Return to the King
Posted on October 07, 2008 @ 1:10 PM
Notes from an annual pilgrimage to King Island, south of southern Australia
By Sean Davey
Second Homecoming
I’ve been flying back to this rustic little island for 16 or 17 years now, so it is almost a second home for me. I’ll typically fly in and bunk up with my long-time buddy, Wire, who’s a bit of legend round these parts.
In early March, Wire called me about some epic swell forecast to hit Martha, my favorite wave on the island. A bunch of low-pressure systems seemed to be forming south of Tasmania, throwing huge bands of wave energy towards the island, so I booked flights right away. Our late season in Hawaii had been so good this year that I hadn’t even got any surfers organized, but, what the heck, I was going anyway. Besides, before I left, Wire called again to say that Kelly had been in touch. Apparently he was planning a King Island R&R mission around the time of the Bells contest in Victoria.
King Island is about the size as Oahu, my real home, although any similarities end right there. For a start, on any given day Oahu has round about a million residents and another half-million visitors. When you drive away from the airport on King Island, you’ll see a sign announcing a population of 2,000. In truth, it’s more like 1,400 due to some decline in recent decades.
Over the years I have come to know so many people here that I’m a kind of de facto local. I always drop in to see Shannon at the Nautilus Cafe for a coffee. Then there’s the iconic King Island Bakery across the road. Every visitor will eventually eat a couple of their epic meat pies – we’re talking lobster pies, Camembert pies, sometimes even wallaby pies. It’s hard to walk past the place on a cold morning with an empty stomach.
This place is just what I need after several months of every Tom, Dick and Harry in the surfing world on my doorstep in Hawaii.
Martha Calls
I’d only been there half a day, and we were already making our way up north to the fabled banks of Martha. It is a unique location, quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Imagine a beach that faces north but gets most of its swell from the south. “How so?” you’re thinking. Well, the island is kind of elongated in a north to south direction allowing for south swells to sweep up both sides and refract back onto its north coast, where Martha happens to lie.
It takes a big pulse to make Martha bear fruit. Typically, you need a massive south to southwest swell to pound the west coast of the island, but even then, over the years I’ve seen plenty of good swells fail to produce results.
I was lucky enough to sample Martha’s wares just once on my first two-week visit, and after that I saw that the weather always seemed worked in two-week cycles, and the good days were always just before or just after my stay. After missing too many primo Martha swells, I began extending my visits to three weeks in an attempt to beat the cycle.
But it’s never that simple. Martha swells also have a bad habit of coinciding with inconvenient tides. It doesn’t like a high tide; the swell bounces back off the beach and creates weird backwash, so you’re aiming for low. Of course, big swells and low tides often seem to occur super early in the morning or last thing in the day, so usually we’re either hauling ass up to Martha in the dark, long before sunrise, to catch the back end of low tide or reluctantly driving away from epic barrels after sunset. Eighty-five percent of all my Martha sessions over the years have fallen into this torturous time frame.
This day was somehow different. We arrived around 9am to a barely believable sight. Golden sunshine bathed perfect glassy 4-5ft A-frames, with only a couple of surfers out. Meanwhile, the far end of the beach was shrouded in an odd, low-lying and very dark cloud – really strange lighting, but spectacularly beautiful to photograph.
Kelper Ryan
Because I didn’t have any pro surfers with me (yet), I was content to shoot lineups and waves, but I did notice one local getting some great waves, so I shot a few images of him as well. Turned out he was a ‘kelper’ named Ryan. He’d moved here a couple of years ago with his young family looking for a more relaxed way of life. I met him on the dunes after his surf and immediately struck up a conversation with him. The lucky bastard owns a house just a 10-minute drive from Martha, so he gets to surf here pretty much every time it happens. Apparently, on a big swell a couple of weeks before, Martha was the best it had been in years, and everyone was saying that because of the huge swell, the banks were now rooted. I gotta say, though – they looked pretty damn fine to me!
As is the routine around these parts, we stopped in and had a cup of tea with Ryan at his house before heading back to Currie. He and his wife have a young daughter and another kid on the way. So, I wondered, what exactly does he do to pay the bills? A kelper, he explained, is a guy who trolls the craggy shorelines looking for prime strands of freshly washed up bull kelp. They haul it onto their trucks, then take it down to a production facility in Currie, where it’s hung out to dry on racks. Once dried, it’s taken down and crushed into a fine mix, which is shipped around the world for use in various applications, mainly in food and medicine. King Island has a reputation for producing some of the finest kelp in the world.
I asked Ryan if he could pen a few words about “that beachbreak” near his house. This is what he wrote:
This spot is a unique wave. The local surfers who live here put up with weeks of onshore stormy weather relying on the right angle, swell size, wind, tide, and banks to do their thing all at once. It makes it even more of a special session when all the elements come together.
We’re probably lucky it’s so fickle – it makes it a bit of a gamble for outsiders, not to mention the cost of flights and accommodation, cars, etc. You easily could do a couple of weeks in Indo or NZ for less.
I love the raw, haunted look of the sand dunes melting back into the half-burnt-out scrub, to the feeling that if I don’t make this drop I may break my back or my board.
Negotiating the super-sucky drop to stand upright in the barrel and get spat out onto the shoulder – or sometimes if the swell has the right angle, you might be able to backdoor another two sections till you hit the sand – gives me many mixed emotions.
Some days there’s no one up here, and there are five or six perfect peaks from the beach to the point. Walking down the beach, seeing the sun playing tricks on the water and sand dunes, it can feel surreal and dream-like, making you feel pretty stoked on life.
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