365 surfing short stories in 365 days

[steve shearer]

Brother Longy, keep pushing here brother.

Surfing fiction ain't my trip tis true, I prefer the Russian peasantry or French Aristocracy or American Civil War as fictional subjects. Even Breath I found stultifyingly contrived and artificial........

But permit my impudence.....the real story here is the concept itself: the 365 in 365 trip.
That would be a momument to human achievement.

So where you at?
Are you on song to complete this journey?

I notice a lot of things drop in your chest and go "click" or "clunk"

This is some kind of weapon metaphor is it?

Come on....give us 365 short stories in 365 days please.
This will cement your name in surf writing history and probably give you licence to start running very expensive how-to seminars :

I could see you standing up the front of the class of serious young insects all looking at you like you've got a bulls-eye on your forehead while you point to a whiteboard with a large cane (rescued from an operation in PNG) that goes Tap, Tap Tap on the whiteboard as you spell out the essential elements.
"Discipline"
Discipline"
"You think those three hundred and sixty fcuking five stories wrote themselves!"

[oldman]

Even Breath I found stultifyingly contrived and artificial........

Really?

You're a hard marker Steve.

[LONGINUS]

Steve you're right...I need to finish this...there's no way out.

I'm a little behind the target but I can go back and make it up again...recover it and press on.

Would Dave Rastovich give up picking up plastic bottles on the beaches of Lousiana just because some mexican left the oil tap to 'on' - NO

Would Mick Fanning stop picking on minority groups just because STAB ran an article on it? - NO

Would Surfing World run an article on the word tour unless there was a paid billabong ad in it for Parko? - NO

Could ASL put together a surf mag that didnt have the words FAAARK, FROFIN or FKIN MENTAL on the cover?....NO

And so for these reasons and more I must continue.

Clunking in the chest? I had a dream once that I was a machine and I had to manually transfer chemicals and enzymes around my body to produce human emotional responses to situations. The 'clunk' was the hammer going down deep inside my system as I released adrenaline. - I've never forgotten that dream...

[mical]

^^
I really enjoyed it, not a classic but still a good read.

[lessormore]

Everybody say Hi to Longinus.at Swellnet Seems he might have ran out of stories to tell!

[LONGINUS]

http://www.surfingatlas.com/articles/dry_the_rain

West Timor, 1995

“You say how much”

I looked down at the old ’38 special she was selling, serial number filed flat under the base of the grip. The piece had been wrapped in a muslin cloth soaked in whale fat for god knows how long. The smell reminded me of my Nan’s old sowing machine. I peeled of a $50 USD note and everyone laughed. I made with the ‘walkaway’ routine, a few seconds later she shoved the piece in my pocket with a handful of corroded bullets and disappeared with the fifty. The cool metal pressed against my thigh on the long walk down to the boat. Kupang, West Timor -1995.

The island of Timor, forgotten remnant of Dutch and Portuguese Empires- endstate of lost surfers raised on white rice and wanderlust. I had seven days in the capital Kupang but one night was enough. Weird nightclubs funded on corrupt oil money where Javanese businessmen sip thick black bubble tea through straws like insects. Tired Surabayan prostitutes in pancake makeup made up to look like Balinese girls stalk the streets at night; while the ash covered faces of converts to an ancient blend of Christianity and Timorese animalism practice lost catholic rituals that event the Dutch and Portuguese had forgotten.

Our ship had been assigned an Indonesian Naval Officer as our liaison in port. He came onboard speaking perfect Djakarta English, he was about my age but had a rack of medals on his chest like an admiral. As he sat down and spoke I watched his rows of medals in the fluorescent light and wondered how many East Timorese heads he had kicked to get them. There was no doubt about it – this boy was going places.

Three of us onboard were surfers and so he set up a boat to take us across to Nemberala. We arrived just after dark in the village and crashed in the nearest losmen. I woke up with a weird metallic taste in my mouth in the pre dawn haze as a polite softly spoken fisherman was walking around prodding each of us gently.

“T-Land now…surfing T-Land now please”.

I have since had the pleasure of staying in many hotels around the world yet none have ever come close to the wake up call I received that morning. Less than 30 minutes later we were motoring into an empty lineup throwing down riceballs and sweet buffalo milk. Five foot lefts were ratcheting in slow time. No nasty ‘speedies’ section like G-Land to catch you out on day 1, this was T-Land. I put my fingers together to imitate a photo frame – perfect.

We stoped for lunch and motored back into the village. Sitting around before the second session someone mentioned a spot called ‘Boa’. I could have surfed T-Land for the next 20 years but went with the flow anyway. Two hours later we pulled up at a way too fast right hander that was throwing a square barrel onto about 50 metres of reef. Not my idea of fun but everyone else enjoyed it. I got hung up in the lip on my first wave. An impressive ride only in the fact that I somehow managed to go over the falls twice.

I sat the rest of that session out in the boat and saved what I had left in my shoulders for a third session back at T-Land. As the driver helped me out of the water I caught sight of a necklace he was wearing, a large silver disc drilled clean through the middle and hung on a leather cord. He saw me looking at it and took it off to show me. It was a coin, a Dutch guilder stamped 1674, remnant of an extinct empire on the edge of the world. Once he saw how fascinated I was with it he begged me to keep it but I couldn’t, I placed it back over his head onto his shoulders and he closed his eyes as I did it.

The first second I had to myself I went back to my bag, pulled out the gun and bullets I had bought in Kupang and threw them all over the side. I had no need of them here. The gun sank quickly but the brass of the bullets sparkled through dull green verdigris as they drifted to the bottom, like marble chips falling through glycerine.

[jimmy]

Long time coming Adam.. Where the fark have you been?

[LONGINUS]

at sea old bean

water water all around yet not a drop to surf!

Got back to land just in time for a barrage of legal threats from surf magazines various to pay my fkcuking advertising bills or else they will send around some ASP burnout to break my kneecaps..its good to know your work is appreciated

In Hossegor 11-12 September if anyone is up for a beer, West Coast Sicily if the med is up.

[jimmy]

at sea old bean

water water all around yet not a drop to surf!

Got back to land just in time for a barrage of legal threats from surf magazines various to pay my fkcuking advertising bills or else they will send around some ASP burnout to break my kneecaps..its good to know your work is appreciated

In Hossegor 11-12 September if anyone is up for a beer, West Coast Sicily if the med is up.

OK then. Can I have your'e shitty wax stockpile before they kill you?

[LONGINUS]

Deal!

Only if all proceeds go into researching and developing more petroleum based surfing products

[LONGINUS]

http://www.surfingatlas.com/articles/dry_the_rain

Dry The Rain

West Timor, 1995 -

“You say how much”

I looked down at the old ’38 special she was selling, serial number filed flat under the base of the grip. The piece had been wrapped in a muslin cloth soaked in whale fat for god knows how long. The smell reminded me of my Nan’s old sowing machine. I peeled of a $50 USD note and everyone laughed. I made with the ‘walkaway’ routine, a few seconds later she shoved the piece in my pocket with a handful of corroded bullets and disappeared with the fifty. The cool metal pressed against my thigh on the long walk down to the boat. Kupang, West Timor -1995.

The island of Timor, forgotten remnant of Dutch and Portuguese Empires- endstate of lost surfers raised on white rice and wanderlust. I had seven days in the capital Kupang but one night was enough. Weird nightclubs funded on corrupt oil money where Javanese businessmen sip thick black bubble tea through straws like insects. Tired Surabayan prostitutes in pancake makeup made up to look like Balinese girls stalk the streets at night; while the ash covered faces of converts to an ancient blend of Christianity and Timorese animalism practice lost catholic rituals that event the Dutch and Portuguese had forgotten.

Our ship had been assigned an Indonesian Naval Officer as our liaison in port. He came onboard speaking perfect Djakarta English, he was about my age but had a rack of medals on his chest like an admiral. As he sat down and spoke I watched his rows of medals in the fluorescent light and wondered how many East Timorese heads he had kicked to get them. There was no doubt about it – this boy was going places.

Three of us onboard were surfers and so he set up a boat to take us across to Nemberala. We arrived just after dark in the village and crashed in the nearest losmen. I woke up with a weird metallic taste in my mouth in the pre dawn haze as a polite softly spoken fisherman was walking around prodding each of us gently.

“T-Land now…surfing T-Land now please”.

I have since had the pleasure of staying in many hotels around the world yet none have ever come close to the wake up call I received that morning. Less than 30 minutes later we were motoring into an empty lineup throwing down riceballs and sweet buffalo milk. Five foot lefts were ratcheting in slow time. No nasty ‘speedies’ section like G-Land to catch you out on day 1, this was T-Land. I put my fingers together to imitate a photo frame – perfect.

We stoped for lunch and motored back into the village. Sitting around before the second session someone mentioned a spot called ‘Boa’. I could have surfed T-Land for the next 20 years but went with the flow anyway. Two hours later we pulled up at a way too fast right hander that was throwing a square barrel onto about 50 metres of reef. Not my idea of fun but everyone else enjoyed it. I got hung up in the lip on my first wave. An impressive ride only in the fact that I somehow managed to go over the falls twice.

I sat the rest of that session out in the boat and saved what I had left in my shoulders for a third session back at T-Land. As the driver helped me out of the water I caught sight of a necklace he was wearing, a large silver disc drilled clean through the middle and hung on a leather cord. He saw me looking at it and took it off to show me. It was a coin, a Dutch guilder stamped 1674, remnant of an extinct empire on the edge of the world. Once he saw how fascinated I was with it he begged me to keep it but I couldn’t, I placed it back over his head onto his shoulders and he closed his eyes as I did it.

The first second I had to myself I went back to my bag, pulled out the gun and bullets I had bought in Kupang and threw them all over the side. I had no need of them here. The gun sank quickly but the brass of the bullets sparkled through dull green verdigris as they drifted to the bottom, like marble chips falling through glycerine.

[LONGINUS]

http://www.surfingatlas.com/articles/fadeout

Fadeout

Garden Island, Western Australia 1998

No one forgets the time they see their first dead body. The smell around them, the shade of the light, the shape of the clouds, the expression on the lifeless face. I saw my first dead body in 1992, I was 19, he was 42, his name was Petty Officer Darren McClutchy.

A week ago we had all been surfing at Queens, Waikiki. After 6 weeks of maintenance in Pearl Harbour we had the place wired. Six of us were reasonable surfers and rode Waikiki twice a day; before work at dawn and every afternoon before beers at Dukes.

I remember the last wave of the day, McClutchy was a long way up the line, way too deep, but I pulled back and let him take it all the same. He bulldogged through the shutdown section and trimmed past me – grey spectral eyes in the fading light focused down the line. I went in after that. Around an hour later I think I saw him from the bar at Dukes, a dark shadow with a longboard shaping along the beach, contemplating a final paddle at Publics. I always wondered if he went out and caught his final wave then or if I saw it before when he passed before me.

We sailed the next day.

The next time I saw McClutchy he was lying in his rack just after midnight when he had failed to get up for his watch, the diesel hum faded into sea static as I watched the coxswain lower a small mirror in front of the mans mouth. The rest of us stood there transfixed. The mirror came back clean, no condensation and they declared him dead - probable cause, massive heart attack. I looked around McClutchys rack as they tugged at his wedding ring to bag it up; his own little world beneath the sea. A picture of two children, red brown hair the same as his, he stood behind them framed by a parkland somewhere in Freemantle. Next to that picture was a wedding photo, his wife with a beautiful smile and a 1980’s perm, Mc Clutchy had folded the shot to fit his wife and kids together in the small space next to the bunk speaker, on the other side of the fold was a shot of him in his mid 80's glory; more hair back then but he looked like a perfect match contestant all the same, no doubt into 'windsurfing and raging.'The long black shine of the body bag came up from store and they zipped him up inside. I watched his mouth area for a long time as they scurried around his bunk to collect the effects, wanting to see the plastic rise and fall with respiration but it never happened. Someone lifted up his bunk to reveal a cache of pornography, ‘acquired tastes’ that he was famous for, the smirks died down as the photos of his wife were folded away, there was something written on the back in a woman’s hand that no one dared to read.

In the galley the freezer was cleared as best as possible and a space made for the body. As we left him there the coxswain entered alone wearing gloves, carrying tweezers and a wad of cotton wool. I read about what he would do next. A wad of cotton wool would be forced down the throat to prevent any gas from escaping; the same would be done to the anus. We had a week to home port and McClutchy would be frozen solid in 6 hours.

Everyone that had surfed with him and knew him well came down to the freezer over the next week to say their own goodbye. It was an odd location for an open viewing, the black body bag zipped open with salami and frozen pork swinging from the rafters. All of it was supposed to be destroyed when we came alongside but many sailors would take some of the meat home to eat it. It was an old superstition of the sea that part of the lost sailor would be inside it and it was not right to simply throw it away.

One of the trainee cooks went down to grab frozen food and managed to lock himself inside the freezer with the body – they found him 20 minutes later a blubbering petrified wreck – he was nicknamed ‘Ghostbuster’ for the rest of his career. Mc Clutchy would have liked that.

I went down a day before we got alongside to see McClutchy. I sat in the freezer all alone exhaling white frost in a cold weather jacket for a good 5 minutes before I had the courage to zip down the black bag and look at him. His mouth was pulled into a faint smile, ice linking his upper teeth, a pale tongue lolling back into the recess of his throat. Skin faded to white with flecks of ice buried in his hair. I reached out to touch his eyelids, expecting the soft tension of living flesh beneath my fingers. I found only the hard cold shape of a frozen eye that jerked my hand back on reflex. I zipped him up and walked out, frozen milk and yoghurt stacked around him in the sodium light of the deep freeze.

We came alongside with a larger than usual crowd on the wharf, it only took a few moments to find them there at the head of the group with a senior naval officer on each side of them -McClutchy's wife and kids. The kids were older than the photo, both tall, more like their mother than him now but they still had his hair, the browny red shock of hair that suited his daughter more than her brother. I watched his wife's face as we tied up in silence, tear swollen eyes behind dark glasses. The perm from the wedding photo was gone now and she was a little heavier now. The extra kilos from the second child that McClutchy like all men never cared about but it embarrassed her all the same. Her beautiful smile was gone but I could see the shape of it in her face, her daughter had it too.

They brought McClutchy out first and the captain helped to carry him across the gangway, the frozen black bag smoking in the morning summer sun, long fingers of white frost curling back behind the honour guard. McClutchy and his family disappeared with the Navy brass as a great silence descended on the wharf. We cleaned up and washed down the boat, no one said a lot that afternoon. I skipped out of beers that evening and went for a surf.

The back of Garden Island had a couple of cracking reef ledges that McClutchy and I always had to ourselves whenever we wanted them. I trimmed along a few 3 foot speed walls at Beagle Road and kicked out before the kelp beds. I paddled back out to the surge and watched the sun dip down low in the west. McClutchy always did this same lame gag whenever we saw the sun hit the water during a session, he would let out a low 'hiss' to imitate the sun hitting the water and boiling the ocean away. It always made me smile though and I used it all the time on other people - never let him know that. I paddled hard for a 4 foot set wave and missed it. From the back I watched the line peel left at perfect pace, the smooth black/greenback of the wave breaking down under surface tension and cavitating with foam. I saw the speed pick up on the kelp bed and then a 50 foot long section fold down instantaneously like it always did. Way down the line a howling gust of spray from the mouth of the barrel that always made me wonder if it was possible to get enough speed to make it that far somehow. By the time I turned around the sun was about to hit the horizon in a white heat shimmer, I closed my eyes and waited for the sound...

[LONGINUS]

Canary Islands, 1997

Cumbre Vieja


The airport on La Palma Island in The Canaries reminded me a lot of Bali – an artificially created square strip thrust unrespectfully into the ocean, the corpse of a forgotten point break and a million tonnes of coral ground beneath the black top. The baggage carousel was lined with a euro blend of pre-op cosmetic surgery patients, junkies and honeymooners. It always relieved me to see my board come out in one piece around an airport carousel – the fact that ours were the only boards worried me a little though – this place was a bit of a gamble.

The hordes of pre booked car drivers drifted away with their charges, until a solitary figure in a ten pin bowling polo shirt and shithouse brown slacks shuffled forward with a scrawled sign under his chin. This was Livery Sanchez – driver, he looked like a Spanish version of Peter Lorre, his side parted gloss black hair was perfect.

71’s was a cranking right hander just to the south and we bumped along the dirt road through to the end of the line at the fishing shacks along Lugar Lomo. A raw North Atlantic swell filtered past the outside point and tuned its way for a few hundred metres into the bay, once it rounded the corner it broke along a thin blade of reef for an age before detonating in an unmakeable gas chamber on the black sand beach. We rode that break until the sun crept west across the ridge line of the volcanic mountain ridge known as Cumbre Vieja. The instant that happened, the whole area took on a very different feel. The black sand beach shone like grey neon under the clear water, it suddenly looked as hard as pavement. I looked up to the ridge in the distance, rays of light filtering through the deep fractures of the mountain ridge, rocks like bleached marble. Far to our east across the horizon of the Atlantic lay Africa and the madness of The Western Sahara; the last piece of Africa that no country possessed…no one wanted – the entire region crawling with murder squads, cannibals, water barons and warlords straight out of a Mad Max sequel. Sanchez was clearly spooked in the weird half light effect and he waved us in. It wasn’t hard to convince us that the other side of the island would be just as good so we bundled into the car for the trip across Cubmre Vieja to the other side. After about an hour we reached the peak and were into the light again. Sanchez stopped for a smoke and we stretched our legs. There, on the peak of Cumbre Vieja, 2000 metres in the air I surveyed the entire Canary Island chain spread before me to the east. Sanchez handed me a faded, dog eared Readers Digest from 1987 with an article on the mountain. I flicked through briefly, a shot of Belinda Carlisle in leopard print leotard folded for rapid reference on page 34. I turned back to the article and proceeded to read about the end of the world. The entire south-western side of the island on La Palma is taken up in the Cumbre Vieja volcanic feature. In the article, a scientist runs a theory that the severe cracks around the island ridge are telltale sign that any day now, the entire island will split and Cumbre Vieja will slide into the sea. The resulting tsunami from this event would generate a wave of around 600 metres height travelling at 1000 kilometres per hour across the Atlantic. The nightmare of Western Africa disappears as the ocean reaches to places it hasn’t seen in an epoch. Three hours later, Southern England disappears with waves washing up as far as the Scottish Highlands. In six hours, the Eastern Seaboard of the US is submerged, with expected casualties approaching 30% of the entire US population. The wave is called ‘Onda De Dios’ – Wave of God. And when it recedes, it leaves in it’s wake a new world.

That night I had a fantastic dream. I dreamt that we were standing up on the peak with Sanchez when the island broke up. A massive crack opened up on the ground but I jumped to the wrong side. I was separated from everyone else on the island as Cumbre Vieja began the long slide down to the Atlantic sea floor. From my vantage point high on the top of the ridge it was like commanding some enormous ship pushing west towards the Americas, a great bow wave pushing up 20 miles away at the head of the moving island. Looking behind, La Palma and everyone… everything I knew faded away as I pushed on – riding my island into a New World.

[steve shearer]

Fuck, you've got no shame Longy.
I'll give you that.

But howsabout starting a new thread if you don't intend to honour your committments.
At least then your not rubbing our noses in it.

[LONGINUS]