We’ve been here once or twice before in previous travels but I’ve never really experienced the lineup in a decent surf with a bit of swell running.

Well, today changed that. Swell was about head high or a bit above, wind was offshore & the weather a little bit stormy. Swell chart said 3m but most of that was going past as Snapper Rocks is a bit protected from a South swell. The normal 200 – 300 or so punters were in the lineup with a fairly diverse collection of demographics, all being very hopeful. More on demographics later.

So I paddled out in about the middle of Snapper to avoid the bulk of the crowd & managed a few waves between there & Greenmount. Also learnt a new way to entirely remove my rashie in one go on one of my wipeouts.  These waves seem to have a bit of grunt.

There was a lot of water moving to the North & I eventually washed up on Kirra beach. That’s about 2 kilometres North from Snapper Rocks Point.

Made the 2km walk around back to Snapper & decided to give the point a go. 

The big Southerly  swell was crashing well over the exposed end of the point so I watched a few make the dash across no-man’s land (it is Anzac Day) then paddle like mad into the lineup. Also watched a lot more get it wrong & disappear North into more frothing whitewater, never to be seen again.

Luckily I got the timing right & made it out. Once semi-safe behind the break I paddled around for a bit & ducked a few bombs waiting for my chance. Waves seem a bit bigger up this end… Eventually a big wide one came thru. It cleaned up the others further out in the lineup & had broken just a bit out from me. I decided to give it a go & scrambled to the edge in the hope that it would clean up further down the line. A shaky takeoff but made the drop & bottom turned into the sweet spot where it cleaned up into this seemingly endless wall of water. I proceeded to carve my way thru all the witches hats in the lineup (that’s the other surfers trying to duck dive thru the wave) on & on it went until I felt my legs starting to turn to jelly. By this time I’d made it to about Greenmount which was probably a good 500-600m from where I took off. What a great wave it is. No wonder Parko & Fanning surf so well if this is their back yard.

Back to demographics.  Having traversed the whole 2km lineup a couple of times I think the bell curve of distribution of people in the lineup is skewed a fair bit to the left as per the diagram below.

Demographic Legend.

A: Lots of kiddies along the shoreline & nothing to worry about. 

B: Tourists on a pilgrimage to surf the famous break. Unfortunately this lot had missed Surfing 101. There are brochures available on the learn to surf van. 

C: Tourists on a pilgrimage to surf the famous break. This lot had done Surfing 101 but failed the final test (This is me but I fail consistently well).

D: Young Locals who had the place wired

E: Old Locals who had the place wired

F: Pro Surfers 

It only takes one decent wave to make your day & it’s been a good day.

We’re off to Newy now for a few days so Jayne can do busy person work stuff.

Once we get back it looks like we’re heading to somewhere around Noosa.

25 Apr This entry was published on 25/04/2016 at 3:22 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.