Found myself in and out of the surf club this week. I’m one of the few members of the surf club that actually lives here in Barefoot Bay. For reasons best known to themselves, most of the members of the club choose to come to the Bay instead of other clubs that are closer to them. Our long-serving club secretary lives in the Sussex Inlet, 60km south of us – the club president lives in Broughton, 10km away. In fact of all the members on the club committee – I’m the only one that actually lives here.

The advantage of that is that I have a 90 second drive to get to the club on patrol days and can stay in bed a lot longer than most of ‘em. The disadvantage is that I’m usually the person called upon to open up the club for people wishing to gain access for whatever reason. So the Yoga club, the SLSA Branch Committee, various maintenance bods, instructors and miscellaneous club members give me a ring if they need to get in.

This week the showers got a bit of an overhaul, the man from Coastalwatch paid us a visit and the council dropped by. We have a camera on the roof of our club which is maintained by the Coastalwatch group and very useful it is too. Prior to coming to the beach, most of the surf club’s members check out conditions online first – as do the local surfers. Anyway – the camera had died on its arse and they sent a tech guy out to fix it. I ended up standing on the roof of the club holding the ladder for him.

Sunday is the traditional beach day for the surf club, but this being the tail-end of the season, it’s fairly quiet at the moment. Today was particularly quiet because all the nippers were at their presentation day at Jamberoo Water Park. So on the beach was just the patrol and those of us doing our IRB training, along with various beach-goers. The swell was the biggest yet – 4ft on average – 6ft now and then as the odd big set came through.

Training was, ermm, eventful. For the most part I did fine, driving out through the surf, however I did come a cropper during one beach run. I did a run to shore and then turned to come back out. We went over the first two waves fine, but the third looked like it was going to break on the boat, so I turned the boat away in order to come around again. Unfortunately the prop was in frothing white water and, as I cranked up the revs, it merely cavetated – boiling the water. The end result of this was that the boat was sideways to the wave as it broke and myself and my crewman/instructor – Peter – were ejected from the boat. As I was thrown from the boat I remember thinking to myself that it would be a bad idea for the motor to hit me on the head, so I dove downwards to the bottom and waited for the boat to pass overhead. When I popped up, the boat had been thankfully washed towards shore and we recovered it without incident. Strangely enough I was really glad to have rolled the boat because one of the club’s longest serving IRB drivers said that until you did, you had no real idea how far you could push it.

The fun continued during rollover drill. We stripped the motor off the second IRB and towed it out to sea with the other boat. Then, just beyond the second sandbar we practiced rolling the boat over and righting it. Like most things this is not as easy as it sounds – it’s particularly hard to get on top of the upturned boat because there’s nothing to grab a hold of. Once on top, it’s fairly easy to pull the boat over using the rope that’s designed for just that job, but I told everyone to bear in mind that we were doing it without a motor on the boat.

The rules and how to break them …
I thought this story was very interesting as it could easily happen here in Oz. Not that Australian surf lifesavers are famed for taking Newfoundland dogs out on beach rescues, but because it’s indicative of the red tape that’s strangling modern life. Australia is every bit as swamped in bureaucracy as the UK – more so in many cases. I was reminded of this last week when one of the club members took the nippers (and indeed the nippers mums and dads) out in the IRB off the beach. If surf lifesaving got wind of this we’d be seriously admonished, fined and taken to task, but look at the facts – there were about 45 surf lifesavers on the beach that morning, the surf was incredibly tame and the driver of the boat was very experienced. According to the letter of the law we shouldn’t have taken those kids or their parents out on the boat, but nobody was in any danger and they’ve now had an adventure they’ll remember for a long time and which will quite posssibly keep them interested in the surf lifesaving movement.

There’s been lots of talk about the ‘rules’ within the club lately. I certainly have no objection to breaking those rules when nobody’s going to get hurt – but sometimes I accept that you have to lay down the law. Until recently the club had a quad bike which was jokingly referred to as a ‘junior retention device’ by more senior club members. What used to happen was that the teenage club members on patrol would take the quad for long jaunts up and down the beach. I didn’t mind them going for a quick burn-up, but one pair took things to extreme during one of the patrols I attended. They rode the bike virtually the length of our seven mile long beach, then out onto public roads, over to the pie-shop (where they bought a pie and some fizzie pop), before driving back a good 90 minutes later. So anyway – the edict came down that no club member was to ride the quad bike, the club tractor or the recently purchased but not yet delivered ATV unless they were over 17 and had a full driving licence.

It’s interesting to note that the RNLI have, within the last decade, adopted pretty much every facet of beach surf lifesaving as pioneered by the Australians. The red and yellow flags and uniform, the rescue tubes, the use of the IRB (originally poo-poo’d by the Brits until they saw how valuable a tool it was over here), swimming between the flags (indeed the ‘swim between the flags’ motto itself), rescue boards, nippers, flag races, the carries, the procedures – they were *all* originated over here. Indeed many of the surf lifesavers on British beaches are aussies following the sun to Europe.

What I think the Brits do right that the Aussies don’t is that the rescuers are unified. In the UK the RNLI does the onshore and offshore rescues, but here in Oz you have Surf LifeSaving Australia who are in charge of all beach surf lifesaving and the Marine Rescue Association who fulfil the traditional off-shore boat rescue service. I’d love to see their service and ours united.

Anyway – my bed’s calling to me – later ‘taters.