This week has gone by so quickly and I've done so much, it's hard to know where to begin and what to tell. Last weekend Faker, Stoner, Abhi, Doc, and I went into the city for tea (dinner). We did a little bit of exploring and found a delicious Italian place that turned out not to be too expensive (the owner gave us a 25% off coupon!) and ate our fill of all types of different pasta. Even though that's what we mostly eat at school (Coles Spaghetti for 59 cents a pack!), it was great to try some different sauces and not have to cook it ourselves.
Monday I went back down to surf at Gunamatta. Again, it was pretty "small", meaning solid two feet overhead and offshore. I surfed a perfect left for a while with only 4 other guys out, allowing me to practice going vertical backside. I'm definitely improving, throwing my board up through the lip, pushing my fins loose, losing control, free falling back to the bottom of the wave, sticking it, and immediately going for another turn. As the tide went down, I moved over to a little right point break for a while. It gets smaller when the tide drops, so it was only about head high, but a perfect little 3-turn right, and only 5 others out. Again, the water was like a pool, the wave faces a pure dark blue. It looks deceptively warm from shore.
Tuesday I attended my first toga party! There was a free pasta dinner and then everybody from Roberts hall headed down to the common room in their togas and danced under the black lights.
Wednesday and Thursday were filled with school and cooking (we can put together some awesome tacos!), and Friday night I headed down with Smithstress to his house in Portsea, about an hour south, near the tip of the Mornington Peninsula.
We got up on Saturday and walked down the path through the woods from Tim's house to the beach. Right behind his house there is a good left and a good right that break across rock shelves onto the beach. The swell was a little messy, so we drove down to Portsea surf beach, where we paddled out to clean 8-ft. surf with a lot of close-outs. Some pretty big sets came through, and I caught some good waves.
Tim had to work at 4, and when he left, Steve (Tim's dad) took me out on the boat for a little fishing. Steve builds houses, and one guy he built a house for has a dock spot at the Blairgowrie harbor, on Port Phillip Bay. It's about a 5-minute drive from the house. The guy who owns the berth only has his boat down for about a week out of the year, and the rest of the time the Smiths get to keep their boat there. The 18-foot boat is kept out of the water on a lift that floats. When you want to put the boat in, you open the valves, the pontoons on the lift fill up with water and sink, and you drive the boat off. When you bring the boat back, you plug in the pump and pump air back into the pontoons, lifting the boat out. Pretty handy.
We went just a little bit out into the bay, where there are grassbeds about 3 meters down. Put on some squid and clam for bait, and once we located the right spot, we were into the king george whiting. It was cast out, hold the rod until you get the bump, and set the hook. We caught 12 in about an hour, all about 13-16 inches long. Small, but as long as I get to fish, I'll take it.
Tim's parents went to a party for a while and I ate dinner with Tim's 13-year old sister Emma and two of her friends, who drilled me with questions about America. Nobody has guns in Oz, there are virtually no gangs and very little violence, and there are no cheerleaders or marching bands, so I got asked questions like "do you have a gun?", "have you ever shot anybody?", "are you in a gang?", "are the cheerleaders really the popular girls like in the movies?", etc.
I watched my first footy match, the St. Kilda Saints vs. Adelaide for the nab cup (national australian bank), a pre-season match. A very entertaining game, it's like a cross between rugby and soccer. Footy is played on an oval, and to pass you either have to punch the ball out of your hand (almost like an underhand volleyball serve), or kick it to your teammate. The players are spread out like in soccer, and when you carry the ball apparently you have to bounce it every once in a while. Most of the rules still escape me. The goal is to kick it through some upright posts. Between the two center ones is 6 points, through the outside ones is less.
Sunday I went for a surf on the left behind Tim's house. He was a little sick, so he just rested for the morning. Fatty, you gotta come check this place out. The left was like a cross between lower trestles and Playa Escondida. It's a sand bottom on top of the rocks, and the wave wedges into a perfect peak and bowls down the line. It wasn't hollow like Escon, but it was bowly and steep. Because of the long weekend (Labor Day is today, though uni students don't get the day off), it was pretty crowded, with about 10 other guys out on a concentrated peak. The waves were generally about chest to head high, but every once in a while bigger ones came through. It was pretty tough to catch a wave under the locals, but I got lucky for the first one and paddled out to a set that swung a little wide and caught everybody else inside. I air-dropped with the lip into a solid overhead bowl and threw a huge snap and a big carving cutback. After that I got a little more respect and caught more waves.
When the onshore wind came in the arvo, Tim and I went out in the boat to some rocks out in the bay and did a little snorkeling. The water is clear, but apparently nowhere near as clear as it was before they began to dredge the channel through the bay, a work that is in progress, and which all of the locals are very upset about. There was a fur seal lazing on the surface of the water, just sitting there, and then turning upside down so just his feet were on the surface and spinning around for fun. We swam right up to it and mimicked it, putting our feet out of the water and our heads toward the bottom and spinning around. Apparently the seal thought we were making fun of it because after about 5 minutes, he climbed up on the rocks, barking his seal bark and scratching himself with his back flipper. So that was the first time I swam with a seal.
Tim said that to become an honorary local, I had to jump off one of the channel markers. So he drove me over to marker 6, where I jumped off the boat and climbed the ladder to the top of the 30-foot high structure. Though it had "no climbing" signs posted, there was nothing blocking the ladder, so the marker was just asking to be jumped off of. I reached the top and looked down at the boat below. Unlike that rock we jumped off in El Salvador, the water was actually deep here so I didn't have to wait for a wave to jump on top of to ensure that I didn't hit the bottom. The only sketchy thing was the sheet metal that surrounded the buoy on all sides didn't feel very sturdy to stand on. I put one foot up, then the other, and tried to catch my balance as the flimsy metal railing I was perched on top of tried to wriggle out from under my feet. Unable to get balanced, I gave up, lifted my hands from the railing I was perched on, and jumped. I guess now I can be an honorary Portsea local.
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