SO there he was, The Offsider, hitting Ahipara last Thursday with his family and board crammed in the sportsmobile to find the waves absolutely all time.
It was his day off, and the empty afternoon line-up lay spread out before him like a laden banquet table in an empty room. The wind was almost too offshore but she was still grooming the lines into straight, corduroy perfection. Some sets offered six waves and while the bigger ones were shutting down at dead low, once the tide turned, every single set wave began reeling off the bank for some length without detour towards the shipwreck buried in the sand.
The water was finally getting its winter bite but the air was still quite warm even though the mountains in the south were full with snow; someone noted this was something to do with a strong high trapping warm air over the north. Having the bank as good as it'd been in some time combined with the sheer lack of people drove The Offsider into an excitable frenzy, like a shark smelling blood. He began talking to himself in a weird sing-song voice while he walked back towards the sea after each ride as if hypnotised. In the water, he watched huge plumes of green laced with white from incoming swells being launched skyward by the backwash off the rocks and the stiff offshore.
On each lap back to the jump off rock, he met others returning from the main break shaking their heads as if in disbelief at what they'd seen there. One claimed he'd scored six tubes in a row or something, and also spoke of a heavy shelf some distance south which had been working the day before at 8-12 foot, and with a national mag there to capture some of the country's best big waveriders towing in. Another, a local bobby, told of how he'd scored the most tubes he'd ever had in his life which would surely help as he was about to escape the winter by travelling to a fabled reefbreak in the Indian Ocean soon.
After the surf, The Offsider and his 4-year-old daughter Cheleyna walked around the rocks hoping to spot some seals where they came across the sole other guy who'd been out on that wonderful winter afternoon. The cat pulled out a bottle of his own homebrewed moonshine to toast the occasion of catching the epic break completely empty and pumping on the best swell of the year, each sip helping to ward off the chill from sea and wind.