Another day and another video of Justin “Jughead” Allport getting smeared across some conglomerate. This clip was taken on Tuesday this week after the Central Coast fireman, slab hunter and rock lobster had made the call to surf Ours. Once again it didn’t quite work out for Jug.
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“Yeah, it was evil,” Jughead told Tracks. “It wasn’t quite big enough to break out further and the swell was more north than we thought so it was breaking wider, which means you takeoff much closer to the rocks.”
Allport paddled and towed some mutants successfully, but the one above was clearly not meant for human consumption.
“When you pulled in all you could see was the cliff ledge,” continues the bald mutant wave wrangler. “The angle of the swell meant it was pushing in toward the rocks and the cliff so hard that even if you were making the tube, you had to pin drop to get out of there. There was no kicking out off the back because the lip would beat ya every time.”
If however the clip above looks bad, it was nothing compared to what happens next. “The video stops when I get rolled off the ledge and go under the cliff and out of view,” explains the father of 11. “Just after that I got sucked under water. I hadn’t had much of a breath anyway and even though the next wave was a fair way off, it hit me before I even got to the surface.”
Now anyone who surfs Ours can expect to end up in this position at some stage. Usually though surfers are swept down and flushed along the rocks to deeper water and safety. Not this time though.
“I was caught underwater and pressed against the cliff caught under the ledge,” says Jug, whose competitive career high point was a 4th place finish in the Under 19s Hunter Region Scholastic Titles in 1989, all be it in a stellar field. “I’d never been in a situation like that before. It was like I was wearing the cliff as a peak cap above my eye-line.”
Eventually our hero stopped wearing a cliff as a hat and made it to safety. His 5 mm booties and a 3/2 wetsuit meant there was no major injuries apart from a load of bruises sustained all over his hairless body. “I’m off to the physio tomorrow,” he concluded, “Fuck it was heavy.”
