Myponga

At this moment that I start to type the clock on the wall tells me it's 11:45 PM on a Wednesday evening. Outside I can hear the onshore wind howling like a Banshee in the midnight blackness, threatening to rip the roof off as it claws its way around the eaves of our house. A few hundred metres down the bottom of the road is the sea and I've been lying here imagining the many scenarios being created out there with this persistent onslaught. The current weather report on TV is telling me that we are experiencing 30 knot winds at the moment, with a maximum of 40 plus expected over the next 24 hours. If it’s going to blow this hard then let it do so for a few more days, as it’s been so very long since there’s been a huge swell in the gulf and that is something I want to witness again. There’s a very high tide a 6:30AM and with this wind behind it I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the local jetty has been washed away again. It’s happened twice before in my lifetime, and there’s no good reason why it can’t happen again. Who can stop Huey when he gets in one of these particularly nasty moods? There will be plenty of stormies to ride when the sun comes up but only one place, anywhere on our coastline, really worth looking at and that is Myponga.

Myponga is a small fishing village that sits at the bottom of an extremely rough, long track about 40 kilometres south of where I’m sitting right now. It has a sort of point that sticks out like no other in the gulf and is perfect in conditions like this, as it swings the storm swells into the bay, while the wind coming over the hill is turned into an offshore.
You can ask me if it’s that good a place to ride when these conditions prevail and is it worth the amount of pain inflicted on the vehicle to travel that track and I’ll probably say No! It’s a treacherous, pebbled rock break that is exceptionally hard on both board and body, plus it doesn’t break consistently well. So why would I go there if it’s not that good you ask, I’ll tell you why. I haven’t surfed or seen a real big swell there since 1967 and it’s a place I want to surf just once more.

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