the rhodesian swimmer
- Mona Vale Pool, head right
Years ago somebody put names to those two boulders that define the way out off the Mona Vale pool when the conditions are too big to contemplate paddling out from the beach.
Fraught passage indeed is that route, especially when the whitewater sweeps its way across the slippery fifty-foot runway that is the test of most of us youngsters as we sprint over that slick and mossy rock with only an eye for the sets we are missing and all the other timing gone to buggery in our haste to be out there.
Joe was one of the old men who always seemed to be in the pool doing slow laps those mornings, no matter what hour our early demanded of us.
Occasionally we two would meet and talk for an instant, him grabbing a breath at the top end of the pool and me timing the final squirt over the last fifty foot of rock platform in between the bigger sets.
The old boy had a slop sided grin and a big spark in his eye and my bet was he would have been a boardrider if he had ever had the chance as a lad.
Joe is real slow at getting in and out of the car these days and the other day I bumped into him up at the Chemist in Mona Vale and after all the usual bullshit about howyezgoin mate etc etc he lined up for a serve of some painkiller or other to relieve the constant ache in his back.
Chronic condition reckoned Joe.
Even slower now is this old swimmer, leaning heavy on a walking stick and thinned away to bone and shaky with age but keen to know if I’m still surfing.
Still out there riding waves on the horizon?
He asks this with the old grin, he’s about eighty-five and even if I haven’t been out for a while I don’t tell him, he might be disappointed.
Then he put his big old Rhodesian farmer’s hand on my shoulder and squeezed it like an old mate would and just before we went our separate paths I asked him whether all that winter swimming was what did his back in.
‘ Not so ‘ said Joe, ‘ it was a couple of beatings I took in a German POW camp in Austria in WW2, they seemed to like hitting me with their rifle-butts from behind and I reckon now I’m paying the price for being a young smartarse.‘
‘ But you keep surfing you hear ‘
colour pic of the pool by brent bat
petebowes.com 
Amazing !!!
that’s Joe done, now we get to meet Edith – everyone out there has a tale to tell don’t they
Years ago some one ( the clubbies ) put an old upright piano on the right boulder.
Don’t know how long it lasted or if it still lives beneath on the sand.
That might have been a little hard to get across the gap, and of course (being a snapper) you have a pic, right Bruce?