surfresearch.com.au  newspapers : 1925

The weather was growing hotter and hotter.
Up in the hills the white Christmas bush was flushing and ripening.
Down on the beach the sand was too hot to walk on barefoot, and gave off a glare that was almost blinding.
None of the Noah's Ark people bathed in the middle of the day, not wishing to have their skin stripped off by the sun, so I was able to get a good long morning surf myself, and even sent to Sydney for wood, made myself a seven- foot surf board, and, after many spills, succeeded in learning to ride it standing either on my feet or head and hands.

But it's a lonely game surfing with no one to yell "Don't go down the mine, daddy," as one poises above the drop of a ten-foot wave, or to play that time-honoured game which never loses its flavour- i.e., to spot a wave with concealed dumping powers, to swim furiously towards it, yelling "All abroad," and then to hop neatly off it and watch the casualties.
I found myself looking forward to the mornings when my late enemy, Andrew, the fisher lad, came along for an hour or so to swim with me.
Little by little we were making friends, though he still disregarded my notices.
I came to like him well in the end- him and his people, and once or twice I went down to their huts about 1 a.m., when they were all waking up, ate their rough breakfast with them, and went out in the darkness with the boats.
It was an eerie sort of hour, depressing in the extreme with the whispering silence of the sea closing round the boats till one wanted to shout aloud- but didn't because the echoes would have been so beastly.
I didn't wonder after the first night that fishermen were superstitious and quite realised how the legend that the Day of Judgment was close at hand must have spread among the North of Scotland fishing boats.
There's a tense feel in the air just before dawn as if something much bigger than commonplace
daylight were coming up out of the sea- something big and terrible like the horsemen of the Apocalypse or the dragon with seven heads and 10 horns.
Andrew's old father knew the Book of Revelations backwards, and I always remember how one hot windless dawn he stood up suddenly in the boat and said loudly: "A sea of glass mingled with fire" and sat as suddenly down again.
Which was just what it was- I've never seen anything like that sea before or since.
(To be continued.)

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