Weekend Camping TR of sorts
As I mentioned in the “What are you doing this weekend” thread I headed up the coast for a surf trip with a mate, I was also aching to have a run in the Ranger on the beach. The mate I was going with has a kid so apparently in order to smooth the way forward for him to get the go ahead to come he could only do one night so we planned to get a good nights sleep Friday and head off early Saturday.
Not sure why as at 33yr old you would think I would be past it but I slept like shit Friday night as I was way to excited, turns out my mate at 36 had the same problem ha ha. We got outta the beaches just before 6am and got to Sandbar about 9am. Now I have known for some time that you need to let the tyres down on the sand but due to being a long time between lessons it’s always one that needs to be learned again. We let them down a bit but not enough, neither of us had a pressure gauge, the gauge on the $10 air compressor I bought was busted so we used the knee in the sidewall of the tyre method. Got onto the beach fine but the first really soft sand we hit required a further minute of deflation each tyre to get going again.
After sorting out the tyre pressure issues
We found a little a frame peak that was making the best of the 2ft or so of swell on offer and paddled out. Despite the fact it was only small, if the same peak was on offer back home it woulda played host to 10-15 guys but as it was we had it to ourselves the whole time, this was an ongoing theme for the weekend. I had one surf last week but before that hadn’t surfed for about 3 months I worked out. On my last wave I managed to string a couple of things together and started to believe I might be able to surf still. After we got out we sat on the back of the ute and watched it and talked shit for a while, very relaxing stuff.
We headed into Bluey’s and got some supplies and then drove down past Seal Rocks to where we were going to camp. We had a bit of look/beach bash on Lighthouse Beach but the winds weren’t to crash hot so we set up camp.
As it seemed the wind had set in for the day we decided to pass the time by drinking, as it got dark we decided that we also needed a fire.
Me sober as a judge and only mildly excited about having a fire.
I don’t remember a lot of what happened later but I do remember towards the end of the night having an impromptu karaoke/screaming session to Tool in the Ranger. Not so much singing as trying to see who could scream lyrics the loudest and be heard over the 400w stereo, god knows what everybody else in the campground was thinking, luckily it was almost empty and as we had been drinking since 2pm, probably still pretty early in the evening.
Woke up the next morning feeling slightly shady about 7am and stumbled up the dunes to see this
Bit hard to make out but that’s 3-4ft, offshore and empty. Headed straight out but I was struggling, whenever I exerted myself I felt like having a technicolour yawn. I managed about an hour and half and called it, I just felt too sick, despite that I actually got some decent waves. We dismantled camp and headed into town to get some brekky and then consulted the interwebs for the weather forecast. This is another little lesson learnt yet again, do not be over reliant upon technology for making decisions on where to surf. We could see that there was a southerly change making it’s way up the coast it seemed quite quickly so we ended up on one beach waiting for the change to arrive for about an hour. This was despite that with our own eyeballs we were watching a strong NNE wind cranking through. I cracked it and drove back to close to where we camped and had a bit of a walk to check the surf.
My eyes just about popped out of my head when we got there. I ended up sprinting back to the car and then back to the beach, there was mindless empty perfect right handers reeling off in front of us at about 4ft. The first wave I caught out there reminded me that I can still surf it just needs to have a little bit of size and grunt to push the extra kgs around. My second wave I got way too excited and ended up creasing the tip of the nose of my board but luckily it was only minor. It’s amazing to get back into waves where you can surf them top to bottom with no pumping and flailing around through fat crap sections. The whole surf only lasted a touch over an hour before the southerly eventually did come through but it’s the best surf I’ve had all year and that includes Bali and WA.
Overhead on take off, get into it just behind the peak, semi freefall to the bottom and then come screaming round the section and take aim at the lip and repeat, I’m getting amped up again just typing it ha ha! The most amazing part was we were the only guys out, the nearest surfers to us were over 1/2km up the beach. All in all it was awesome weekend, I can still surf and you can still get awesome waves to yourself!
Awesome trip report, mate. Sounds like an unreal time. Stoked for you. 
And yeah, you look really sober in that photo. 
I slept like shit Friday night as I was way to excited
This is when you should have tested out the phenergan!
haha nice TR - glad you had fun!
I’m 43 and I still can’t sleep when I’ve got somethin on the next day!!!!!
Ahhh, that is what surfin is all about, no crowds, talkin shit, drinkin till ya pass out and just havin fun!!!!! Cool TR nthn!!!!!