Nick’s Blog, number one: Wednesday

DEBBIE OR NO DEBBIE

Tropical cyclones form when a kink appears in the upper atmosphere over a patch of ocean with a sea surface temperature of over 26 degrees Celsius. The kink appears as a sort of rupture in the laminar layers of air 30,000 metres above sea level, up where the big planes fly and the carbon dioxide goes to hide, and it’s a bit like pulling a plug in a brimming-full bath, except upside down. Warm moist surface air pours upward into the rupture, cooling rapidly as it rises toward space, and falling outward in a broad dispersal pattern. Around 24 hours into this process, the Coriolis force — the great force exerted by the spinning Earth — sets itself into this rising, spilling air mass, and pulls it into a spiral. More and more air rushes in and up, dragging with it moisture and static charges and dust particles, and as the pressure builds beyond the atmosphere’s ability to contain it, vast energies are released, far beyond anything we’ve managed to create on our little human lonesomes.

And then the Bureau of Meteorology calls it “Debbie”. Debbie?

Today at Kirra dawned cloudy. Debbie was dragging her veiled edge across us — that warm humid air trying to make it toward her centre, and a fortunate easterly breeze taking the edge off what promised to be, at the start anyway, an absolute scorcher.

But Debbie or no Debbie, I’m gonna mark today down as a big one for the water squad, because I reckon today we found out what Aussies is really all about — losing.

It really truly is about losing, you know. So much more losing happens here than winning. There were 48 athletes in the open men’s board relay final today, and 39 of ‘em walked away without a medal, including us. There were 48 athletes in the under 19 men’s board relay final, and 39 of them walked away without a medal, again including us. We walked away without medals in events we’ve won: open men’s ski relay, open women’s board relay, under 19 women’s board relay, click click click. In the hottest surf racing carnival on earth, we were suddenly just another team.

Or were we? In the heat, I kept seeing hard stuff. People not quite getting starts. People nailing starts but getting no waves. Firsts and seconds turning into fourths and fifths. Little glimpses of magic, like Amber Moran’s opening paddle of the under 17 girl’s ski relay, a silver medal paddle. Tropical Cyclone Amber. But mostly, brilliant efforts not quite converting. That open men’s board relay, for instance. In all the triumphs of last year, this was the one race we’d failed to even make the damn final. This year the a-team qualified so smoothly I thought, oooh, things might flow our way. Oh no no no. Max Brooks started in the middle and the pack split into two on either side of him and left him to paddle the first 200 metres alone, while they just sorta sneaked away. Max tagged Jayke Rees in ninth or 10th and Jayke ripped in with possibly the paddle of the carnival so far and tagged Charlie Brooks in basically equal second.

So Charlie is fast and buttery. He’d also paddled four board races straight — two open qualifiers, a 19s semi and a final. He went in fast and buttery and felt both calves and hamstrings cramp within the first 30 metres. I watched him drop to a prone posture, but had no clue what was happening. Charlie drafted Manly’s Jay Furniss and eventually regained some freedom of movement, and five of ‘em got the first wave from off Kirra’s distant sandbar.

Man, that sandbar. That’s worth writing about. It’s nothing at high tide; you can’t even see it unless you paddle out there and it rises slightly out of the green. At low tide, as it was for most of the afternoon, it’s like a second shoreline, a complex area of broken water and knee-deep shoals that might do you right and might do you wrong. Tropical Cyclone Georgia Miller made a typically bold choice in her leg of the board relay and jumped off her board to run a section; “I knew I’d either be neck-deep or up to my knees,” G chortled, pretty chuffed that her call was the right one. But that sandbar mirage hurt more than it helped most people today. Anyway, Charlie and Jay came off that wave into the long open gutter neck and neck and Jay drifted one way and Charlie the other, and yep, it went Jay’s way. Fifth, again.

Debbie, or Debbie’s remnant, swung her fringe a bit harder as the day went on. Rain squalled in occasionally and a north-east wind filled, and it made the event organisers increasingly skittish. So much so that they pulled the open men’s surf race into a string of nine cans INSIDE the sandbar line, a thing Trent Herring pretty much regards as blasphemy. “A joke,” Trentos fumed, stomping up and down the beach. “Embarrassment.” He was momentarily settled by the appearance of four black and white cans outside the break, but no, this was even more of a mirage than the sandbar itself. The open men, 36 of the fastest surf swimmers in the world, took off like scorched possums and made it around the string of nine in about 90 seconds.

Then it became a race.

And then it became Ollie Signorini’s race.

I recall Ollie heading off the Hawaii last July or so, to do the open water swim between Lanai and Molokai. He wanted to do it but he wanted also to win the Waikiki roughwater swim, one of the world’s great open water swims. About 4ks or so coming into the Outrigger Canoe Club. Beautiful water. No mirages. Australia’s finest distance swimmer, Jarrod Poort, was in it too. You might recall the swimmer who went out like a madman in the Rio Olympic open water event and held the lead till the last k or so? That was Jarrod. Ollie stayed with Jarrod then out-bodysurfed him off a reef outside the Outrigger and won the race and got a sponsorship out of it.

So the open men are steaming back from the string of nine. A Northcliffe cap is in the lead. Ollie is leading the next little group of swimmers. His mate Jarrod is off to the side. Trent and I are glued to this. There is 120 metres to go. Northcliffe unaccountably veers right. What is he thinking? Ollie straightens up and begins to kick and pulls away from his little group. “He can cut him off from the flag!” Trentos is almost screaming. “He’s got this!” Ollie leans in against the small current off the inside shorebreak. Northcliffe is lost, 15 metres off to the side. Ollie gets up briefly, sees a tiny wave, dives with it, gets up, runs to the line. Ollie who can’t run, runs.

Tropical Cyclone Ollie.

That’s a gold medal we’ve never won.

So there’s lessons from this, but maybe we’ll leave them for now. A kind of wackiness descended on the scene late on this very very long day, as we all tried to rip down the tents and hide our craft in the dunes. There is much confusion over what the weather will do in the near future. Carnage! some say.

To which I say two things. The great sportsman I mentioned at last night’s opening dinner, the one I said I wouldn’t name? It’s the NFL quarterback Joe Namath. Joe won perhaps the finest Superbowl of all time for the New York Jets in the late 1960s, calling a win when nobody believed it, and pulling it off against the odds. Quarterbacks are dealing with a field is constant motion, looking for patterns that may not appear to exist but then appear from nowhere when the quarterback makes the decision: pass, run, hand-off, fade. A fluid situation like a surf zone. I met Joe in LA about 20 years ago and for some reason we got on like a house on fire. And he told me the key to his game. “Play it as it lays,” he said. “Don’t predict it. I did that as a joke, to fire myself up. It’s not predictable till the moment you see it.”

And the second? Tropical cyclones have been forming for as long as the Earth has had an atmosphere. They’re older than life on this planet. Anyone who thinks he or she can predict their behaviour is, well, overestimating the power of computing for a start.

Tomorrow’s a new day. Wake up and have a look at it, and play it as it lays.