THEMS THE BREAKS
SOME of the biggest names in surfing aren’t attached to the people riding the waves.
Rather, it’s the names of the waves themselves that tend to be the most legendary — particularly along the Surf Coast.
The spectacular vernacular of the surfing world can be most evident in the names given to particular breaks, ranging from the weird to the wonderful, and from the clean to the obscene.
Australian National Surfing Museum curator Craig Baird said surf breaks were once named to help share top spots, but had slowly become closely-guarded secrets.
“It’s just a geographic A wave that only breaks sometimes. The tide’s got to be low, the swell’s got to be a certain size, and only then will Sometimes break. Depending on who you believe, it may be named after the popping noise of seaweed at the surf spot, or it could be a 60s surfer’s pet name for sex. The rocks sitting directly next to this break look like haystacks, so it appears to have been an easy one to name. reference at the most basic,” Mr Baird says.
“But I think the thing with surfers is they’ve always kind of done that, named a break ironically or humorously and shared that information with Shorthand for Fisherman’s Beach, so named for its place as the base for early fishing fleets in the area. No, it wasn’t named for any actual bell. One of the world’s most famous beaches was named after the Bell family that first tended the land there in the mid-1800s. There doesn’t seem to be a consensus on the story behind this name, with some claiming it is to do with the shape of the round rocky inlets. So named for an ex-girlfriend of local surfer Ben.
Th There’s ’S Sometimes ti near Point Impossible, so named because it only breaks sometimes.
Then there’s Nessies in Torquay, just at the end of Loch Ard Drive, named with a quick leapfrog of rhyming slang from Loch Ard, to the Loch Ness monster and arriving at Nessies.
Craig even has his own story of naming a break.
“The third outside reef at Point Impossible, some friends and I were surfing there in the late 70s, and we didn’t know that it had a name ... but we started t td calling lli it R Rocket k t R Reef,” f” he said.
“And it was funny here, a couple of years ago, the volunteer I have here at the museum surfs Point Impossible quite a bit and he was talking about his son surfing Rocket Reef.
“So it may be that somebody’s named it independently, or it may be that the group of us that were surfing there have talked to other people, who’ve talked to other people, who’ve talked to other people, and four decades down the track it’s stuck.”