Surf Year in Review

It’s the last day of the year and the media is full of reviews, summaries and highlights. I’ve thought of some surfing highlights in the last year. But where to start? Local surfing highlights? Australia surfing highlights? Or international ones? Remember the epic swells in Teahupoo and Pipe going off in 2011 and the crazy footage that came with it? But who cares about epic swells in Teahupoo and Pipe if you can only watch it on telly… Surely, the epic Christmas swell of the past week on Australia’s East Coast is worth a mention in the top 3 for most Aussie East coast surfers. I figured surfing highlights are quite subjective. So I’m going to share my personal ones with you rather than compiling some random surfing news. Maybe it reminds me of one or the other of your best surfing moments in 2011 and maybe not so glorious ones too.

Ok, here are my top 3 surfing highlights in 2011 in no particular order:

• Manyana surf weekend: one of the bestest surfing weekends all time but definitely the best in 2011. Awesome surf, nice weather, good mates, house down the coast. What do you want more?  (here’s the link to the full blog article and the video from the trip >>)

• Night surfing: craziest surf experience ever. Surfing at night in a glow in the dark wetsuit on a glow in the dark surfboard. Oh and not to forget the fireworks they’ve fired off in the background. Awesome. (See Gidget goes night surfing for footage >>)

• Venus Goes Gidget: yes, sorry cheesy, but to me it counts as a surfing highlight, starting this little blog and writing about surfing. Loving it.

No good year in review is complete without lowlights. It was actually quite hard to come up with any. Reason being, I tend to live in denial of any bad surfing experience and the other one I guess is good luck surfwise (touch wood) in 2011. I think this is the first year in a long time without any stitches, broken nose or snapped boards (not even many dings). Here are the ones I have not conveniently forgotten. My personal not so great surf-related moments in 2011:

• 7 hour drive and (almost) no surf: the worst surf trip ever. A friend and I drove up to the Central Coast hoping for a great surf around Catherine Hill Bay. 4 hours later and after checking every single beach from Catherine Hill Bay all the way back to MacMasters, we ended up surfing Terrigal for five seconds, before we decided it’s too sharky and headed back to Sydney.

• Wipe out including whiplash before skiing weekend: I was about to head off to Perisher and managed to have one of the worst wipeouts if not the worst this year. It was not even a big wave but somehow I fucked up the take off and came smashing down with the lip on my back. I still went to Perisher but opted for skiing rather than snowboarding which was a bit easier on my painful back.

• Broken board sans surf: I bet you’ve dinged your board before in the surf. Quite annoying. But if you have a good session, you take these things into account kind of. It’s pretty annoying though if you ding your board without the pleasure of a good surf session. In the process of vacuum cleaning my apartment, I accidently pushed over Bruce (my longboard) and he got severely injured on the corner of my bookshelf. That really hurt. Lesson learnt: Vacuum cleaning is dangerous and needs to be done by professionals.

Next year’s forecast: Well, I reckon it’s going to be a fantastic surf year for at least one gidget i.e. me. I’ll be kicking the year off with a trip to Sri Lanka. If I stumble across internet cafes while on my hunt for waves, I shall give you an update from far away. If not, I’m sure to have some interesting surf stories in store for you when I come back end of January.

So long, Happy New Year my fellow surfing peeps. Thanks for reading Venus Goes Gidget in 2011 and may 2012 bring lots of waves.