Surfing non-stop to fight cancer
For 36 straight hours, they surfed. Even when it was too dark to see the waves coming, they surfed. They surfed for their friend – 44-year-old Vickie Hudson-Craig – a solicitor, wife and mum who has a form of cancer treatable only with drugs that cost her family $5500 a month.
Over the weekend, about 50 surfers took to the waves at Sumner beach to help. Starting at 6am on Friday, they took it in turns to surf non-stop until 6pm on Saturday. By then, they had raised more than $100,000.
“The support from the surfing community is overwhelming,” said Hamish Reid, Hudson-Craig’s friend and organiser of the Heart Surf event. “It seemed like everyone in the Sumner community wanted to support Vickie. “Everyone’s donations have made a real, huge difference to their lives. Thank you.”
Hudson-Craig has cancerous tumours embedded in her heart muscles that will continue to grow and threaten her life without two nonfunded drugs – Tafinlar and Mekinist.
She has been taking the drugs, which cost $5500 a month – more than half the family's income – since January 2022 and the tumours have shrunk by almost half. Last year, one was almost too small to see on an MRI without dye, Hudson-Craig wrote on her own cancerfighting site. “Fighting cancer and having to pay for medication is really hard,” she said.
“But having friends arrange events like this, and having the community jump in to support us really helps [husband]
Ryan, [daughter] Ruby and I find some happiness in the darkest moments.”
The event was the brainchild of their friend Reid, doctor for the Crusaders rugby team. “It had got to the point where they were down to below one month of funding for Vickie’s drugs,” he said. “It’s getting quite critical really. The fact that Vickie was having to reduce the dose of her medication because they were running out of money just doesn’t sit right with me.”
Night surfing was challenging, Reid said. “You can’t see when the waves are coming. So it’s quite hard being in the right position for the waves. It’s just like life, as you’ll never know what would happen next.”
Autumn was not ideal surfing conditions, Reid said, but the group got lucky. “We were fortunate to have a calm, not-too-cold night.”
The team has GPS data from the whole event, and would submit it to Guinness World Records. No such collective surf relay data had been taken before, Reid said, so processing it for record-setting purposes would take months.
Coastguard Sumner kept a close eye on the whole event, he said. “They stayed awake to support us the whole night and made their facilities available...They ensured our safety and made [the event] possible.”
A Givealittle page is ongoing, Reid said. “The money doesn’t go anywhere else, apart from straight to those drugs.”