about they booked a dive trip, blah blah. We found this all pretty amusing and I tightened up the screws in my fins to try and make it look just as technical as diving gear.

Martine dropped us near the pass and motored back a little into the lagoon for the dive. The two of us were in heaven here. There was a tongue of reef to the north and one to the south - it was all breaking pretty straight on there but here in the middle there was a small reef inset a little into the lagoon with a left and right breaking to the north and south of it...just like Sultans.

We rode it for an hour on a falling tide. Every wave an easy fattish take off that double shuffled into third gear as soon as it cleared into the lagoon on the shoaling reef. The inside section turned out be pretty technical, a 50 yard speed section that I never really wired before forming into a nice slow peeler that straightened into a steep blue wall - shutting down onto coral rock 200 yards down the line. I stopped catching them all the way inside after I came off mid speed section and spend the next 10 minutes duck diving into coral. The tide kept falling and pretty soon most waves just surged over a marginal edge of reef. We decided to call it a day and paddled back into the lagoon towards the boat. The low tide had opened up a novelty straight hander over a massive edge of red brain coral. I sat perched on the nose of my board looking left and right like a hawk for any tell tale boils or shallow patches. By the time I kicked off into deep lagoon water I had covered 300 yards, the rest of the paddle to the boat took only a few minutes.

Back on the boat the last of the pairs were coming up from the dive. I grabbed a mask and checked it from the surface. The bow of the Fumitsuki pointed slightly upwards less than 10 metres from the surface. The rest of the ship was laid out on a white sloping bank of sand that dipped blue around midships. The back of the ship had been broken and the stern dropped away into the deep blue black of oblivion. Some of the couples excitedly showed us the shots from their cameras. 5-inch gun mounts frozen in coral growth - ejected brass casings stacked up next to them. Sad photos of an empty bridge, windows imploded from some massive unseen impact. Matt black interior sprayed in orange and red coral bloom, the light fluorescent blue of corrosion over perfectly polished marine brass.

Back on deck the last of the diving couples came into the boat. The late 20's female in the group jumped around excitedly at some object in her hand. Taking off her mask she became nearly hysterical and started to wave it around. A thin chain with an attached copper disk - dog tags. The male in their pair held a yellowish plate, a saucer with the Imperial Japanese crest upon it. The dog tags passed around the boat and the plate went the other way. When the tags hit me I held then in my hand gently and studied the round oval disk. Eight characters had been meticulously punched out in two columns of four.

"Did you take them from around his neck?"

Martine conveniently fiddled with some gauge on the motor and the older couples looked away at their photos.

The Frenchman got up and snatched them back out of my hand.

We sat by ourselves on the ride back to port. I watched the diver push the dog tags deep into his bag and sit there staring at the plate in his hands, he soon put that away too. After about 5 minutes the woman with him started to cry. The afternoon glass off was on us now and the lagoon took on an eerie oily sheen. I could make out the shapes of great broken warships on the bottom as we passed over them...soft dark shapes sliding like velvet amongst the coral.

-AJJ Waldie-

Story 3 of 365 (362 stories and 362 days to go)

[Lucky Al]

i'll donate, longinus. are you doing this for the missing vaginas?

[LONGINUS]

i'll donate, longinus. are you doing this for the missing vaginas?

lol...cant stop...

______________________________________________________

BORDERLINE
______________________________________________________

Pohnpei, 1995

Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time. - HP LOVECRAFT (The White Ship)


EXT OPEN AIR BAR SCENE EARLY EVENING

Warm Pacific breeze blows through busy open air bar scene on the island of Pohnpei. Stars shine brightly as full moon rises over Harbour in distance. A man and a woman sit opposite each other at coconut wood table, both drink bottled beer.

WOMAN

Okay, so on three say what your favourite Madonna song is.

ME

Okay.

ME / WOMAN (together)

1..2..3

ME / WOMAN (together)

Borderline.

WOMAN

Oh my god, did you just say Borderline?

ME

Yes I did...yes I did.

Woman’s friends enter scene and take her away from bar scene

FADE OUT to Henry Mancini soundtrack.

And with that she was gone, swept into the warm Pacific night as my own evening quickly disintergrates into a mosaic of metallic South Pacific Lager, muddy Toddy Water and numbing betel leaf. Hours into it we bumped into another group of missionaries, brainwashed mid 20's youth from Utah with crew cuts in Pearl Jam T-Shirts. I overheard one of them talking about surfing Palakir tomorrow and at that moment I decided it would be great to spend some time getting to um.. know them ... A man will do peculiar things to get access to a surf boat in Micronesia...peculiar things.

It's 6 am the next morning and Robert Birmingham the third stands in my doorway framed by the green morning light of dawn across the Pacific.

Yo let's go dude we gotta punch it.

I force a smile but wonder if he will continue speaking like that all day. He looks at my 8 footer.

Yo this place is like gnarly dude, you sure you wanta be bringin that?

Yeah I'll be alright.

Like whatever man, your medical insurance.

We clear the doorway and reach the street. Another missionary clone sits in the van bouncing to generic hip hop. Birmingham bellows,

Yo bitch start it up, we're doing it.


As he puts his cap on backwards and I see some of the local children stop and whisper to each other, I wonder if I can really do this all day. We bounce down to the docks, water slick and oily, air heavy with the keynote of coconut husk. The boat is a converted diving tender, the mission uses it to peddle God across Micronesia, winning hearts and minds one island at a time. We make Palikir in 20 minutes. This is the mid ninety's - no crowd, no surf camps. Someone hasn't decided that the native word 'Palikir' is to much of a ballache to say yet - so it isn't even called P-Pass.

The two of us paddle out from the boat. It annoys me to admit that Birmingham has this wave wired. He drops in late on a bomb and sits in the pocket for a good 100 yards before flicking out, the hooting and hollering are unlike anything I have experienced. The way it works out we actually end up with a pretty good rhythm. I'm happy to take off the fatter reverb sets while he picks the heavies. The real benefit here is that I don't have to spend a lot of time sitting with him in the lineup talking either, we pass each other one riding one paddling. About an hour later, a westerly starts to push across the lineup. It's still good but not perfect. I could have stayed there all day but Birmingham doesen't stop complaining. When he mentions checking out Nan Madol on the eastern side of the Island I suddenly agree with him totally. We swing past Easies and a few other reef passes - good but all sideshore.

By late morning, the weird coral stone logs of Nan Madol are rising from the jungle, first in ruined walls and then in towering platforms and dark stone temples. Corridors snake deep into the jungle, their bottom flagged in smooth stone, purpose built for something unimaginable.

The break to the south east is a fatish peaky right hander that runs on a sharp corner of reef all the way to the shattered outer walls of the temple city. Birmingham complains about the shape of the wave and I am glad to see him go back to the boat. I catch another three waves alone in the shadow of the last great house of The Pacific.

Later, back at the boat we motor in for a closer look at the main temple. A flat stone altar rises over the sea. Hand carved steps rise to it's base, the outer rim adorned in strange carvings and symbols. Deep black stains radiate from the centre, soaking deeply into the heart of the porous coral stone. I talk to the driver.

Did the islanders practice human sacrifice?

Birmingham moves into the conversation.

Savages man, check it out

The driver cut him off

It was only after the early missionaries arrived that they started it up again. They never killed the settlers, only the missionaries

I turned to Birmingham,

Missionaries mate. so blokes like you!

I looked at Birmingham and watched him swallow hard, in that instant he knew exactly what I was thinking and he saw it to.

A blood red sky with the sun setting behind the altar, Birmingham lying on the stone with his throat flicked out in a red gush, life blood dripping along the coral rock and down into the sea. He goes into his death rattle as the priest raises the stone knife high into the air. Somewhere...just out of shot there is the husking of powerful unseen leathery wings from something massive and ancient.

-AJJ Waldie-



(Story 4 of 365....361 days left, 361 stories left)