“Geeeerddaaaay” – It’s the unmistakable, but friendly twang that reminds you that you’re in North Queensland. Well that and the plethora of “Jacked” four-wheel drives that makes my poxy Ford Escape look like a dodgem car.
The horseshoed car park of Agnes Water Point allows maybe 20 cars (or 12-and-a-half local “trucks”); each has a board tied to the roof and a collage of every surf-inspired bumper sticker ever made glued forever to the rear windscreen by the hot North Queensland sun.
Like many who relish the punchy beach breaks and groomed sand-bottom points of the Gold and Sunshine Coasts, I’d not really toyed with the idea of a surfable wave north of Frazer Island. Hell, there is a big mother of a Great Barrier Reef up there isn’t there? Doesn’t it block out the swell?
I’d read about some amazing waves out on the Northern Islands that make use of the Great Barrier Reef, but figured the mainland would be relegated to high-pressure system wind-swells for any hint of a surfable wave.
We’d come to Agnes Water to run a weekend contest, but had somehow managed to swing a full week in town before heading further north to Yeppoon.
At a first glance, there’s an overwhelming population of logs out on the point, the water’s Mexico brown and the beach is littered backpacking goddesses – mostly Swedish by my calculation of blonde hair draped across the sand. I spot a local running up and down his log and perching himself on the nose for what seemed like minutes. The wave ran for easily a hundred metres before the bloke pulled off to save himself a week’s paddle back to “suck rock”. “If only it broke like that with another couple of feet on it,” I thought.
The next morning we strolled down to the point, stopping by at one of two cafes in town for a cup of Agnes’ finest brew. When we arrived at the beach, the one-foot longboard waves we’d witnessed the day before, had jumped up a couple more feet courtesy of a low pressure system that had rendered the Gold and Sunshine Coasts , 600-odd clicks further south, unsurfable. At home it was windy, stormy and solid. Meanwhile Agnes Point was three foot, sunny and pumping – as a new busload of Swedish backpackers tore into a game of beach Volleyball, it occurred to me that Agnes Water may well be Australia’s best-kept surfing Nirvana, and I made a mental note to start looking at real estate later on in the day.
We paddled out to the point expecting a thick crowd of locals intent on showing us blowin’s exactly where we sat in the Agnes pecking order. The thick crowd was a total of five surfers, who all smiled, waved and hooted from the inside as I took off on my first wave. This was weird; I’d become so accustom to sneaking into a lineup and playing a game of chess and position strategy to get a wave on the Gold Coast. Here I sat wide of the locals and was still getting called into set waves?
For a week we repeated the exercise, only each day, a touch more swell would pulse down the point and our legs turned to jelly just a little earlier each day. As we left five-foot barrelling rights behind us en route to Yeppoon, we were told by the local lads that we’d just managed to stumble onto a very rare spectacle and promptly assured us that the Point rarely stays like that for so long. I smiled, mumbled “bullshit”, and waved as we drove north to surf onshore wind-swells, noting in my diary that in exactly 12 months time, I would be coming back to Nirvana with a bigger quiver, bigger car and a beach volley ball under my arm.
