The search for perfect waves in remote and difficult to get to places continues.

Today I was lucky enough to tag along with some other like minded searching surfers (there’s strength in numbers). We were on a quest to visit the mysterious & famous “$;)$&@”. Sorry the name has to be keep secret, that’s why it’s called a secret spot.

We had a couple from Perth on long boards and an Israeli & myself on short boards. The surfari became known as “Kooks on Tour”.

The approximate location was known, kinda sorta, but that’s not really important, it’s all about the journey.

We head off out of town from Marrawah heading North. 300m out of town we’re on dirt road, a sure sign that we’re on the right track.

About 10km later we turn right into Mount Cameron West Conservation Reserve. This is mostly indigenous land & any passage thru it is restricted to defined roads & walking paths. How could we go wrong, we’ll just follow the path.

As the track get narrower we eventually come to a small car park & dead end. The beach is still about 1km away but we can see waves breaking, the sun’s shining & the wind is light offshore, so it’s all looking good.

There’s a older bloke & his half dingo, half dog with his ute in the car park & he tells us he’s been sleeping over here for a couple of days. We got chatting to him & he gives us a bit of a rundown of the area.

Watch out for tiger snakes, echidnas and some other noisy unidentifiable animal somewhere in the bush that’s been putting his dog on edge.

He tells us it’s a 40 minute walk to the secret spot from here & some boogie board riders had been out since dawn & hadn’t returned as yet.

So we get our gear together with our boards in bags over shoulders, wetsuits,towels,water & head off into the waist high grass.

The old fella says to be sure to stomp our feet as this evidently scares away the tiger snakes. He’d seen a couple on the road & track.

We pass the boogie boarders about 1/2 way down the track as they are makin their way back up. They reckon they caught a couple of “decent slabs” & made some passing comment about the 2 mal riders saying “You’ll have a lot of fun on those…”

Onward & downward we plod, thistles, nettles, March Flys but no tiger snakes.

About 12 minutes later we get onto the beach & it looks like there are waves further north up the beach but nothing appears to be happening on the point.

We head north up the beach for about 500m to have a closer look at the beach break but the further we go the worse it seems to look. It looked much better from the car park.

We look back at the point & from this angle we can just make out waves breaking. With the angle of the headland this was out of view when we first made the beach.

So we do an about turn & head off in the direction of the point. That’s back the 500m plus another 500m on sand then another 500m over rocky boulders.

Eventually we make it to the end of a headland that we can only assume looks down onto “$;)$&@”.

It looks like the boogie boards were a lot more familiar with this place than we were as now the tide is wrong, the wind has turned onshore & what looks like the potential to be an epic place to surf has turned to mush with the occasional larger set showing some indication of what this place would be like in the right conditions.

We all admire the view for a few minutes, rest & rehydrate before heading back down over the rocks & back up the beach to at least have a surf in the fairly ordinary beach break.

The water was clear the sun still shining but the longer we stayed in the water the stronger the onshore wind blew until we figured it was time to “go in”.

This was a point of some confusion to our Israeli surfer friend that explained to us later that it works the other way in his language.
I.e. You “paddle in” into the surf & “paddle out” when you get out of the surf. Here, it’s the other way around… You “paddle out the back” & then “paddle in” when you’ve had enough.

So by the time we made it back to the cars we’d probably walked/clambered with our gear for about 5 or 6 kms. Luckily I’d worn my rubber booties, the others just had thongs on their feet which made it pretty rough going.

On the map below the red marker is where the secret spot may or may not be. The tiny white spot at the top right of the image is the car park & it’s about 1km from there to the beach.

I can strongly recommend a visit if you have half a day to spare or a full day if you want to have a decent surf as well, assuming the conditions are right. Maybe take a pack lunch.

You just can’t buy surfing / bush walking experiences like this. I’ll sleep well tonight.

11 Jan This entry was published on 11/01/2015 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.