Road Trippin Oz '05
Photos courtesy of Sean Davey
by Sean Davey
posted 2006-07-15

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Some folks who are familiar with my work, will know that I usually travel to Australia each and every year, just around the same time that the pro tour is also there, but I generally give the tour a wide birth in preference for quite the opposite actually. Read on and I'll explain;...

I've been living here on the North Shore of Oahu now for going on 8 years and I've seen a lot of changes, most noticably the huge population increase in both residents and visitors. It used to be that during the Hawaiian summer, the North Shore would become a sleepy mellow place, much like parts of Maui, but with all the attention from the movies and numerous television shows being filmed here over the past few years in particular, it's quite the opposite these days. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that summer now seems to be the busier season here on the North Shore. Anyone who has been here during surf season will tell you how busy it is at that time of the year, so to think of it being even busier during the off months for surf is a little difficult to fathom for most.

Being someone who comes from a cruisy low key place like Tasmania, I really feel the crowds and stuff, so by the time that the winter surf season has wound down and the tour has moved on, I really feel the need to get back to Oz and unwind somewhere real mellow. My usual preference is a couple of weeks, hanging out with my good mate Wire on King Island, situated on the west side of Bass Straight (between Tasmania and Bells actually). I like it there because there's never what you can call a crowd. In fact, all the people there are very welcoming to outsiders. The only way in and out is via a short (but comparably expensive) commercial flight from Melbourne, which seems to be enough to keep most surfers from checking it out. My usual thing is to just go there and keep contact with a few key surfers who will make the flight over when the surf's on. It doesn't usually pump all the time, in fact it can get downright fickle at times, but the cruisy way of life is just what the doctor ordered after 5 months of solid shooting on the North Shore.

I decided to do something a little different this year though. I got talking to my good mate Brendan at Rip Curl and we hashed out a plan. The idea was to have a small charter plane on standby and just go to wherever the surf was happening within a radius of several hundred miles. With a team of killer surfers (most of them in town for the Bells beach event), I was pretty excited at the possibilites, especially with so much Aussie coastline potentially at our fingertips. The one thing that we didn't count on was the extreme lack of swell in and around Victoria during this time. They didn't even run the Rip Curl pro this year till the last 4 days of the holding period and even then, they had to move the entire event over to the eastern side of Port Philip Bay, to Philip Island which is something that's never been done before.

Several days into our time period, a storm swell hit NSW and most of the crew bailed there to get what they could, however I was told that Tom (Curren) wouldn't be going even though he was in town. Sensing an opportunity to travel with the man himself and score some photos, I noticed that a nice easterly swell (from the same storm) was forecast to hit Tasmania over the next couple of days, so I set about arranging a small mission down there. The idea was to go in low-key with just Tom and hopefully score this one (secret) spot on. As it turned out, we ended up with not only Tom, but also Jamie Obrien and Zane Harrison. My low key mission wasn't so low key anymore, not with three surfers, myself, a video guy (Zak) and Brendan, but what the heck. I was just stoked to be heading down to Tassy for what looked to be an almost certain score.

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