new surf dialogue

morning sun children

4/13/10

Finally some rain. The road has been a dusty, tin heap rattling affair these past two weeks. Many through ways along the coast around the Raglan area are yet to be paved, but well traveled, and the summer drought has left them washboarded and thick with dust that kicks up through the undercarriage of our trusty rusty campervan. We have been staying at Neil’s place, 2km off the paved highway, and twenty minutes from Raglan, and the famed left hander that Bruce Brown brought to the world when Mike Hynson and Robert August surfed here during the filming of The Endless Summer. They had the place all to themselves when those reels were shot, but today, Raglan is an international surf tourism magnet. Holy crap a lot of people come here.

But out here at Neil’s place, where the crickets and the cows are the only sounds one has to deal with, Raglan can seem

neil's place

 pretty country. We weren’t going to spend as much time here as we have. Both of us knew what a tourist trap Raglan was, but we both wanted to at least experience the place for a day or two, and I really wanted to see the lefts peeling off the multiple points of Indicators, Whale Bay and Manu Bay in the most intimate way possible. After a few great days of surf and freedom camping just outside of town – along one of those dusty dirt traps, where the views are dramatic sea cliff portraits to the horizon- we met Neil in the Manu Bay parking lot, he and I exchanging pre-surf pleasantries before getting into the Tasman with the sunrise, and he and Christine chatting after he had caught his share at Boneyards and the wind began to screw things up. When he found out that we were living out of the van, he offered us his place to stay at. He needed to leave for Auckland for several days, and was really hoping to find someone to house sit for him before he left. So we took him up on his offer, and have been here for nearly a week now. The waves keep coming too.

He bought the property a couple of years ago, and has been constructing an off the grid home built from old shipping containers. Think gravity fed rain water from the tap, solar panels for electricity and a composting toilet. The place isn’t 100% green – the stove top runs off diesel, but will be converted to bio-diesel, and the water is heated by LPG (liquid petroleum gas), but the efforts he has made are pretty inspiring, as is his generosity. He invites travelers and surfers to come and stay with him all the time, enjoying the company that helps fill in the gaps between the cricket chirps and cow moos.

He’s heading back here in a day or so, just in time for the next big swell, and we’ll probably spend an evening together before we head into Auckland ourselves to speak to a group of UW students who have come to study for the Spring quarter and are about to have their first WWOOF experience as a component to their study abroad. One of the professors leading the study is a personal friend of mine, and we are both looking forward to a familiar face.

The rain is such a sweet sound; draining off the rooftop, filling up the water tanks and calming the dust storms for our morning commute through the cow paddocks and wind farms to the seashore. Life’s a beach.