Around The World In 80 Waves

I meet up with Anna again later in the day and we go for a cruise in my van to check out the options. The swell has died through the day and I’m a bit disappointed that there is no point getting in at Indicators because the waves there aren’t really breaking. After seeing the epic tube rides caught there a few days earlier I was itching for a slice of that action myself.

It is not to be however, so the best of a bad bunch are the waves on offer are Wainui Beach. We jump into our wetsuits in the car park at the top of the hill and then stroll down to the sand where Anna shows me the channel in the break where you can avoid most of the waves whilst paddling out.

I have no problems getting out the first time and there is barely any wind so the conditions are really clean.

However as soon as I paddle into a few waves on the 8’0″ I have hired I am pearling the nose and then getting the full force of the wave driving me into the sand I’m trying to surf over. I then keep getting stuck inside eating plenty of sand as I struggle back out a few times through the breaking waves.

I do catch a few though and have a fun final session in the Raglan area. Anna is doing better than me and by the time she has got out I have boiled the kettle in the campervan and we can enjoy a hot drink whilst we savour the sun setting over the sea before heading back into town.

After surfing Whale Bay I drop Anna off and get the van rigged for the rest of my travels in New Zealand and try without success to catch up on the blog. The IT issues have become insurmountable using my old hardware so I give it up as a bad loss and after a few beers turn in early.

That inevitably means that I am up before dawn the following day and on my own I head straight for Manu Bay where I am treated to a gorgeous sunrise, whilst I get my wetsuit on. 

Anna was hoping to join me in the water and I also hoped to bump into Flash at the break because he paddles out  there every morning with his son, but neither can be seen so I am on my lonesome.

It is so early in the morning when I wade out over the rocks which I will be surfing over as the tide comes in, that there are only a handful of people in the water. I know it won’t last long because the conditions are PERFECT.

I am back on my game today and a bit gutted that nobody witnesses it. It doesn’t matter though because I’m having such a great surf and there are a few people in the water to have a laugh with.

I lost count of how many waves I caught but it was loads and I was riding from right on the point and then surfing around the coast until I had to jump off or surf straight into the breakwater which pushes out into the sea.

Fantastic session. I’m loving New Zealand.

After a night spent on one of the vans’s seats I am not in the freshest state the following morning, but am correctly told by Apollo that a board for the bed will be delivered later in the day. Once that is sorted my first order of business is sourcing a surfboard.

Sarah and Roddy’s brother-in-law, who is universally known as Flash, actually works in the local surf shop (www.raglansurf.com ) and helps me sort out a great hire deal on one of the locally made Hughes surfboards. Once that is collected Anna (who has the day off work) and I head off to the beach as soon as possible because there is a great swell breaking on the coast.

The waves today are fantastic at all the local breaks: Indicators, Whale Bay, Manu Bay and Wainui Beach. We opt for the less crowded break at Whale Bay that you see here and once more I climb into my wetsuit because the water is considerably colder than Tahiti where I last got wet.

Anna hasn’t surfed here before so the two of us figure out a way to scamper across the rocks lining the shore and then jump onto the back of one of the waves, before paddling madly to get out to the side and around the breaking section of the next ones.

Conditions seem to be perfect for the overhead waves, even if the winds are quite strong blowing off shore, and I paddle straight into the line up, while Anna takes a more tentative approach. Not sure which was the better option but for some reason I am all over the place today and as well as taking a beating from a significant number of waves am really struggling to catch anything, but am having a good time in the water regardless because there is a friendly atmosphere.

We can see people getting 5 second barrel rides along the coast at Indicators and I’m dying for a piece of the action in the waves breaking over the rocks lining the shore. Anna catches a few and I’m feeling a tad embarrassed by my lack of waves until I bag an absolute beauty which I ride all the way in snaking up and down the face. That us until two huge rocks (known as The Pinnacles) appear right in front of me in the break and I have to bail off the back of the board before a few nervy moments getting clear of trouble.

It is good to break my duck but after the rough night’s sleep, travel and taking a beating from the ocean for a few hours I’m shattered and am relieved that Anna feels the same way, so we paddle in.

I later discover that the bay is named after the whales that regularly appear in the line up. Orcas or Killer Whales are particularly common and I have to say I am quite glad that they left me alone while I was in the water. There have been no recorded attacks on humans by orcas in the wild, but even so I think the shock of something sixteen times the size of me, twice the size of an adult Great White Shark and with teeth the same size as my feet appearing suddenly out of the water next to me might literally frighten the life out of me!

The first place I am heading to in New Zealand is a small town called Raglan, which has been famous in surfing circles since it’s waves appeared in Bruce Brown’s classic surf film ‘The Endless Summer’.

The weather is awful and I get completely lost leaving Auckland so it is well after dark and I am tired by the time I pull up at the supermarket there upon arrival because I need to buy supplies.

I walk through the door of the supermarket and immediately bump into Anna at the vegetable section, who was one of two gorgeous Canadian surfers I met all the way back in Oahu and joined me for the first surf of my travels as well as touring most of the North Shore with me back in December.

Neither of us knew the other would even be in this part of the world let alone in town or going shopping, and two minutes either way and we would have missed each other entirely. Nobody else in the supermarket has a clue what is going on and is probably wondering why two people are jumping around hugging one and other only having seen the price of potatoes, but we are super stoked. Such an excellent surprise.

We spend a few minutes catching up on the waves we have been scoring on our different journeys, and I’m disappointed to discover that I only missed also seeing Alexa again by a week because she has just gone home.

“Do you want to come and hang out with me and my friends in our hot tub?” is not a question I have been asked often enough by pretty young surfer girls, and is certainly not an offer I need to consider for long. We complete our shopping and I give Anna a lift back up the hill to her place to enjoy a few beers. Whilst there I am treated to some wholesome home cooked food too. What a welcome. I think I will be liking New Zealand.

However it was a good job I was in a great mood, because when it is time to turn in I discover that  the numpties at the campervan hire company haven’t equipped me with the center-board necessary to make up the king size bed in the van. Denied!!

I enjoy a slow start today but spend a great morning with Sarah, who is desperate to show me the lovely view from their house in Auckland. Unfortunately the weather gods are not being kind and the rain was lashing down relentlessly, so much so that we could barely see the other side of the valley at one stage.

After a bit of shopping and securing the latest in a long line of foreign SIM cards to keep me online during my time in New Zealand, we head over to the offices of Apollo Camper-vans, where with the help of one of my surfing buddies back in the UK I have secured a great deal on a set of wheels to tour in. (Thanks Debs. x)

I’m not the smallest bloke in the world so I had told them when booking I did not want a vehicle that I would be banging around in. This has clearly been taken to heart because look at the monster van they handed over.

Sarah and I are in stitches, but managed to get this picture of what I christened ‘The Beast’ in one break in the rain before I headed south.

I am going to be touring around New Zealand for a couple of weeks, but straight away my time here is a day shorter than I thought I had, having lost a day when I travelled westward over the international date line. What happened to Monday?

I haven’t had enough time anywhere to see everything so I am used to it by now, and will see as much as I can.

I have flown into Auckland on the North Island but arrived too late for me to do much more than land myself.

I had hoped to be met by some of my friends at the airport but the information on my plane’s landing time that I had been supplied with was way off, and unsurprisingly they didn’t fancy a six hour wait at the airport for me to turn up.

Roddy and Sarah used to be neighbours of mine back in London and once again it is great to see familiar faces on my travels.

We spend a lovely evening catching up on gossip over a few beers and talking about everyone’s adventures during the twelve months since we had last seen each other, but it is a school night for everybody else and we turn in before it gets too late.

Not ‘too late’ being about 5am on the Tahitian clock, which I was still thinking it was that is.

After dropping off Eric’s wife’s surfboard and the hire car it was time to catch my next flight onwards to New Zealand.

I was without a board so wasn’t expecting any issues, but not even Bear Grylls safety film for the Airbus A320 (http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/air-nz-does-it-again-bear-grylls-stars-in-latest-comedic-safety-video-20130227-2f56h.html) could lighten my mood after I got stung for $100 by Air New Zealand in order to take two bags on the plane.

My request that my bag have a window seat seeing as it was paying for its own ticket fell on deaf ears!

All credit for the following shots taken from our little aluminium boat must go to Giovanni Copello.

Please liaise with him directly if you would like to use them:

info@copello.it

Now I will be absolutely clear that I did not make any attempt to surf this wave at all. It was far too big for my fitness and / or skill level. In fact it was so big that the session was for tow-in surfers only, whereby they water-ski behind jet-skis to build up speed and then whip themselves into the action. As such it was a two man event and for all the above reasons I sensibly left getting in the water to the professionals.

I am however going to claim this break as one of my waves mostly because as will become abundantly clear taking on thirty foot waves in this small boat was as close to death as I have been since the huge waves in Santa Catalina.

Myself and Giovanni had made every effort to get ourselves onto a bigger boat but the word was out that Tea’hupoo was going off and every boat was already booked up.

As a result our skipper for the day was a lovely local guy called Sante, who I suspect might have been a tad deranged because all I will remember of him is his deep booming guffaws every time he would gun the little engine because we were borderline caught inside one of the giant waves about to crash onto the reef. We spent six hours bobbing up and down in his little thin hulled aluminium boat which was clearly not ideal for the situation.

Gio got loads of great pictures but they were achieved by him standing up in the back of the little boat with me then having to be spread out like a starfish across the front in order to lower the centre of gravity back down, with Sante grinning and laughing at everything that was going on. I will post some more pictures which Gio took with his professional camera later but these are some of my own and you can see some footage from the local TV station here: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x10gz2r_pour-les-amateurs-de-gros-tubes-direction-teahupoo-pour-une-session-100-adrenaline_sport.

There was an almost tangible energy there which everybody was feeding off, whether it be the pros pouting for the latest lens they had spotted looking their way or the enthusiastic fan like myself who would be going crazy for every monster wave that was ridden.

All the surfers were wearing full body armour and life preservers so this really wasn’t for the faint of heart. However we too were perpetually guessing whether we would have the best view for the next wave or if we had gone too close to the reef and were about to be obliterated by the sneaker set.

The ocean currents and just the amount of water moving around all the time onto and then draining off the reef meant Sante had to keep one eye on the horizon

More than once it was far from certain that we would get away unscathed and I was right behind the TV cameraman that filmed the boat coming vertically out the top of a wave and being within a hair’s breath of going over the falls backwards on a rogue set that appeared. Here is Gio’s shot of the action

I don’t know how good your French is but the lady doing the commentary for the TV show confirms that people got hospitalised just watching the waves here. How gnarly is that!

Like I said more pictures to follow, but it was epic in every sense of the word and I don’t know whether it was not having my land legs back that was causing me to wobble all over the place once we eventually returned to dry land at the end of the day, or if it was just fear!

Top day all round and once on dry land we were delighted to find all the locals playing Boule in a festive atmosphere just down the road. Well it is FRENCH Polynesia after all!

I arrived at the bungalow I have hired in Tea’hupoo. It is one of about half a dozen at a place La Vague Bleue run by a really friendly Tahitian guy called Warren and his family. It was already dark so there is little to do apart from settling into my place and think about what I might be taking on in the morning.

The bungalows are right on the shore and it is more than 2 miles from there by boat to get to the gap in the offshore reef where the waves break, but every few seconds you can still hear the rumble of the swell crashing onto the reef.

As is I don’t have enough on my mind my sleep is somewhat disturbed by geckos repeatedly falling from the roof to land on top of me during my sleep. Whilst my head is protected by a good mosquito net, the end result of discovering a lizard anywhere in your bed is understandably a huge degree of freaking out until you know what it actually is, followed by a prolonged period of distress whilst failing to get the gecko out of the bungalow.

Of course the lizards couldn’t care less about me.

I do get some rest and by the time I find a lizard in my wash bag in the morning I am almost untroubled at all by it because I know in daylight they are no real threat. I am a wee bit in two minds about brushing my teeth knowing that a gecko has spent the night being romantic with it though!

I go down to the shore to see what the waves are like. It may be far away but you can see it is enormous. Time to get in amongst it me thinks.

I meet a fantastic Italian bloke called Giovanni who runs the yacht club in Portofino and is staying in the bungalow next door. He is also keen so the two of us head down to the harbour to see if anybody is willing to take us out to the waves.