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During the COVID-19 pandemic my employer made it mandatory to attend a mental health check-up with other staff members over Zoom.
The well-meaning and enthusiastic facilitator asked the group, “Apart from your family, what is the most important thing in your life?”
To break the silence, which was more awkward than the scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when the teacher taking roll call continues to ask, “Bueller? … Bueller?” to no response, I blurted out “the ocean”.
“Yes, the calming rhythms of the waves on the sand on a sunny day, I can see why that would be important to you. Anyone else want to throw up a suggestion?”
Yeah, nah. The ocean and the beach can be calming and soothing, but can also be deadly. What’s life without a bit of risk?
As a cadet journalist in Wollongong I was sent out to cover a report of a swimmer missing at one of the local beaches. I arrived just as lifesavers were removing his body from the waves.
As they carried the body along the sand I couldn’t take my eyes off his face: it was so blue from cyanosis, which is caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain.
Clovelly beach is one of the safest, if not the safest, beach in Sydney. It’s more like a large ocean pool than a beach, with no waves breaking on the sand entrance to the water. About the only danger is stepping on a sea urchin when you pass the reaches of the sand and hit the rocky bottom.
My wife Nella and I were standing in chest-deep water one sunny summer’s afternoon when she felt a brush against her leg. She looked down to see a young boy totally submerged and drifting towards the entrance to the bay.
She pulled him out of the water and we returned him to shore and to his grandmother on the sand, who was quite oblivious to the boy’s life-threatening situation. I have no doubt that if it wasn’t for that nudge against my wife’s leg he would have drowned.
Don’t like fishing? Tell your story walking.
When people tell me it’s boring I reply: “It’s the most dangerous sport in the world.”
During the past 20 years, 201 people have died while rock fishing – 20 in the Randwick Council area where I fish.
If there’s a hint of the swell being unpredictable I turn around and head for the couch, but even then the threat of the freak wave is very real. I’ve been put on my arse on the rocks by a wave that appeared out of nowhere, and luckily only suffered a few scrapes and bruises.
I have witnessed another fisher being washed off the rocks – fortunately he was wearing a life-jacket and we retrieved him from the briny with only his pride damaged.
My school friend Rob had tamed the ocean. He was, in the classic sense of the phrase, “a waterman” – totally comfortable in the ocean, whether he was surfing, swimming, fishing or snorkelling. At 16 years old he was one of the best big-wave surfers in our country town.
While snorkelling one day, Rob surfaced as a recreational fishing boat was passing above him. He was struck by the propeller and died instantly. The boat was the only craft cruising around in the area at that time. The chances of it passing over as Rob surfaced? A million to one, if you’re being conservative.
So, yeah, life’s a beach. But death can be a beach, too.
Ben Coady is a Sydney writer and the former sports editor of the Herald.
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