the manoeuvre that has no name.
This is a delicate subject, as is The Manoeuvre a delicate enterprise – and precise, and always successful. Because The Manoeuvre hasn’t been done unless it has successfully been done. Anything less than a win simply distributes an immediate and unsavoury reputation about your person.
Imagine North Avalon, the Peak – that type of neighbourhood – and you’ve been told TO GO IN with such violence that you accede to the demands, right away. They are all shouting it at you.
This is because you tried the manoeuvre on a mate and you buried him. Publicly. He may not have minded so much but you have offended everybody else out there to such a degree some bastard might try and crop your ear when you get to the carpark. You have become a very odourous person indeed and there’s all your mates packing up their cars and getting away from the beach before you make it to the shower.
A carpark which is massively choked today because this is the swell everyone knew was coming. They can see you coming too and like their brothers out in the break, they know what you did. You’ll need another car as well. The one you came in has been already taken away and will be burnt later. Everything about you is unclean, now.
What you have done was hang off the lip, already on a half-glide onto the wave, while you watched your good mate on the inside take a severe drop – make the bottom and squirt it around and up and into the heaviest barrel of the morning. But you still hung off there a little more, still with some momentum, because when that lip catches him .. which it will .. right about NOW … you can swoop. Because he’s gone, and it’s yours,
surely.
– but he’s still there as he takes his hit – then he takes your hit – a good solid connection punctuated with some crisp rail on rail combinations.
This means that you are a drop-in artist. You have bad blood, no caste, no skill and no hope of a spot in any northern beaches line-up for many years. With The Manoeuvre it’s either the best of times or the worst of times. Failure is permanent ignominy.
~
Essential Disciplines for The (legitimate)Manoeuvre.
1 Critical Positioning.
2 Control of Momentum.
3 Concentration on Inside Man.
4 Concentration on Inside Wave.
5 Concentration on the Ever-Steepening face.
6 Picking the Moment.
7 Taking the Wave.
8 Making It.
– and you have to make all the 8.
header pic by AP – three blokes hoping two don’t make it, Waimea style.
petebowes.com 