We were pretty excited, my best mate Daniel and I, when we loaded the surfboards into the car that morning. We had a small party at my place the night before and one or two people were still sleeping on my couch. I left clear instructions on how to lock up and where to leave the key, I made them repeat the directions back to me to ensure they understood and when I was satisfied, we left.
By no means was this your typical early morning surf trip, nea, we didn’t even leave the house until about 11:30, but it was only a few days before new years and the temperature was already climbing into the 30’s and we just wanted to get in the water and let ourselves tan (read: burn like dickheads) in the harsh Australian sun.
We left my house in Moe, in the La Trobe Valley and headed for our usual spot an hours drive away at Inverloch. As usual with best mates, we talked shit the whole way, trash talked recent ex-girlfriends and pumped out some fun summer tunes. We arrive at the car park near the surf beach, grab our boards out of the car and head over the sand dunes.
What we faced as we came over the dune made our hearts sink faster than an alcoholic sinks piss on pay day. The surf was completely flat. Dead. Not a wave to be seen anywhere. Fuck.
(seen here; no waves)
“Well we may as well go for a swim at least” Daniel says to me.
The beach is relatively quiet all things considered, so we just jump in to beat the heat.
“Fuck, I really wanna surf though” I said, more than a little disheartened.
“We could go to Cape Patterson and if it’s flat there we could go to Phillip Island” Daniel offers.
“Yeah… Or we could just go to the gold coast” I say, only kind of half kidding.
Daniel stares at me for a moment, then at the ocean, then back to me.
“Ok, let’s go.” He doesn’t even flinch.
Just like that, at 1 o’clock on the afternoon of December 28, 2013, we decided to drive the nearly 2,000 km stretch to one of Australia’s most famous surf beaches. But the adventure barely begins here.
We go to Daniels so he can grab some stuff, clean underwear, tooth brush, pocket knife, before heading to my place. We get there, I go round the back and grab the key my friend left in the BBQ and head back to the front door to open up.
The clear instructions I had given were as such:
“Do NOT lock the wooden door as I lost my key for it, only lock the security screen door with this key and place it in the BBQ”. Pretty simple instructions, right?
Unfortunately, the friend who shall remain nameless cough Nick cough, had done the exact opposite of that. He had locked the wood door with the deadlock inside and left the security screen door completely unlocked like a fucking dickhead. We are locked out. Our adventure looks like it may come to an abrupt end before it even begins.
(I’ll run this car off a cliff!)
We try to open up some windows, but I’m pretty smart and have them all locked. I contemplate breaking one for a moment but Daniel talks me out of it, but not after he considers it as well. We only have one last option left.
There’s a security screen over a bathroom window that is awkward to get to, but I’m positive I’d left the window unlocked, the only problem is we don’t have the shed key to get any tools to open it. Then we have a light bulb moment.
Daniel, my best mate, in all his engineering (And probably slightly Aspergersy) wisdom had packed his trusty pocket knife. We run back round to the car, dig out said knife and get to work prying this security screen off the window. After some mucking about, it comes off and I was right, I had left it unlocked! (Please don’t try break into my house. I lock everything now)
We get in to the house, grab what we need and head off. It’s now 5:30 in the evening.
It’s only about a 23 hour drive to the Gold Coast from the La Trobe Valley and we didn’t want to waste any time, there were waves to be surfed and probably beer that needed drinking. I had to confiscate Daniels phone and turn it off because his crazy ex kept messaging and I found it infuriating. She hates me, for the life of me I can’t figure out why…
We stop every couple of hours for coffee or food but keep the breaks short as not to waste time. It’s the middle of the night anyway, not like we can take in any sights.
We cross the Sydney Harbour Bridge at 4am. Nothing happened here, just a point of reference for those following along at home.
We are somewhere up the central coast when the sun starts to come up. Neither of us have slept in quite some time, but we’re in good spirits. By this point we’ve exhausted the topics of ex-girlfriends and other blokey talk and have turned to listening to a playlist on my phone. It had 20 songs on it. We listened to it at least five times in a row…
(Daniel being all driving and stuff)
The actual drive itself, whilst being quite enjoyable, was actually fairly uneventful. That was until we were on the road leading in to the Gold Coast.
We had both been awake for slightly over 30 hours now, roughly 25 of which had been spent driving. Daniel was commanding the vessel like a champ, but even he was nearing the end of his ungodly endurance. We were only about half an hour from our final destination when the fatigue really began to kick in. It came to our very sudden attention as a truck in the lane to our right starting blowing his horn at us. We had both started to drift off and were careening into the wrong lane. Snapped suddenly to our senses we had to fight fatigue in two different ways.
Firstly, there was my way. I’ve perfected my way over many years. It involves slapping myself, or anyone else, really hard in the face. We both benefited from this tried and true technique instantaneously, but just to be sure, we tried Daniels strategy.
Daniels technique probably works better than mine, but don’t let him know I said that. He likes to maintain cognitive stimulus, which turns out is different from my method of cognitive re-calibration. So I had to ask him a whole slew of questions that would get him thinking. Ha! what a nerd!… It worked though and we didn’t die.
By the time we finally got to where we were staying, we were knackered, so we had a few beers, some dinner and slept. We slept for a solid 10 hours.
We got up in the morning and went down to the beach with our surf boards. There was a good swell and the weather was almost perfect, there was only one problem…
I don’t know how to surf…
So we got drunk in the Q1 bar...