Sydney might be the best city ever for the nine-to-five work a-doo-da-day white-collar surfer. The nine-to-five office jockey, whatever you want to call them.
Where else can you find very consistent and often good waves within such a short commute of a CBD? Nowhere! Sure, tell me about Barcelona where it doesn’t break for weeks on end, or freezing New York. Try to sell them as the better locale for surf, I dare you.
For the bright-eyed man or woman who wants to make a fortune and catch a few waves while they are at it, Sydney is the place to be.
It is heaven for investment banker with a quiver of hypto-cryptos, all too short for his stock-trading pudge-belly, or the lawyer who has watched too many Laird Hamilton stand-up paddle-board clips.
A perfect incubator for snippy little groms with rich parents. A haven for pasty British men who used to surf twice a year at Cornwall.
Manly, for example, is a twenty minute ferry from the towers of industry, where the millions and billions scream down fibre-optic cables, all the salt-haired suits clipping the ticket as it rockets off to the far reaches of the fiscal empire.
But this is a location that can also cause a peculiar delusion.
I get very angry at crowds, as though it were an injustice without explanation. Never mind the fact I have chosen to live at what could be the busiest beach in all of Australia. I get so angry about it and tell anyone who will listen!
Do you ever paddle in and, when asked how the surf was, complain that it would have been good, if not for the crowd? That it was ruined by every man and his dog? All your mates and their mates and half of south America?
I might need to leave Sydney!
I am delusional enough to think other people at the beach should know who I am, that they shouldn’t paddle for a wave that I look at because I grew up there, and that’s how it works in Hawaii, or even Bali. Never mind that this beach is on the edge of an urban sprawl, full of normal people who don’t care about surfing’s weird tribal rules.
What a fucked-up way to think! What the hell!
I have, in all sincerity, complained that there are no good left-hand point-breaks close to my house… as if someone did it on purpose to spite me.
Time to get out of the office and find somewhere else to live. Any suggestions?