Party at Tony Browns
1st January 1970
Imagine this scene; 10cm of snow on the beach, roads closed all over the city, more car crashes than your local speedway, sub-zero daytime temperatures and out of control storm surf. This is no place for Isolated to be conducting a road trip. Right?
Wrong. A couple of days later all that shit cleared, leaving sunny blue skies and a nice lined up swell, Mother Natures way of saying sorry for dumping the biggest snow fall to hit the South in many a year. There was still the odd patch of snow around, but that just adds to the uniqueness of this trip, yet another roadie into the deep and farkin cold south.
We planned to hit a becahie, called Tony Brown's that I swear nobody in this entire world apart from the Booger crew of the Deep South knows about. The best thing is too that it is undoubtedly in the top five of NZ beach breaks on its day. It has the heaviest, two way, spitting-multiple-times, incredibly hollow peaks you can imagine. You know those photos of those epic Central-American beachies you see in surf mags, well that's what its like, and it's our wee secret.
Funny thing is though when we arrived it looked small and fattish. Not to worry. A dropping tide would solve that and it did. Within minutes there were Mexican-style kegs all around us. It still looked small though, but, that's the weird thing about Tony Brown's, you need someone already out in the line up to gauge how big it is. Regular Isolated road tripper Mitch Frew was to be our guinea pig. He bolted out there after seeing an epic one and once out there we were all kinda surprised at the size of it, as easy 4ft pits steamrolled in and unloaded on Tony Brown's perfect banks.
Mitch was followed by a few names and faces you probably haven't heard too much about on Isolated before...
Brendan Dorman, who likes to be known as "B-Diddy" was hot on Mitch's heals. B-Diddy has been charging the pits around the Deep South for ages and loves nothing more than pulling into massive closeouts with his favourite "Hip Hop Nigger Bitch Gangsta Dog Hoe" tunes playing in his head.
Also on the trip, Paul McLennan-Kissel, which is a farkin mouthful to say so everyone just calls him PMK for short. He doesn't seem to mind. PMK came down south from Christchurch a few years ago to study music at Otago Uni. He's been around for a while and he always did real well in comps, as most Chch boogers do. If you saw him on the street busking (as he does some weekends) you wouldn't know he was a Booger, who loved nothing more than hitting a good solid section, by looking at him., with his long tangled hair and assorted range of Op-shop styles, he looks a lot like Old school Aussie Boog, Jason Spence, and what a coincidence, PMK happens to ride a Jason Spence pro board!
Willy Tregidga, another name too hard to say, paddled out. Willy T hasn't had a lot of time in the water in recent year due to a little travel bug in his tummy, but he's back and quickly gathering fitness. Not. Willy T hales from the West Coast originally, which I never would have picked as most West Coasters usually have some sort of weird growth or fetish, Willy T was clean. He didn't last long. For some reason every freak set that came through found their way to Willy T's head and he was in on the beach puffing before most of us we even out there.
Rob Banfield also found his way out after lengthy poo in the bushes. The man who loves contests and wild West Coast women was frothing at the chance to star in his first Isolated roadie.
And lastly, Chris Garden, the land photog. He was pumped to get some epic shots. You may have seen some of his work before on Fluizone.com (Do a search of his name on FZ and marvel at the images he's shot). Fuck, he's taken some amazing line-up shots but never really shot waves with anyone on them before. Garden had recently purchased a huge telephoto lens and was psyched to get the mega pixels rolling. The funny thing is though, he his one of NZ's finest surf photogs but the guy is half blind! I swear, without his glasses on he becomes so disorientated! It's so funny watching him come in after a surf (I don't even know how he surfs) and watch him walk down the beach in the opposite direction to his car cause he cant see it!
Well, the session was damn good fun. We surfed for hours, not bad considering it was the middle of winter and snow had fallen just a few days prior. Plus, we were all a little edgey (well I was anyway) after a shark sighting the last time I was down. PMK and Frew got the best of the waves on offer, although Frew got no good shots. It wasn't as good as we had hoped for at Tony Brown's, but looking at the pix, it was still and epic days surf, way better than you average becahie.
We left once slight sea breeze hit. Everyone except Willy T, Garden and PMK that is, as a flat car battery left them stranded for hours. Haha! So there you go, just a good old fashioned road trip. No real funny moments, no real dramas, just a sick day trip with the sole purpose to get better waves than you'd find in your hometown. Try it sometime.
P.S.
A meer two days after this trip snow fell again on the Deep South, an even heavier dump than the last. Looks like we timed that trip just right.
P.S.S.
Two days after our visit to Tony Brown's another huge storm pounded the Otago coast. Yet again it snowed - big time. There was twice as much as last time and it took twice as long to clear, and once it cleared, that's right, we set off on another mission. Not to Tony Brown's this time, but even deeper south. To cut a long story short, we left at close to midnight, tried to sleep in the car, (we would have if it wasn't for Mark Hubbard's snoring, Mark's a Whangarei hard man and lover of Rugby, who joined us on this trip).
Most spots we checked in the extremely frosty morning were shit. A rare swell direction turned our favourite waves into poo.
I love trips with the Deep South crew. They love searching that little but further, walking or driving that little bit longer in the hope of finding new waves. We did that. We found a new wave. An epic one too. We called it Stallions due to the massive man-horse in the paddocks next to the break. It only looked 3ft, and it was. Damn fun though, much like an Aussie south coast ledge but without 100 Hardy wannabes on it.
Hubbard wasn't thinking and took anything, well almost anything. He changed his mind about charging so hard when a solid 6-foot freak set approached the reef. The wave was so heavy and thick that no one wanted it. That one wave left the photog's speechless. Mitch Frew, long time Dinner Plates charger didn't even want a bar of it. The heaviest wave we have seen in a very, very long time, even against its close neighbour, Dinner Plates. If someone had gone that thing I'm sure we would be still picking up body parts from the dry rock ledge in front of the wave. Fuck that. The tide killed our new find.
We left, shaken but stoked on the Stallions experience.
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