Hells Bells and that's for sure!

< HERE BELLS BEACH: morning glory.

RIP CURL PRO BREAKDOWN

Where: VICTORIA Australia

When: March-April autumn has begun!!!

Where to eat: Swells cafe, Jan Juc.

Where to go out: The local Torquay pub, though it's so  crowded you may have to jump the fence.

For me Bells is one of those places I either love or hate depending on my mood. Generally I won’t lie I have a passionate hate for Torquay. I drive down the Victorian roads with an overly anxious feeling in my chest, generally to do with the fact I know there are 114 speed camera’s out to catch me (myself and the people I was traveling with had 4 speeding tickets in one week on double demerit point weekend last time I was here), not that I am a big speeder, I like to think I am a cruiser but in Victoria if your doing 106km/hr in a 100 zone then you get booked, no word of a lie, which makes it the police revenue raising capital of Australia so watch out on the roads!

So yeah I drove into the town with a close eye on the speedometer and checked the beach. It was flat, we had a one week waiting period and no swell was on the way. Not good news. Then the freezing southerly wind picked up fresh off the bottom of the world Antarctica and I thought yep welcome back to the Rip Curl Pro. 2010 was shaping into an excellent year for Bells.

Some people may call this negativity, well the positive people in the world but from a pessimists perspective this is what I call reality.

Ok, ok I will say I then went and met my old friend whose family I was staying with at Bells. There house is warm, the family is awesome, there were easter eggs, I had a comfortable bed and what the natural environment lacked this year with waves and warmth, the people made up for, as always. You will find the Victorian’s some of the more friendly people in Australia. Melbourne being the closest major city from Torquay also being one of, if not the best city in Aus, with amazing culture, food, people, street scenes and shopping.

The first day of the waiting period was Tuesday the 30^th of March. The girls were called on in what I can only describe as horrid conditions. Check it out here http://live.ripcurl.com/index.php?aid=817 , two foot and onshore, I was in the first heat, which was stacked with the ‘grommies’ Sally Fitzgibbons and Carissa Moore.

Sally had a couple of low scorers, Carissa had one wave and I needed a two to progress with seven minutes to go and the ocean went flat. Off to dredded round two for me!

I will not waffle about the contest too much, the conditions pretty much stayed the same, dribbly and hard to contest, when the waves are like this it does become a bit of a job, especially for someone like myself who has been competing since the age of fifteen, but you can’t control mother nature and I progressed into the quarter finals for another match up against Steph Gilmore.

I was feeling good and felt loose on my first wave. It was then about fifteen minutes into the heat I made a fatal error. I was sitting 2 metres from Steph and a wide wave swung in. I will ask .. have you ever been paddling for a wave and you are just too deep and you know it. Your instinct tell you your too late, don’t go and you listen. Then you instantly regret it as the wave reels perfectly down the line? Well imagine doing that and watching the World Champ in your sport love the fact you didn’t go and smash every section on this particular wave perfectly, flaring with brilliance. I wanted to go underwater and bash myself up, I had visions of punching myself repetitively but I stayed above water hating myself and watching a natural phenomenon of a water spout (which is a water tornado) touching the water about 200metres from me. This was the end of my Bells contest and onto NewZealand now on the plane with two major lessons learnt from Steph in the first two events. DON”T GIVE WAVES TO WORLD CHAMPS!! Even if you do go over the falls and get flushed and look like a kook!

On the plane now on the way to the next stop New Zealand.

Bec