Around The World In 80 Waves

Vietnam and much of the South China Sea are largely sheltered by the Philippines, Borneo and Brunei.

It was for that reason (and I’m sure a degree of hostility to all things from the USA so soon after the war) that Colonel Kilgore’s quote of “Charlie don’t surf son” in Apocalypse Now was actually filmed in Baler in the Philippenes.

The surfing scene in the movie is entirely down to John Milius the screen writer who went on to write and direct the legendary surf movie Big Wednesday.

A surfer himself he could not resist adding some larking about in the water into the screenplay.

If I had my own squadron of Huey helicopters I would be up for making a dash down to Da Nang to the sounds of Flight of the Valkeries by Wagner, but sadly I don’t.

They do get good waves there as you can see, but it will take me at least a day to reach whatever is available, along with all the associated expense and grief and then the same for the return journey so I am going to pass on the opportunity.

It is a shame but I will shortly be in the Indian Ocean again and can gorge myself on the waves available there to make up for it. Charlie might surf in Vietnam, but Rob doesn’t look like he will on this trip.

Enoshima is the town named after the island shrine you see here, which has been linked to the mainland by a narrow causeway. It is a short drive westward from Kamakura after my morning hike around the Zen temples and chatting with Buddha.

It should be possible to see Mount Fuji from the water here, but it is completely overcast today. So much so that even seeing the other end of the beach is a bit of a challenge!

I parked up in another underground car park, emerging on the sea front next to this emergency tsunami platform.

I think it is somewhere for people to climb up above the level of the incoming surge, but given it is only 7 metres high I wouldn’t rate your chances of surviving here very highly.

Not that I had much to worry about on that score though, because as well as yesterday’s howling wind, the waves have also dropped here. They are about two foot high but very clean, with maybe an extra foot on the sets, and coming in consistently.

There is a staggering amount of people in the water, especially so because it is mid week during office hours. I don’t think I have ever seen so many people in the water at one beach. It was certainly in the realm of hundreds, and I thought Snapper Rocks was busy!

I had decided to risk wearing just shorts and a thin neoprene shirt because the water had seemed warm on previous session nearby and there wasn’t much wind to bite through what I was wearing.

Speaking of bites, it didn’t take long before I was getting dive bombed by eagles again. You can see a couple in the sky behind me.

Despite all the people in the water there was hardly a word being said between the surfers, which was a bit odd, but my cheesy grin seemed to always get a good response. One pretty girl wanted to know about the GoPro but the conversation didn’t last long beyond Konnichiwa because of my lack of Japanese.

It was my last surf whilst in Japan and I made sure I caught plenty of waves because I am unlikely to get any surfing done through much of the next few weeks. This was probably the best ride of the session.

I pushed further west keen to bag another beach today, but there are no spaces anywhere where you can pull in for a decent surf check. I really do mean none.

Any space that you might ordinarily sneak into for a minute or two to see what the waves are doing has been populated by automated car parks such as you see here. It isn’t hugely expensive but the standard argument I have had with car park attendants all over the world is particularly true here. ‘I just want to check the waves.’ However you get no more than about 30 seconds before the mechanics under your car lifts a hatch to stop you leaving without paying.

After a couple of these annoying stops I opted for the southern beach at Chigasaki where once more there are already people in the water and eagles in the sky.

I bumped into an English surfer drying off in the car park, who correctly predicted my session would largely be paddling. I didn’t take out the camera again because I knew he would be correct. He was right and I only caught two rubbish waves in the soup close to shore before getting out. It was grim in the 30mph onshore wind that whipped across the beach, leaving you feeling like you were being sand blasted on the way back to the car park.

After finally catching up on the blog I take a short drive in the car around the headland to the next town called Inamuragasaki.

I find a place to park by the station for the old fashion tram which runs along the coast and went to check out the surf.

It is typhoon season in this part of the world and remnants of Typhoon Fitow are just hitting the shore here. As a result of the onshore wind the sea is largely blown out, and it is looking about as uninviting as surfing gets even if the water is quite warm.

However there are still a few people in the water so I get my wetsuit on and paddle out to join them.I thought it was going to be awful because the winds was howling onshore, so didn’t bother with the GoPro suspecting I would have thousands of shots of me just paddling into the wind. 

It wasn’t as bad as I thought and I did catch a few but the rides which you picked off more by luck than judgement were at best short lived

The only other thing to report is how many Sea Eagles there are here. There is normally one soaring only slightly overhead while you are in the water always ready to swoop down and grab something from the sea very close to you. I am more than used to having sea gulls behave in such a way but have never been dive bombed by birds of prey before, and have to say it is a bit of a worry when a giant bird with talons whistles past your ears!

I am delighted to see loads of surfers in the water at the first beach I stumble across and more importantly there are small but very surfable waves here too.

I get my board out to put the fins on and am disgusted to discover a huge hole in it, which is almost certainly from the airline travel from Australia. However I do a quick ding repair with my emergency solar-cure resin and I am walking down the beach shortly afterwards.

There must be more than a hundred people in the water in the middle of the day during the week, and I am surprised at how high the percentage of girls is here too. Being the only Geijin isn’t a problem though and I am greeted with smiles all around.

I am quickly to my feet during the session and catch loads of waves while here. It is good to wash the dust of travel off and bag another country for my tour. It had been a long day already though so after an hour and a half I got out and walk back across the beach towards my car.

I had parked in an underground car park upon arrival because there are no parking spots on the sea front, but am clearly not the only surfer to use it.

So much so, that there are steady stream of people heading to, and coming back from the beach carrying boards. There are also showers in the car park where you can freshen up after your session.

I am supposed to be surfing whilst on this trip so need to get out of Tokyo and back to the coast. However I was unaware prior to arriving here exactly how close the damaged reactors at Fukushima were to Tokyo itself.

It is less than two hundred miles away, which isn’t exactly next door, but is certainly giving me pause for thought about where on the pacific coast I should get into the water. Especially because of all the highly radioactive water leaks which have just been running into the ocean from the reactors, even within the last few weeks.

It may well be the opportunity I always wanted as a child to develop a super power of my own, but in the interest of my own longevity I think I will head south and see how I get on down there. The Toxic Anger wouldn’t be what I had in mind.

I do not know if I will get off the main island of Honshu due to time constraints, but hopefully I will find a break or two that can help me to make my surfboard glow in the dark.

The London Surf Film Festival is currently running back in the UK, and friend of mine has produced a movie for the short film category. She has captured some great footage of the surf in Madeira, which picks up fantastic waves in the middle of the North Atlantic.

The prize for the category will be won by viewer votes, so please take a look for yourselves at Nell’s movie, and vote for the film if you can here.

After a day off I have arranged another dawn raid with Chris to try and bag one more of the northern beaches before I leave Australia.

I am waiting outside his door on a Monday morning at 5.30 am with the engine running. the wheels are soon rolling northwards up to Long Reef which is at the north end of the same bay as Dee Why.

Sadly the waves have dropped considerably from the previous day which I had opted to utilise for trip administration as well as allowing myself some rest after surfing five different beaches and having gone sailing in the previous two days.

We have made the trip and there are at least waves so we paddle out anyway just after the sun comes up over the eastern horizon.

It is before 6 am and there are already at least fifty surfers in the water up and down the bay, but we find a little peak which isn’t too busy and make the most of the fun waves which are on offer.

It was an amusing session, but tinged with a bit of sadness because it is my last one with Chris, who you see here getting ready for a day in the office after we had got out. It has been great having a surf buddy in the water, and from here all the way back home I am likely to be going solo again, or at best surfing with strangers.e make his ferry into Sydney with ease and even have time for a McBreakfast before saying farewell.

Newport beach is where Rossana and Adam’s legal practise is based. There is a beautiful beach there that Chris and I drove to after getting off the sailing boat, although the speed with which we tried to get there before the sun went down may well have ended with us being in front of a magistrate!

I wasn’t at all convinced we would be in time to make the rally driving worthwhile, but take my hat off to Chris who had convinced me otherwise.

I love a manic surf trip. It gets the blood pumping like it used to when I first started going to the beach in search of waves.

As you can see night was already well on its way as we pulled up in the car park. The waves were very small but consistently coming through so we didn’t think twice before getting into our wetsuits and running down the sand. I wouldn’t say this was an all time legendary surf trip but we did catch plenty of little rides each, with the bay to ourselves.

That was apart from an inept young lad who was already on the water and decided he wanted to come and play with us, but just kept getting in our way. A few choice words after one incident saw him leave the water soon after.

We only caught a few more of the one foot crumbling waves before getting out ourselves. It was as dark as you see here in the car park, and I am willing to play shark bait only when the surf conditions are above certain thresholds. After drying off we caught up with Rachel and Stuart in the pub in Mosman for victory beers after a fantastic day.

Chris has arranged to go sailing after his visit to the tax man on Saturday afternoon and is kind enough to ask me if I would like to join him on the boat.

We meet up with his wife Rachel and the owner of the boat called Stuart, before driving over to Pittwater, which is a huge inlet north of Sydney named after a former Prime Minister of the UK. 

The boat is a 28 foot Daydream called Jamboree and I am delighted to be invited on board because I have never been out on the sea under sail, and it is for that reason I am claiming this wave even if I wasn’t actually surfing here.

I actually think sailing is a natural progression for surfers, who still wish to enjoy playing with the ocean once the ravages of time do not necessarily allow them to paddle out into all the waves they once did.

It is a very windy day and after getting clear of all the other boats moored near by we set sail for Barrenjoey headland which is the far end of the peninsular past Palm Beach.

As we get close we notice that a small fire seems to have started on the headland, which reminds me of the Great Orme back in Llandudno. Due to its location on the headland it sadly can only have been started as a result of human negligence such as a tossed cigarette butt or glass bottle.

Straight away I am on to the emergency services to alarm them about the fire, because you should never assume that somebody else has rang, but the wind quickly gets hold of it and a bush fire is quickly engulfing all the tinder dry plants and trees there.

In no time at all all the area that you can see behind Alf Stewart, a grumpy local resident, is ablaze and there is really nothing the local fire fighting services can do other than try to save the historic lighthouse on the top of the headland.

To try and save the buildings a squadron of helicopters flies over the blaze dropping water from buckets they have filled. We couldn’t work out why they didn’t use sea water adjacent to the headland but can only assume it was to protect the animal and plants there. However this just meant that whilst they flew off to a freshwater reservoir or something similar, the blaze went unchecked for huge stretches of time, and anything there would have been burnt to a crisp anyway.

Watching all of this was exciting enough, but to add to the script for today we were joined on the water in our grandstand view of proceedings by a pod of dolphins swimming around the boat. Annoyingly though I still have no pictures to demonstrate another close call with these animals! They kept disappearing.

Once the fire was under control we set sail back for the mooring near Church Point and you can see Admiral Simmons here displaying fine mastery of the row boat to ferry everybody else back to shore.

As first sailing experiences go it was an amazing afternoon and sadly I suspect will be hard to match up to on any subsequent voyages. Once on dry land Chris persuades me that there is still a chance for another wave even if there is barely any light left in the day.