There's one thing about driving through the fog as it sits thick across the city like an old favourite duvet and that's the promise of glassy waves. That was my intention last week as I headed for the North Coast, promise of an east swell and favourable tides as my lure. I normally make a beeline for Aramoana on these occasions but decided to check out one of the fickle points further north – it seems everyone else had the same idea. Parking was at maximum, the line-up was chockers and the walk out looked more like a chaingang shifting rocks.
To make matters worse, as far as I could tell through the fog, the swell was backing off fast. So instead of a surf I took my trusty sidekick Remi for mission up the beach to see if we could find some new angles to shoot. We did, but the thick fog rolling in and out like the breath of the land made shooting any impossible. Even with the shiny new EF600mm f/4.0 that my friends at Canon NZ had lent me wasn't liking the pea soup.
A little closer in and we found some windows between the fog – enough to see Josh Thickpenny owning the line-up with some seriously big turns on the long right hander. He seemed to have the knack for finding the right waves – the ones that made it through to the inside section, which is where it was really all happening.
By mid-tide the swell had dropped, the sun had come out and that guilty pang of a workload that was double overhead was gnawing at me. I caved in, returning back to the studio with a quick stop off at the Union Co Cafe in Port Chalmers in the hope they had their incredible rendang pies in stock. They did, but the last one went 20-minutes before I got there. Damn. North Coast, 2, me, 0.
See you at the beach ... Derek
PS Here's my take on fixing the boorish rules that seem determined to ruin rugby:
1) Introduce an orange card – like a yellow, but the player can't return to the field for the rest of the game (and goes on report), but can be replaced from the bench after 10 minutes. No one wants to see 14 v 15 in test match rugby ... ever.
2) Introduce the challenge mechanism that tennis has where each captain has one or two chances to challenge a ruling. Upon challenge the TMO reconsiders the ruling. If the original ruling is overturned the captain doesn't lose their challenge chance. If the original rule prevails, they lose one challenge. How many Rugby World Cup outcomes would have turned out differently if we'd had this rule in effect? And surely it would have to take some pressure off the referees who are the unsung heroes of the game.
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