Surf

Is there anything better than a day at the beach?

The dangerous beauty of the surf; cricket unencumbered by rules; kids splashing happily in the shallows.

Sure, there are sharks.

Parking meters.

Traffic tantrums.

But all is forgiven once you spill out of the car onto the sugary sand and catch that first glimpse of the jewelled sea.

Dorothea Mackellar was sidetracked by sweeping plains, rugged mountain ranges, droughts and flooding rains.

But Tim Winton got it right in Breath, a poetic paen to our love of the roiling sea.

“Blokes dancing themselves across the bay with smiles on their faces and sun in their hair … How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared,” he wrote.

Sadly, my promising surfing career was cut short by a devastating fin chop at Byron Bay.

The sea was angry that day my friends, like an old man trying to return soup at a deli. (Seinfeld episode #78.)

The scene was Watego’s beach – the best longboard ride in the country.

Battling metre-high waves I made my way ‘out the back’ with the fellas.

Actually, I was happy to hang there and stare at the buff bods until a crashing set came in.

Within seconds, I went from perving on pecs to a punishing pummelling.

(Sorry – I’m undergoing alliteration therapy to deal with the trauma.)

Somehow, I became swept onto rocks where my board and body were smashed.

My confidence was further dented by the blood-curdling screams emanating from the local hospital.

“Put the fu*#ing thing back in,” one surfer yelled as a doctor forced his dislocated shoulder back into its socket.

I tried to limp away but hubby dragged me inside to the same doctor, who looked at my knee and roared with laughter.

“How about I put a band aid on that,” he said, rather unkindly.

“But it’s a fin chop!” I insisted. “Can’t I at least have one stitch? So I can show everyone?”

The good doctor stitched then bandaged the knee, which swelled with each exaggerated retelling of the story at the Byron Bay Beach Hotel that evening.

(Later that night I fainted, either from shock or a bad case of the G&Ts.)

These days I miss the exhilaration of walking on water, as Tim Winton puts it.

But I love sitting on the beach with the kids and watching the artisans of the sea weave their magic.

Four-year-old Taj screams in terror every time hubby pushes him onto a wave, but his face lights up when he reaches the shore – the ecstasy a counterbalance to the fear.

The 18^th century author, philosopher and politician Edmund Burke wrote that the ocean is a source of the sublime because it produces “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling”.

Watching another sapphire set crash onto Curl Curl Beach while the kids make a muddy, disheveled sand castle, I can think of no place I’d rather be.