Stealing the Wave by Andy Martin

Author:Andy Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781596918528
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Foo knelt down, picked up his board and went down the hill to the edge of the water. James Jones and the bodyboarder J. P. Patterson were already paddling out just ahead of him. He flung himself into the steaming broth of the shorebreak and paddled forcefully into the channel and Ace Cool followed right behind him, trying to stay in his slipstream. Ace had been watching Foo: if Foo was going out, he was going out. The funny thing was that Foo had never really checked the surf at close quarters. He was concentrating on his own moves. He didn't like to watch the waves too much in case it stopped him going out. So when Foo was followed out by Ace it was the blind leading the blind. Now there were four men out. Bradshaw shook his head up on the dune and looked grim. They were all dead meat. If he couldn't make it, nobody could. Of that he was certain. It was curtains for Foo.

Bradshaw never admitted to fear. It was a point of principle with him. He always said if he was afraid he'd never go out (but since he was afraid of nothing he always would go). Foo, on the other hand, regularly acknowledged fear. Especially at the Bay. Now, as he paddled out, he was starting to regret not having checked out the surf properly. He could taste the faint, bitter tang of imminent peril on his tongue and he could feel the fluttering of the great void that loomed up inside him as a reminder of the immense nothingness that awaited him somewhere down the line. Maybe not too far down. Foo took his regular slow wide-angled course around the back of the break, through the middle of the Bay, so as to prepare himself for what lay ahead.

Now he would have to look at the surf, from very close quarters. Sometimes too close. 'We all quickly realised that this was no ordinary big day.' All the waves were ledging up, hitting a fully vertical angle, as perpendicular as lighthouses, far too soon. There seemed to be no chance of getting into any of them, no ramp, no entry lane. The four men remained wide, out in the channel, not even on the shoulder, apprehensive of the sheer refractory trickiness of these waves, with a geometry none of them had seen before at Waimea. Not one of them seemed in the least rideable. And even then they had to keep swinging out and around crazy, lumbering, lopsided waves, the kind of waves that defined 'gnarly', that were jacking up and pitching over in an area that would normally be considered 'the safety zone'. What they all quickly realised was that, on this day, there was no such thing as a safety zone at Waimea. The field of play had had all its lines washed out, erased. Twenty-five-footers were springing up almost at random and taking over the entire Bay, leaving no breathing space.

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