Almost a year ago, my dad, Wayne, turned fifty. After having spent half a century on this planet, an inaugural surf trip with my brother and me seemed well overdue. When dad was my age, he devoted much of his time discovering what lies below the sea, pursuing new and adventurous places to dive with a close group of friends. These trips took him up and down the east coast of Australia, diving everywhere from Julian Rocks in Byron to the Great Barrier Reef and everything in between. Lately, I’ve found myself pursuing these same places with a different purpose in mind: to surf and photograph them. Hence why we packed up and headed on the short journey from the Sunshine Coast to Lennox Heads and surrounds in search of waves together.
While dad hadn’t visited northern New South Wales since the early ’90s, my younger brother just made his first trip down a couple of weeks earlier. Back in the ’90s, the Pacific Highway was a very different route then and the trip could take from four to six hours just to get to Byron from Brisbane.
While we didn’t score waves of epic proportions, we didn’t really need to. We spent the three days purely searching for them, finding the odd glimmer of perfection. One of these glimmers was found in a bay just south of Byron without another person or building in sight. It featured a fun, hollow, running wave. We surfed there until dusk and then decided to paddle back instead walking in the cold air, chasing the sun as it set.
Surf trips with family are different from your usual surf run. There’s less of a need to find waves–being away and exploring is more than a joyous change from the normal. I’m pretty sure dad was already hammering out the details for another trip as he unpacked the car.
