Pittwater Life January 2018 Issue

Surfing Life
Surfing Life
Friend & stranger: the
rock that shapes our surf
Six days before Christmas,
on a calm morning with
a tiny swell, I wander
down toward the north end
of Newport Beach, thinking
to jump off the rock platform
and swim back to the Peak.
It’s been a long year,
maybe I can wash a bit of it
off.
There’s almost nobody
on the beach; just a woman
with a Labrador dog in the
corner, where the sand ends
and the rock begins. An old
tennis ball is stranded at
the high tide mark. I offer it
to the dog, and the woman
smiles and declines on the
dog’s behalf. The dog looks
doubtful.
I let it go, along with the
ball, and begin the careful
walk out along the inner rim
of the rock shelf, close to the
cliff, the rising tide pushing
little leftover north-east wind
chop up against me with a
smack.
If you ever do this walk,
you’ll find it takes you up
and along a little crescent
curve of very old exposed
volcanic rock, then onto a
short flat section, then to a
large awkward pile of clifffall
rock slabs, tumbled over
each other like badly shuffled
cards.
with Nick Carroll
With one year dust and another not quite begun, it’s a good time just to wander and look around.
EVERYTHING MUST CHANGE: Pittwater's cliff-faces seem enduring, but they weather like anything else.
Climbing across this pile
is tricky, especially at high
tide. The rocks are scattered
at strange angles to one
another. I’ve done this walk
numerous times over the
years and it’s never quite
precisely the same. At every
step you’re confronted with
some new little puzzle, a
step from the familiar to the
uncertain and back again – a
rock that holds, a rock that
moves. As I hop from one
to the next and the next,
I recognise rocks from my
childhood a half century
ago, and almost trip over
rocks I’ve never seen before,
recently descended from the
fractured edge of the cliff
above.
These cliffs and platforms,
from Barrenjoey to the
outside curve of Warriewood,
define the Pittwater surfing
experience. They contain
and form the sand bottom
contours of our daily surfing
bread. They turn an angled
wind offshore. In some cases,
in the right swells and winds,
their unevenly weathered
laminar layers create our
finest and possibly most
frightening surfing moments.
The cliff-faces seem
enduring, yet they’re anything
but. Look at any Pittwater
headland image from 80
years back and you’ll see the
differences. The cliffs are
changing, like human faces,
marking time. That doesn’t
prevent us from endowing
them with deep, often barely
spoken significance. When
the nose fell off north Avalon
headland a few months ago,
it caused a shudder to pass
through the ranks of the Av
old school. “It’s the end of
an era,” I heard one mutter
not long afterward, as he
46 JANUARY 2018
The Local Voice Since 1991