The Road Trip
It is hard to put into words the feeling of your mate pulling up in front of your house with all the crew and boards on the roof ready to head off on a weekend adventure to a new and exciting spot on a map three hundred kilometer’s away. I can only equate it to being 10 years old and heading away for your annual holidays, but we did it every weekend much to the chagrin of our parents at times who didn’t understand how a sport had taken over our lives.
We would be all wound up sharing the driving through the Friday night arriving at Cunjorong Point run to the lookout just to get a glimpse of the size of the swell or the wind direction, back to the car pull out your sleeping bag, throw it down on the softest piece of ground you could find and drift off to sleep knowing that there was no need for an alarm clock as someone would be up just before dawn and start yelling it’s on boys lets go.
Paddling out at dawn and surf until your arms felt like they would drop off. Lunch was what you bought with you or if you were lucky like at Green Island the Conjurong shop had a delivery of bread, unsliced of course. Break the loaf in half and eat the center out, fill it up with baked beans or banana and you were ready for the afternoon session surfing until it was too dark to see the waves. It was such a wonderous feeling that those memories live with you the rest of your life.
As surfing grew so did the evolution of the surfboard, which was like your best friend in the world and meant more to you than most other things. An example of this evolution would be my own experience, which was borrowing my uncle’s surfboard, a 9’6” Balsa board and weighed 60 lbs, this was when I was twelve years old in 1962 and by 1969 I was riding a lightweight 6’ fiberglass and foam shortboard I hand shaped myself, a huge difference not only in equipment but also in the style of surfing in a short seven-year span. Surfboards have continued to advance in design with surfboard manufacturers experimenting with differing mindsets. This however has slowed down a little in modern design as the old masters retire and it all left up to shaping machines and mass production from overseas markets, what the future holds will unfold in the coming years, but to us older generation, we had the best of it.
As I stated at the start it has always been difficult for a non-surfer to understand and a lot of surfers at the time went through a lot of grief from the mainstream and some dropped out of society altogether living wherever they could just to get as much surf as they could. We as surfers knew that no one understood us but we had seen the other side, that life was meant to be lived not endured, a concept far removed from our parent’s understanding. Some decided to keep a reasonably normal life with a career and just the weekend road trips, which were a release from the pressures of life, however, there were the few who drifted into the drug culture and we lost a lot of friends to drugs.
The adventurous spirit that had seen surfers leave Australia and travel the globe searching for new waves and adventures. The leader of the charge was undoubtedly Peter Troy who traveled to nearly every country in the world and led the way to uncharted waters. Countries that had seen little tourism became favorite destinations, places like Hawaii the birthplace of surfing and the Aloha spirit to Bali Indonesia and beyond, to the point we surf in nearly every country of the world, if it has a coastline and swell we would have checked it out.
Some images courtesy Fiona Murphy
