Surfer's Paradise

After spending New Year’s in Sydney, we got on the road headed north. I had originally hoped to spend the next three weeks slowly bouncing along the east coast, checking out different towns that I had heard of, hopefully catching some surf, and eventually ending up at the Great Barrier Reef. I quickly realized that this is the biggest travel month for Aussie’s and everywhere I checked had week long minimum stays (even the camper van sites). After a lot of rethinking, I decided to drive as far north as Burleigh Heads, stay there a week, drive south again for a week and then fly up to the Great Barrier Reef for a week. The drive to Burleigh was about twelve hours, and I ended up doing eleven hours the first day! I still don’t know why I drove that much in one day; it just seemed to go by and nobody asked me to stop.

Burleigh Heads is in the Queensland District and is know as the Gold Coast because of its beautiful coastline and also probably from the development money that has been made here. I have seen pictures of the right point break at Burleigh Heads and wanted to see if it was as beautiful as the pictures (See “Pray For Surf”). I found a nice fully equipped apartment that was half a block from the beach and a ten minute beach walk to the point. Very beautiful area, but high rise developments have turned this into more of “Condo Paradise”. We were lucky to be staying in the older section which has not changed over to high rises and still had a somewhat of a small beach town feel to it. The crazy thing about this area is how early people get on the beach. I am not kidding when I say that people are on the beach, in the water, and jogging on the trails at 4:30 AM. I know this because the second night I woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep, and so I decided to get up and try and get a sunrise picture. As I reached the beach, people were already jogging down the trails and there were already thirty people surfing. I got my sunrise picture (pictured here) and ran back to get my surfboard. I got in the water by 5:00 AM and had a blast. As it turns out, the waves are best in the morning because the wind comes up by 10:00 AM and blows everything out. There were waves every day but nothing great. I had a few sessions that were about head high, and the larger set waves would break for about 200 yards. The water is crystal clear, and it was wild to see your reflection off the bottom as you surf by. The flip side of this is that you can see all the rocks at the point and any sharks that might be close by. I didn’t see any, but on my second morning out, I talked to a guy that had just been farther out on the point and saw one that had a dorsal fin about 16” tall (probably 8 -12 ‘ long). Needless to say, I stayed on the inside and around other people. Not that there is strength in numbers, but statistically, you have less chance of being the one he picks to taste. Sometimes my old Engineering Classes do come in handy!!

The rest of our time in Burleigh was spent lounging on the beach, walking around town, and basically enjoying a true beach vacation. I love our summers at home, but I find it impossible to sit on the beach for more than an hour, when my “100 Day War” is raging on. Mat purchase a body board and they enjoyed the surf as well as being in close proximity to ice-cream stands. Since we couldn’t afford to fly April out to Sydney, Sally was excited to find the perfect, gay, Australian man to trim and highlight the locks. She had a fun salon experience and someone girlie to talk to if you know what I mean. Our next stop is Seal Rocks, a very remote beach town, about three hours north of Sydney.