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WHAT THE ???
Sudden megaswell stuns Sydney, gives Kelly an unexpected twin-fin
Storm surf in Sydney is a peculiar sort of stoke, partly because in this part of the world, it's almost completely unpredictable.
While Californians get four or five days' warning of North Pacific action and up to 10 days of south swell radar, Sydney surfers don't know what's gonna happen, day to day.
Swells form from storms directly off the coast, or from horrendous localized gales, the only warning coming from weather charts that do backflips every day. Even LOLA, Surfline.com's lethal weapon herself, is subject to this erratic behavior.
And so it was on Tuesday, March 22, when after a week of weird early-winter-feeling weather, an intense low pressure system almost literally exploded just 100 nautical miles north-east of Sydney, drenching the city in four inches of rain and slamming it with up to 70 knots of wind.
Next morning, frothing surfers were greeted with offshore wave-buoy readings of 11 metres - that's around 48 feet - and winds still blasting the coast at 40 knots from the south.
While hardcore Sydneysiders dug out their big boards, and Maroubra's Koby Abberton tow-surfed a perfect secret reef break four hours drive south of town, the scene was now set for a surfing revelation as unlikely as the swell itself -- Kelly Slater's rediscovery of twin-fin magic.
The swell gave Slater a perfect chance to escape the flat-day blues at Bells Beach, 600 miles away, where the Rip Curl remains on hold after four tense no-surf days of the waiting period.
By 9 am on the 23rd, he, Barton Lynch and Tom Carroll were unloading Carroll's jetski near Deadman's, a super heavy rock reef break at Manly where surf was ranging from six to 10 feet, double to triple overhead. Slater was in such an adrenalized hurry, he forgot to screw in his back fin properly. Sure enough, as he, Carroll and Lynch got to the Deadman's takeoff zone, the thing fell clean out.
Kelly had to make do - and did so to such effect that he was thinking of leaving the back fin out for his heats at Bells. "He was going ballistic," reports Carroll. "Like, really, ballistic. He was so excited by the speed, he was leaving phone messages for me late at night, trying to find out about four-fins."
The session even made the front cover of next day's Sydney Morning Herald, with a big photo of Kelly carving and a headline reading "To hell with Bells, I'm riding the Sydney storm". Your correspondent surfed 10-12 foot waves by himself, using all three fins, and very glad to have them too.
In classic Sydney fashion, what showed up fast, left fast. By sunrise next day, the swell had backed to five feet and clean, and Slater had vanished - back to Bells Beach, via Koby's secret reef, which was said to be sick as it gets.
Who knows, maybe it's Bells's turn next.
--
Nick Carroll
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