The View From Yesterday: On Swell Events

Autumn in Australia is the season to keep your calendar clear. When the models tend purple and black you don't want to find yourself double-booked with dinner at the in-laws. There's only one 'event' any surfer wants to attend and autumn 2025 was filled with them.

Stories abound of roaring bomboras, thick-lipped and hollow, torn apart by young'uns living their best lives. Of heaving reef ledges, shallow as your shower recess, navigated by kids too young to drive.

It's wonderful stuff, really. But now that the din of excitable chatter is dimming, it's time for some home truths about the way things were - often bigger, always better. And no-one is better placed to throw perspective on swell events than Andy Meridian.

The AM to MP's PM, Andy is Australia's original surf outlaw, who set the subculture on its way before disappearing over the frontier, only to return when he figured out Facebook.

If perhaps you've forgotten who Andy is - it happens, people age and memory fails - then check the end of the story for some refreshers.

Swell events still fire the neurons in this decrepit husk of a human.

There’s been a couple making headlines recently. Big? Sure. But nothing like the lows we’d cop back in the ‘60s and ‘70s. From Australia Day to the October long weekend, you could guarantee if we weren't getting a Cat 6 cyclone from one direction there’d be a Southern Ocean or Tasman Sea bomb hitting us from the other. 

It was like living in a nautical car wash. Sand never had any time to settle. Wetsuits never dried. Fathers hardly had the chance to remember the names of their kids (though I had my own special system sorted: Josef, Adolf, Benito, and Mao, if you’re out there, remember Daddy still loves you). 

There were Cambrian explosions in board design. In surfing performance. In hallucinogenic ingestion techniques. Man, it was a time to be alive. From what I can remember. 

Those north swells may have turned on the novelty spots. The interior coast. But it was the southerly quadrants I’d really hang out for. Long period isobaric hard ons that would slam into this or that slice of reef or coast. Pure, undiluted power. A punch in the nose on a winter’s morning. A rock in a cop’s face. 

I’m a Burleigh boy but one of my favourite places to surf on a macking south-southeast was a place I called Ruski’s.

Ruski’s was a deep sea sand and rock shelf somewhere in the Tasman. Rumoured to sit on top of an old volcano belonging to some long-sunken mountain range. A sleeping giant, way out beyond the shipping lines. Cortes Bank with an inside section. The sort of place that wouldn't stir in anything under thirty feet. 

I’d first seen it breaking whilst on the Lord Howe Island postal boat. I’d commandeered the vessel for an impromptu orca hunting expedition. One of those false-flag trips we’d run in high seas to avoid any nosy Greenpeace vessels (a story for another time). 

Orcas in those days were of course prized for their teeth, and we’d make a motza selling them to impotent Chinese businessmen. 

I watched in awe on that trip as, out of nowhere, the ocean rose up and folded in on itself. Unlike anything I’d ever witnessed before or since.

I noted the coordinates and conditions down on the side of a jawbone and promised to return. Not that I’m giving anything away here. All I’ll say is that Ruski’s needs a swell period longer than forty seconds, and the location roughly triangulates somewhere between Lord Howe, Brisbane, and a small sheep station on the backside of Dondingalong.

I made sure I was back there the very next swell. Didn’t miss another for the next fifteen years. 

It became ritual. When I saw the charts firing up I’d wax up my 14’6 x 15 tear drop single fin. Pack it on top of the Morris Minor, and make a beeline for the jump off spot. A quick belt of whisky and a tab of acid up the doot - the suppository of all wisdom, as we called it - and off I’d go.

I’d start the paddle around dawn. Ideally on the outgoing tide, where the mighty <redacted> River would pull you out for the first ten or so kays. It often broke during major rain events, so I’d be sharing the water with all sorts of flotsam and jetsam. There’d be cows. Cars. Missing union delegates, last seen in the Valley with some of Sir Joh’s special advisors. My very own Tasman freeway, transporting me all the way to the continental shelf. 

Before long I’d see it. Great white caps exploding like avalanches on the horizon.

It was always joy paddling into a wave there. Despite the isolation and comic-book-like dimensions, it was a surprisingly easy wave to surf. There was a jut of rock, I guess it was the edge of the old caldera, which sat up above the sand bar. Probably in only thirty feet of water. Enough to create a small capping surge on the swell lines as they drew into the zone.

They’re one of the greatest quirks of wave zone bathymetry, those surges. Forget wedges or ruler-edged reef breaks. The roll in trumps them all. Allows you to set your line early. Drop in behind the peak. Get the hard work done before the good part starts.

And out at Ruskis were tubes you could fit a coal ship in. I’ll tell you this for free: there’s something cosmic about a right hand barrel on an east coast morning, acid or no. Board angled nor'west. Body in synch. Water rushing up below you. The refracted sunlight cascading up the lipline and over your head as the ocean vibrates all around. Like sitting in the Sistine Chapel with God breathing down your neck.

One day out there something happened that was so wild, so beyond the pale, I still have trouble believing it happened. But I tell you it was true. 

I’d been out for eight hours - seven of which were spent in the tube. The swell was still rising. I had to wait for the tide to turn so I could begin the trek back. That paddle in is never easy. There’s no geographical markers. You rely on the sun, the moon, and whatever’s left of the acid to get you home. 

I knew the East Australian Current would be dragging me south, so I figured I’d make landfall somewhere between Yamba and Yagan. Once there, I’d hitch a ride back to my car. No biggie.

But a few hours in, there was still no land in sight. I was heading in the right direction, but fatigue was setting in. Only the warm embrace of the industrial-strength trip was keeping me going. 

Then, a disturbance to my left. Out of nowhere, a solitary orca surfaced. It had a distinct birthmark on its black and white forehead.

Was it an omen? I’d heard stories of orcas guiding wayward sailors home. But they’re social creatures. You rarely see them alone. I figured he was thinking the same of me. 

Truth is, they’re even smarter than they let on, these orcas. Which is what makes them such good sport. 

The orca cruised alongside me. We kept a wary eye on each other. With orcas, you never drop your guard. They remembered a face. But so did I. I played it over in my mind. I knew him from somewhere. 

Then it hit me like a surprise paternity suit. That birthmark! My last hunting expedition. We’d called him Gorbachev, after the distinctive cranial pattern. I’d wiped out most of his pod, but had let him live. Still took my souvenir though. 

He opened his toothless mouth to confirm. God damn it. The cunt was after me. I was far from shore, no help in sight. An apex predator, hell bent on revenge. No harpoon. Just my board for protection. 

This could get rough.

Gorbachev vanished below the surface, then launched upward like a torpedo, slamming into me from below. He sent me flying sixty feet, easy. So high I could see land over the horizon. As I fell, I clutched my board and landed in his open jaws — the deck wedged into his toothless gums like a splint.

Thankfully the eighteen-ounce glass job held, just long enough for me to reset.

He spat me and the board out. Circled around for a second strike.

This could get very rough.

But what was it Marcus Aurelius said?

 "Love the hand that fate deals you and play it as your own."

Here’s one thing I’ll tell ya for free. If you ever find yourself fighting an orca: play dirty.

I waited till he came back around again. Let him knock me in the air. But this time I came down with my board vertical. Sharp rails cut through gum and flesh. He let out a high pitched squeal. The big sissy. I lunged at him again with the board again. Drove it into his blowhole like a spear. 

But it was not enough. The great beast smote me. He pulled me down deep, so deep. Darkness was all around. 

My body floated in the water. Countless fathoms below. Gorbachev looked me in the eye. But at that point he did something I would have never guessed. He showed mercy. An understanding. 

What happened between me and Gorbachev will stay secret for now. Partly because it is subject to a copyright lawsuit with the estate of Herman Melville. But it also speaks to something deeper: the immutable bond of the sentient creatures.

Suffice to say, we reached an agreement. I’d never hunt orcas again. 

The last thing I remembered was Gorbachev dragging my near lifeless body to shore. I’d washed up somewhere on Stockton beach. Board gone. But life intact. 

I called a local girlfriend of mine there, the Gateshead Gobbler, to come and pick me up and return me to my car.

I’ve kept my agreement with Gorbachev since then. And every time I surfed Ruski’s, named in Gorbachev’s honour, I’d tip my hat to the toothless cunt. Marcus Aurelius be damned.  

So that was that. Not the type of tale you’re going to see in a magazine or on a Surfline rewind, nah. But just another swell event story in an eternity full of them.

// ANDY MERIDIAN

More of The View From Yesterday:

Andy Does Darlo
The Interior Coast
Andy Goes Svengali