Monday 3 April 2006
A group of seven surfing 'bullets' survived a mid-life crisis recently. However, it was not the pending arrival of menopause, but a drama that happened to coincide with their middle-age during a surf trip to the Mentawai Islands. Wavescape editor Spike reports.
Muscles around the second vertebrae go into spasm as I paddle for the first wave.
But I carry on surfing. This 42 year old is on a dream surfing trip in Indonesia to side-step a mid-life crisis. No chiropractic corrosion of the thoracic curve will stand in the way. Until of course, the three-stitch klap to the balding kop as it cracks soundly against a clump of coral. The re-entry floater becomes the wipeout at NiPussi, nicknamed ‘Pussies’, a surf spot in the Mentawai Islands off Sumatra.
I hang suspended – aching back in momentary relief – before plunging into shallows bristling with sharp coral. In the foam underwater, at the edge of my consciousness, an epiphany is jolted loose by the sharp impact to my head. With the burning sensation comes the realisation: “Stop trying to act 20 years old. It’s really embarrassing.”
Blood dribbling down my temple, a friend on board our charter boat is equally unsympathetic. "You’ve been pussy-whipped!" he wisecracks. Paul is one of seven ‘bullets’ or ‘old guns’ on a boys-only holiday to avert, or atleast delay, the onset of senile dementia.
We consider ‘bullet’ or ‘old Gun’ much sexier than archaic terms like old ‘ballie’ or ‘toppie’. Besides, ballistic metaphor is our manly prerogative. Our women back home will not go bald. We will. Age-related moulting may seem a feeble reason to desert our families for two weeks, but it surely gives us the leeway to compare a shiny bald dome to a ‘bullet’. Besides, as surfers, we have a natural affinity with ballistic theory. When waves are ‘smoking’ or ‘firing’ or ‘going off’ we paddle our seven foot ‘guns’ to ride ‘barrels’.
A recent Quiksilver DVD is another source for our delusional semantics. Surfers everywhere salivated with envy and awe at the explosive skills of surfing champion Kelly Slater and others in Young Guns and sequel Young Guns 2. The flicks are pure surf porn. Elastic-limbed 20-somethings contort and careen across the pristinely perfect waves of Indo pulling off “backward tail slides”, “360 degree spins” and “busting big airs” – things most over-40s do only by vloek, usually when falling off.
So we call our trip ‘Old Guns 44’. We like it – it’s terse, it’s tight, it’s shorter than “Seven previously talented middle-aged balding bullets boasting the merest hint of a boepens and an average age of 44”. Now we can be legends on our own T-shirts, a collective of cool – a bretheren of barrel hunting brus.
“Wait until our sponsored video comes out,” we boast. “Okay, so we don’t have a sponsor. Hey, maybe the Indonesian beer brand Bintang will come on board,” slurs someone as we drain the fifth cold one from the fridge. “Take heed Young Guns,” we shout, cackle and wheeze, “you can’t keep an old bullet out of the barrel.”
To prove us bullets always bounce back from adversity – is that ricochet? – I am back in the water the next day. Okay, a double dose of Voltaren overnight and a clinical stitch job by Aki our Japanese skipper may have helped.
But nothing can hold back our desparate enthusiasm. Not even wealthy entrepeneur Jock's tweaked lower back, also in spasm, or the iodine-stained abrasion on his left buttock encircled by a saucer-sized ring of blue-ripe bruising after he bounced on the ‘surgeon’s table’ – a vicious stretch of reef at a break called Hollow Trees.
Not even builder Paul's infected ear that has him hollering, “What! Australia?” while cupping his ear to amplify our muffled voices. Not even lawyer Mike's stubbed toe as we dance one night to dance music DJ Spiro like desparate housewives drunk with rum, recapturing a youth soon lost again, drowned out by the first snore. Not even geologist Jan's hectic under-arm rash or sunburnt bald spot. Not even excutive consultant Richard's wounded heart as he struggles through a painful divorce, or his festering coral cuts. Not even quantity surveyor Shaun's seasickness that sees him sway silently in the doorway for days, woosy with Stugeron.
These seven bullets know how to have fun, no matter what. It’s tough surfing your brains out, swinging in hammocks and reading books, eating sushi and drinking cold beer with friends as moon-glanced riplets lap at the hull in the warm embrace of the lanquid tropics. And no cellphones. Ah … bliss. The perfect antidote to middle-age.
But the surf forecast radioed to our boat from our base Padang is heavy with foreboding. In six days, the swells will go weird and irregular. We will not get the typical deep, sloping rollers with long intervals that make the region so famous. This swell will be short, steep and stormy. Vaguely uneasy, I recall the virulent splotch on the long-range weather chart at an Internet kiosk in Singapore airport on the way over. Surely a cyclone off NW Australia can’t influence us?
In three days, the weather morphs from tranquil, blue and sunny to blustery, grey and squally. “What the hell is going on?” we wonder. This isn’t in the brochure! Another three days later, and we are still wondering. Only this time, it’s “What the hell am I doing here?” as our shuddering boat yaws and pitches across a storm sea.
We have decided to cut the trip by two days. We depart early one morning from the southern end of our island chain and diagonally traverse the strait between the islands and the ‘mainland’ Sumatra, heading NE. The weather is coming from the North. We beat almost straight into it. Ten to fifteen foot wind-waves roll randomly towards us, striking the boat obliquely to the bow. We should cover the 85 miles to Padang in 15 hours.
“Ha ha ha!”
(Tinged with a hint of hysteria in hindsight)
It will be a 25 hour hell-ride.
Helmsman Maketek throttles back as we climb the bigger swells, some approaching 20 feet peak to trough. We teeter atop each crest, allegedly to cushion the boat from a pending collision with the trough. But at each treacherous drop – contents of our last meal suspended – the boat will groan with each cracking impact as she belly flops deep into the sea. The green and white-streaked gizzards from the ocean's guts spew outwards from each side of the hull, riverlets of water washing down her side. By mid-afternoon, the wind is gusting 25 kts or more. Not galeforce, but unpleasant enough.
Eating and drinking is a challenge. Going for a crap is impossible, unless you want a regurgitated fecal enema as gravity pumps the out-flow back up the toilet bowl. Opening the fridge is a joke. You have to time the sideways lurch right, or cans and bottles spew across the floor like a garbage truck at a tip. A freezer chest crashes over. A large speaker narrowly misses Richard's head.
Night falls. The motions worsen. The helmsman is unsighted in the inky blackness of a moonless, cloud-choked sky. At about 1am, after 15 hours of gut-curdling lurching and crashing, I can’t take it any more. I leave my top bunk in the 'pit' – our eight man cabin below – and climb up into the saloon. I am not seasick, just irritated by the sickening lurches and the sloshing sounds of seawater pouring through the front hatch.
Richard is already there. Jock and Mike soon join us, also abandoning their top bunks. For the four of us, it has been like trying to sleep on a rollercoaster. Each weightless plunge suspends your body above the bunk. At the thump, you are smeared into your bed by a couple of G’s like Sumo wrestlers jumping on your head. If the boat slews sideways as you drift up, grab something or you will fall two metres and bounce painfully on a wooden floor barely cushioned by a soggy layer of carpet. You might even accelerate during the fall as the hull rises to you.
I see the wave at about 1.20am. Propped up dreamily on an elbow in the saloon, it looms through the opposite door, which is wide open. I lazily observe its foaming crest morph across the sky.
Seconds ago, chef Eri stepped into the night carrying a butcher's knife from the galley. Three crewmen on the foredeck needed it to free the remnants of the tarpaulin roof that provided shade in the day; now a flapping mess of shredded fabric in howling wind. I was irritated. “Eri, why leave the door open!? We’ll get wet.”
We get wet. The wave slams into the boat. Water hurls through the door. We are drenched. Great. I look to the foredeck. Are the four men still there? Are they overboard? No. Three cling gamely to the roof. Shit, where's Eri? Seconds later, he lurches back into the saloon. Water sloshes from side to side, port to starboard, starboard to port, doing the seaslide samba. Eri is a bedraggled sea rat. He is sopping. His 50kg frame droops with soggy clothes. Something else is not right. His normally brown face is ashen. His normally easy smile is a purple grimace. He's in shock. Blood is everywhere.
We don’t know that the wave has just shattered the windows on the port side of our sleeping quarters. Below, an ocean bomb of shrapnel shards has exploded through the windows next to the top bunks, almost impaling the remaining three okes in the bottom bunks. They have been rudely kicked from their bucking reverie by a deluge of water and 5mm plate glass cascading from the walls; slamming into them. The electricity has shorted. The lights are out. In the darkness, the floor is awash with water, glass and sporadic 220 volt pulses. “I thought the boat broke and we were sinking,” says Jan later.
Bleeding from a cut on his arm, Jan wades to the hatch, but his escape is blocked by more glass. A mirror in the doorway has exploded. Paul has jumped up so fast he has almost broken his shin against the bunk. Shaun is the third, patiently waiting behind them to get out.
Upstairs, Eri’s blood spurts in arcs of spray. His foot is cleaved open. The wave struck as he handed over the knife on the foredeck. He held on, then jumped down to return to the saloon, leaping straight onto a jagged chunk of plate glass protruding from a window that caved in seconds before. A tourniquet and tight bandaging stems the obscene flow of blood. Drugged to the eyeballs, Eri is the only guy who will sleep tonight.
Milling fearfully in the saloon, we ask questions about emergency procedures, escape routes and survival. Can the boat withstand this beating? Will it capsize? How will we secure the ‘tinny’ – the aluminium speed boat bucking and weaving in tow behind us? It is our only liferaft, but is attached to the stern by a 25 metre rope. If we turn turtle, how do we stay together in a pitch-black night, heaving sea and howling wind? Have we got spare rope, or surfboard leashes? Who will cut the ‘tinny’ loose? Is the key in the ignition? Should we unpack the surfboards just in case?
Mike is a former racing yachtsman and prepares for the worst. On go the lifejackets. Out comes the EPIRB (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon) and the waterproof grab bag. In goes food and water, knives, torches, batteries, air tickets and passports. Amidst the carnage we sit – bloody bandages, knocked over dustbins, torn clothes, galley utensils and soggy debris. No more bravado. No more jokes. No more thumping techno music. No more wild beer-drinking. Just silence. A bunch of aging farts in the middle of a mid-life crisis.
Exhaustion soon subsumes the earnestness of survival. Crew and clients collapse onto the sodden carpet. A blood-stained pillow lies discarded near a bright orange lifejacket. A can of coke gently rolls up to someone’s head. Eyes closed, we doze fitfully, waiting out the night. The shudders are muffled and ignored by numbed synapses and jaded nerves.
At last, signs of light. A window turns a shade paler than black. Charcoal turns to grey. A new day dawns. Our battered boat sails up the Padang River in pouring jungle rain at 8am, more than a day after we left.
Relief hangs over us like a force-field, numb to rain drops that dilute the sour smell of our damp clothes. A motley gaggle of grizzled wild men slide between the jumble of trawlers, ferries and junks that clog the banks. We soak up the quizzical stares of brown faces through the water-striped air.
Relief. It’s a strange feeling. It feels dull and lifeless. Coming down from high drama, relief tastes like stale anti-climax – a detached hangover after a huge night. Never mind Old Guns or bullets. The metaphor is tired. We’re spent cartridges now. Scattered and lost. We’ve shot our wad. We’re also tired. We just want to go home.
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