A team of Australian bodyboarding ratbags has managed to capture staggering footage of an extraordinary oceanic phenomenon: a place where four 12-ft (3.7-m) waves regularly converge into an oval dip, with explosive results.
You wouldn't want to be a fish in this particular neighborhood. There you'd be, minding your own business, swishing some tail, opening and closing your mouth, enjoying the simple things in life – and then an instant later you'd find yourself locking eyes with a seagull, having been launched more than 130 ft (40 m) into the air by a naturally-occurring water cannon of spectacular proportions.
A sequence of wild videos were captured by Chris White and "drone guy" Ben Allen, during filming for Tension 11, an independent boogie-boarding film released on YouTube. White had seen the wave before, and captured it in still images for his coffee table book, Dark Light.
"The very first time I laid eyes on it," says White, "I wasn't filming, I just had my still camera. We were exploring the waves and we just randomly ended up there... Got this photo of... At this point I thought it was just two waves hitting each other. Everywhere I posted it, people thought it was fake, because it looks like it's mirrored. And then it explodes... I've always been curious, does that happen every time the swell's big?"
It seems the answer is yes. White returned to the spot more or less by memory, after deciding to revive his iconic Tension films, first released in 2000 on VHS tapes. Stab Mag's Ethan Davis describes the original films beautifully, as "scrappy, prank heavy documents of slab hunting and bad ideas that stitched hardcore bodyboarding together with a Jackass level disregard for consequences. They became cult classics on the fringe and occasional public menaces when the jokes escaped containment and landed on A Current Affair or Today Tonight, framed as evidence of Australia’s moral decline. Which, naturally, only made them funnier."
Little seems to have changed in that regard, bless their cotton socks; the Tension 11 trailer (NSFW) is brim-full of butts, farts, nude karate and crudely-sketched genitalia as well as death-defying wave riding. An accurate representation, in my experience, of the Australian adolescent experience at the time.
But the team also grabbed a stack of footage of this unique ocean phenomenon happening over and over again. And it's not two waves converging – in many cases it's actually two giant 12-footers colliding with another two smaller waves backwashing out from the shore, plunging simultaneously into a gap left by hydrodynamic forces over a reef close to the surface, causing a huge volume of water to rocket skyward as if a depth charge has gone off underneath the waves.
The team was lucky not to have their drone blasted out of the air as they filmed it. At this point, it's only fair to hand you over to White and Allen. Excuse the language; I don't think many of us would do much better under the circumstances. And if you're not a fan of some very Australian whoopin' and hollerin', best pop the sound off, because they do get a tad excited.
The Tension team won't be revealing where they found it: "I wanna go back so bad," says White, "but at the same time, I don't wanna kill someone. It's scary to think what could happen." Both agree that some of their board-riding co-conspirators would likely find it hard to resist the idea of sitting over the dip, hoping to get launched skyward. But the plan is to return to the spot again for a future Tension 12 project.
Still, it's staggering footage of an extraordinary natural event, and I can't help but get swept up in the sheer joy of these two marvelous drongos as they recount the story. Godspeed, you mad bastards.
Source: Tension Movies
