Ask Carroll

[aaarating]

Having had a shoulder reconstruct I feel both sympathy and admiration for your rampant stupidity and downright tenacity. I don't know how you faced another shoulder job after the first? Like a knee replacement they reckon you should get em both done at the same time cause you won't go back after the first. Bloody savages those ortho surgeons.

[PeepeelaPew]

...

[Davros]

I find some blokes align alcohol consumption with manliness and its prevalence increases with age. It's quite pathetic. I feel mentally and physically weaker about 6 beers in to a session nowadays.

[godsavetheking]

Nick, I've had another brainwave. With Jarrad Howse having described Surf Snowdonia as "awesome for board testing" and an increasingly cynical readership growing ever wearier of Surfing Life's advertiser-fuelled jollies to the Telos, what better way to rediscover some authenticity and to reconnect with the board buying public than to relocate the test to the drizzle of North Wales? You can even stay in a little onsite hovel, eliminating any suggestion of high living. Brilliant eh? I'll ready the pork product leis for your imminent arrival at RAF Valley

I have a better idea god save, we are in the process of setting up this year's fabulous tropical junket, why don't I forward you the dates and you can book in to Telo Island Lodge for a week or so (perhaps under an assumed name, I mean nobody is gonna believe you are really called "godsavethequeen") and crack a few awesome rides with me and my team of professional dancing puppets?

Don't tell me you don't want to.

So let me get this straight. Afforded a once-in-a-generation chance to clean up surfboard testing in the public domain, you instead try to buy me off with an exotic holiday. Have you ever considered a career in FIFA?

[The Mighty Sunbird]

[Nick Carroll]

So let me get this straight. Afforded a once-in-a-generation chance to clean up surfboard testing in the public domain, you instead try to buy me off with an exotic holiday. Have you ever considered a career in FIFA?

Well I'm not paying for your damned holiday. I'm really just trying to shill for some more business for TIL.

[rmb]

On a more serious note Nick what are your thoughts on responsible drinking, how much is too much and the damaging effects of alcohol? I have found myself getting to a point where enough is enough and I don't get the enjoyment of having a couple of beers and require more and more which results in me occasionally getting reasonably intoxicated and suffering the consequences the next day in being in a depressive mood and anxious. This usually takes a day and a bit to get over. I don't drink everyday and binge maybe once occasionally twice a week where most the time I stick to a couple of drinks but it occasionally creeps up usually on weekends. I am typing this here not as some sort of pity me question but part of some personal therapy becoming more open about my own personal journey and thought it would be a good topic for conversation. Oh and I am not suffering a hangover now and am feeling pretty positive about it all.

I think it hard to gauge "responsible drinking" in the Australian context, drinking seems to me to be a sort of national blind spot; lots of people struggle with the idea that some other people don't drink at all. My little brother is teetotal these days and he reckons people sometimes literally try to force him to drink at social occasions. When he says no, I don't drink, they just say Oh well I'll get you a beer instead.

I get the sense that you have your own idea about what works for you and that you're a bit suss of the role drinking is playing in your life. That feeling of anxiety and slight depression is something you should really pay attention to; drinking, like any drug use, can lead to a range of mental impairments and illnesses, and you really don't want that shit in your life.

There's a lot of good reading on the subject of alcohol use and abuse. I suggest you do a bit of reading on it and try to gain more of a sense of where you fit in the alcohol dependence spectrum, that will help you think about what you want to do about it. One thing I do know and can tell you directly is that you don't need to drink any alcohol at all in order to be a functioning happy adult. It's not necessary. If it FEELS necessary, it might be a problem.

Thanks for the response Nick, Saltman. I think you have hit the nail on the head re my thoughts on where drinking sit's with me and that's where I am finding I enjoy social situations without booze and tend to only drink to kill boredom and occasional loneliness when away for work etc. Pulling the plug on it for a bit thats for sure test the waters and see what it does for me.

[otway1949]

Thanks for the response Nick, Saltman. I think you have hit the nail on the head re my thoughts on where drinking sit's with me and that's where I am finding I enjoy social situations without booze and tend to only drink to kill boredom and occasional loneliness when away for work etc. Pulling the plug on it for a bit thats for sure test the waters and see what it does for me.

I would invite you to consider, what is the situation behind your boredom and the loneliness, that you have used booze to cover.
Could you work with those issues in another way that would be more beneficial?
You are clearly thinking of some different choices just in these posts.
There is no resolution in the bottom of a bottle, only a postponement of having to face up.

[8]

Not good to do out of habit or to break boredom, however a good night on the turps now and then can really offer release from a stagnant mindset and gift the odd muted epiphany here and there.

That's my excuse at least.

[eel]

I remember speaking to a reformed alco about what constitutes an Alcoholic over a recreational drinker, and he said,"If you would like a drink then your recreational, if you NEED a drink then your in Alcoholic territory"

Very simple but makes sense.

[rmb]

Thanks for the response Nick, Saltman. I think you have hit the nail on the head re my thoughts on where drinking sit's with me and that's where I am finding I enjoy social situations without booze and tend to only drink to kill boredom and occasional loneliness when away for work etc. Pulling the plug on it for a bit thats for sure test the waters and see what it does for me.

I would invite you to consider, what is the situation behind your boredom and the loneliness, that you have used booze to cover.
Could you work with those issues in another way that would be more beneficial?
You are clearly thinking of some different choices just in these posts.
There is no resolution in the bottom of a bottle, only a postponement of having to face up.

Otway great question and points. I will just add I am not really at breaking point apart from the shit feeling when hungover. I feel I am at a point in my life where I am shifting my focus towards different things and killing time by sinking piss no longer seems worthwhile. The moments of boredom and loneliness tend to come when I am away for work or my family and friends aren't around and I consider it an opportune moment to smash down a few stubbies. Not really social drinking at all.

How am I rectifying or facing up to this probably shift my focus during these moments to other more worthwhile pursuits such as exercise, reading etc. I will not say I am going teetotal although at the moment I have decided to go cold turkey for a bit later on I will still have a beer over dinner with friends etc but it will only be one maybe two and not putting myself in situations where I have too many and wake up feeling like trash.

[The Mighty Sunbird]

I remember speaking to a reformed alco about what constitutes an Alcoholic over a recreational drinker, and he said,"If you would like a drink then your recreational, if you NEED a drink then your in Alcoholic territory"

Very simple but makes sense.

Yeah but you can like it till you want it till you need it

[Beanpole]

I remember reading Bukowski saying it wasn't that easy being a full on wino. It takes staying power, determination and a strong constitution.
Funny Ivehad a few revelations in this area this year myself. Basically I'm not really enjoying getting smashed that much. Much preferring quality to quantity plus my diet has made me far more susceptible to getting a caning if I over indulge.

[Cranked]

For me Its now over 6 years without any alcohol whatsoever. My mental state continues to get better and better, despite some pretty heavy hits from some unforeseen events. The buddhist encouragement to examine your self and your life also helps, its got the goods, just take from it what you need. If I had my life again there is no way I'd ever get involved with drugs of any sort (that includes caffeine), not as a heavy abandonment of pleasure, but as a light hearted laugh at a ridiculous engagement with something you don't need in your life at all. With our thoughts and stories we make the world, why not make it a good one? I realise now that I spent my life searching everywhere for something I already had. But old heads on young shoulders, what can you do?

[Nick Carroll]

Ha ha cranked, I feel as if I have a young head on increasingly aged shoulders

Not really apropos of the alcohol thing, here's a story about that - about how surfing keeps reflecting my state of mind back at me, how it blows away any bits and pieces of so-called human wisdom and maturity that I occasionally fool myself into thinking I've picked up. Written a few years ago now.

WASHING OFF THE LAYERS

By Nick Carroll

Too much surf sends my head spinning. It always has. I get excited, run round in circles, forget to wax up then remember when I’m halfway down the beach, and have to run back up to the car. I paddle for the wrong wave and like as not make a complete fucking mess of it. Try as I might, I’ve never quite learned not to rush.
I’m rushing now. I want to write about this 35 days, June 9 to July 13, 2007, during which I watched and surfed a series of storm events I might never again see at my home beach in my surfing life. I’ve only seen its like once before, that was May and June 1974, that famous 50-year storm that smashed the Cygna up onto Stockton Beach and was followed by swell after massive bombing swell. But I was a grom then, a little kid who for the most part could only stand on the dunes and watch. Now I’m an adult surfer, with boards we couldn’t dream of back then, and an Internet backdoor into the weather bureau, and years of surfing to draw on, and still June 2007 turned me back into that grommet … except this time I could paddle out and ride.

I knew it was gonna be a special month on the afternoon of June 8, when I got out of a car in a mate’s driveway and heard a tree fall clean onto his neighbour’s rusty old Volvo. It was insanity. We’d just driven back from Sydney in blasting rain and the biggest coldest gale for years. A wicked low pressure had formed very close to the NSW central coast and suddenly intensified. As we’d got closer to home, we’d begun to see stuff flying through the air: building materials, garbage bins, real estate agent for-sale signs, branches of trees. But a whole tree?? What the Fuck? We raced up the driveway and came upon the car and the tree, which had half draped itself across the powerlines. “Don’t walk under there!” my mate yelled to the lady who owned the car. “I’m not stupid,” she retorted, standing right there anyway.
She wasn’t the only one being caught napping. Off Newcastle, the ships who hadn’t paid enough attention to the Bureau were dragging anchors perilously close to the coastline. One of ‘em – just like the Cygna – would end up right on the beach.
The wind absolutely howled all night and all the next day, forming a massive 15-foot storm swell. During April and May, there’d been almost no surf at all, and huge volumes of sand had been nudged up onto the beaches. The storm began tearing away at it, pulling thousands, millions of tonnes off the coast in huge pluming rips, and what the water didn’t take the wind did, blowing it up into big piles along the council dune works and surf club wall. Every time I ducked down the beach to watch another chapter of this furious tale, I’d see little groups of surfers huddled in cars or under trees, just gazing at the elements … we couldn’t surf but we couldn’t stay away either.

Overnight the wind dropped and backed sou-west, and by dawn the air felt eerily quiet. The rest of the household was tucked up asleep while I dragged two six channel AB pintails, a 7’1” and 6’5”, out of the garage. I’d set up to meet the champion paddleboard racers, Mick Porra and Brad Gaul, down at Long Reef to do a paddle north to Palm Beach, but as soon as I saw the ocean I knew that was just out of the question. The surf was too good, too crazy. I got the 7’1” and raced out to south Newport, surfing eight foot plus wedges with just one other, a casual goofyfoot. After a while we were joined by three or four more. Later Porra told me he and Brad had gone for it, and that they’d been catching foaming waves up the coast on their big 12 foot paddleboards, outside all the bombies. Three kilometres off Whale Beach, Mick had fallen off his board; he swam after it but the wind kept flipping it out of his reach. He started thinking “Crap! The board’s history! I’ll have to swim all the way in!” Then Brad came looming up behind him. They doubled up, somehow chased down the errant board, and made it in.
It was that sort of day, just mental.
Back at south Newport, I remembered seeing a big wedging left and right sandbank in front of the surf club, and thought what the hell, I’ll paddle over there and see if I can find one. I got there just in time to meet Dane Burnheim, a young Newy local. Dane was grinning like a madman: “There’s crazy rights out here!” There were, but I was watching the left. This wave would form only occasionally, only as a result of huge easterly storm surf, but when it did, it was a gem. Old Newport local R.J. “Bozo” Windshuttle had written a poem about May 1974, eventually getting it published with the help of the Newport pub. Here’s a stanza from the poem:

The lads at Newport young and old would still remember yet
How the sands from beneath those pines washed out to form a left
It is too fast, it is too quick, and the wind is from the south
It was up to me and Wilbur to be the first to paddle out
A perfect left I’ve never seen at Newport to this day
Quite like the left created when the beaches washed away.

That was way back before anything had happened for any of us at Newy, before the Peak started breaking, before our club Newport Plus, before Derek Hynd mastered the 360 on a single concave twin-fin then got his eye knocked out, before the duels with the old school Bra boys, the Pro Juniors, Fame and Glory, before TC’s world titles, pretending to grow up, marriages, kids, divorces, actually starting to grow up, the fucking lot. In rearranging the beach 33 years ago, the May ‘74 storm had somehow set a stage for everything that’d followed in our witless little surf addicted lives. Now, as this storm ripped away at sand layers that hadn’t been touched since we were 15 years old, I felt a feral intensity arise, a deepening sense of that wild almost frightening surf lust, that animal sense of a blood contact with the natural world. Other layers were being torn away too, in places closer to home.

For a month I ran off that feral surf lust, letting the arrival of swells call the tune of things, letting other things fall aside. Instead of meeting notes and work schedules, my diary filled with half-scratched records of wind, tide, and swell, always swell.
June 11 was a long weekend Monday, and the wind swung dead offshore. Perfect four to five foot waves peeled off Bozo’s Bank, ridden by a crowd of 30 or 40. I was my usual frenetic self. What I didn’t know was that for the next month, I wouldn’t have a single surf with more than 10 people in the water.
On Saturday the 16th another huge wind struck. By 10:30am, I stood on Cook’s Terrace hill at Mona Vale and watched 20-foot waves break in immense rip bowls three-quarters of a mile offshore, chaotic and unsurfable. It backed the next day to eight feet and howling sou-west winds. Then an east swell, and a Monday arvo at Bozo’s Bank again, in heavy strange crossed-up lefts that looked better than they were, that reminded me of grey early 1980s days at Pipeline. And a Wednesday of slamming six to ten foot southeast groundswell and light southwest winds, a spectacular afternoon at the south end with a handful of surfers. And a freezing Thursday with the swell down to three feet, nobody in the water, and the beach suddenly empty, wild, eroded.
Three days of six foot southeast swell and light variable westerlies. A weekend, June 23 and 24, six to eight feet, forecast to be bigger but not quite getting there. Then a dramatic Wednesday and a bombing eight-foot-plus east-north-east groundswell, northerly winds swinging offshore, and three of us riding crazy massive lefts into the centre of the beach, me hypothermic after four hours from a too-thin wetsuit. And a Friday of fresh southeast swell, but this looking thinner and dropping quickly from an early eight-foot-plus peak. That was June 29.
Four quiet days.
July 6 and a massive astonishing groundswell from the southeast, flaring in massive lines, ten feet plus. The wind swung offshore in the afternoon and I ran down to the south end alone, not a soul in the water. Four bodyboarders in the shoredump were doing little skimboard backflips. The sand was so eroded now that front yards were beginning to be eaten away; I had to climb over broken fencing to get to the jump-off. Surfed alone for an hour and a half in the vast giant walls and when a few others paddled out, I was glad of the company.
And six days later, another swell. The swell.

July 12 smashed me to pieces. I still haven’t fully processed this day and all its sensations; maybe I never will. I don’t truly know what happens to peak surf experiences, where they go in your head. They flood your defences, they tear away the layers of civilisation you’ve built up so painfully and carefully, and then they’re over. Or are they.
A big storm had blown off northern NZ. By this time I was wired into the rhythm of this 30-year event. I knew what to expect. Truly nothing else was gonna matter.
I waited for the sun to rise, drove over the hill to a neighbouring beach and saw huge lonely peaks breaking well off the cliff line. The animal surf sense set every nerve twanging like an electric guitar string. Ten minutes later I was running down the track.
The day was perfect, clearest of skies, sunny, light offshore breeze. The beach, normally a gentle curve, now scoured to its rock roots, a cliff of sand suspended over the shoreline, held together by threads of dune grass. Eight or ten foot peaks and walls of water exploding on sand and reef 250 metres offshore with the force of a major groundswell’s first six hours. And nowhere – not on the beach, not on the cliffs, not on the expensive balconies of any of the ridgeline houses – nowhere a human to be seen.
Something about this coastscape, something eerie about that emptiness, slowed my run to a walk. Nothing was wrong and yet it all was. The rip through which I’d planned to gain open water. The slow fall of the lip on that deep cliff-front peak, the bare rock just beyond. The wind and sun on the empty scoured beach. I’d surfed there a thousand times, yet today it felt like nowhere I’d ever been. It felt like a place you could die.
Surf lust has its limits. But I couldn’t walk back up that path. I jumped into the rip, made it out, and for an hour and a half, I surfed knowing I was at the mercy of this swell; that in my eagerness, I’d walked straight down its throat, and now could only hope it wouldn’t swallow. One stroke or two taken in the wrong direction; a foot wrong on a takeoff; anything, in fact, done with less than utter humility and respect for the ocean and the circumstance, and swallow it would. I was scared from the moment I hit the water, but I also knew this was somehow the Karma of being a lifelong surfer, of the way surfing had begun for me, and that those storm days 33 years ago had launched me like a spear all the way from grommethood into this day, this surf. I felt light as a feather. I caught two waves, rode in on my stomach, touched my forehead to the dry sand.

The eeriness passed, I went home, had a sandwich, then in the afternoon surfed the tip of Newport Reef, my favourite spot in the world, huge and absolutely perfect, by myself. It was fucken crazy. Surfing my spot at that size requires you head out from the back side of the set-up, so the water sucks you out into the bay between the rock pool and the reef. Clambering over the rocks, I found three bodyboards and a surfboard just lying there. Heard a commotion up in the bushes above. Out through a gap in the bushes came Harry Woolvern, one of the young Newy locals, followed by three or four booger mates. “We went out there,” Harry said, “I got SMASHED.” Harry’s got the right stuff. I jumped and got out into the open without any trouble other than a slight scrape to the right fin. Paddled through all that open water, totally alone, paddling into empty water, breathing deep, getting a focus. While the water in many places had been dirty and brown thanks to runoff, the reef tip is a long way offshore and clean as can be; it was glowing a deep blue, and you could feel the ocean vibrating. Almost as soon as I paddled into the zone, a twelve foot set hit off the bombie and stormed through onto the reef. The set stood up square, magnificent and truly terrifying – a deep blue wave face, drawing and sucking clean and way out of my reach. I watched in complete awe as it pitched, roaring like a wild animal.
I surfed waves like that alone for about an hour, taking my time, until a bloke I know, the casual goofyfoot from the morning session a month past, came out and sat a bit wide for a while. “I’ve got the worst flu!” he said. “I shouldn’t be out here, but...” We both shrugged, laughing at his “but”. Next wave was a full-on bomb, and fading back down the face, I was filled not with lust but instead with a glorious sense of everything, the cliffs to the side, the open sky to the northwest, the foam, the deeps and the shallows, the sun lighting it all, the impossibility of it, the impossible beauty of such a day on the rim of a reef and the clean water and the foam line and the feeling of a turn down the face of a 10' wave.
Paddled back out and me and the goofyfoot watched as another one of those twelve foot sets hit. We watched in complete slack-jawed amazement. I thought about my 8'1" Sunset gun, sitting in the rafters of a mate’s house on Oahu, it coulda caught one of those waves. Maybe I coulda, on the 7'1", if it was 15 years ago. I said as much to my mate, he said, “Nah, too much side wash.” Maybe he was right.
I caught a last wave and paddled all the way across to the mid-beach rip next to Bozo’s Bowl, and got a small right to the beach. Almost all of Newport Beach was gone by this time, but still there was a small cliff of sand left facing the rip, a cliff just metres from the council’s dune preservation system, where once, 33 years before, as a grommet, I’d lit fires to warm up after a session. I slid up on a shorebreak foamie, turned, and the next shorie wave came exploding up across the sand and slammed me back against the cliff. I threw my board and let it slam me, laughing.

It’s funny how quick a surf pattern changes, and how final it feels when the change settles in. Only a few weeks later, the middle of August, I wandered into the car park and found a mate checking the surf. It was light offshore and dead flat, as it’d been for some days. The air was unusually warm. We both knew not to expect anything much for a while. “Just as well for them houses,” my mate said, indicating the south end with a flicker of his eyebrows.
“Yeah, I bet for a while there they were having fucken kittens.”
We sat a bit longer, and my mate said, “Wonder how long it’ll be till that happens again. ’74 last time, jeez we’ll probably be waiting another 35 years!”
Then the thought struck me and him at the same moment, and I couldn’t help laughing at it. “Fucken hell, next time that happens we’ll be eighty years old! There’s no way we’ll be surfing it … we’ll be sitting on folding chairs watching the grandkiddies! ‘Gooo, little fella! He’s having a dig isn’t he!’”
Those wild storms will come again. I’ve had two of ‘em. The first marked my birth as a surfer; the second marked something else – like I said, I still don’t know what. I count myself lucky for the two. I wonder if I’ll be lucky enough to see a third, and if so, what those storms will bring.

[Trev]

Great read Nick. And it bears some memories for me as well.
That June long weekend I drove down from Brisbane where I'd been looking after my mate's businesses while he went to England for his son's wedding. We had just sold our house at Castle Hill and settlement was on the Tuesday after the long weekend.
The storm played havoc with the Hills District too. I arrived on the Monday afternoon to find the hotel we were booked in at Pennant Hills had no power and my wife who had supervised the uploading of all our worldly possessions was supposed to be staying there. They found us somewhere else.
Then we loaded up the two cars with the stuff we needed for the next few weeks until we found a new place back home and drove north. There was water everywhere. We had to make a couple of detours around and north of Newcastle.
And the next few weeks of which you speak, enough of the swell made its way north to create a great welcome to the Sunshine Coast for me.

[chrisb]

Thanks Nick for the article, good read - as I was in the USA in June and July 2007 I missed it all.
But I do remember the 1974 storms, mainly as a spectator until the waves eased off. That storm claimed the Bondi mermaid together with her multi-tonne boulder as well as the Paragon Restaurant that was inside what everyone thought was the safe haven of Botany Bay.
If I'm still around in 35 years time for the next storm it will be as a geriatric spectator.

[Cranked]

Jesus H. Christ, thanks Nick... I'm totally exhausted after reading that!