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Posted on Tuesday March 16th 2010 at 4:24 p.m.
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I slept in and missed the dawnie, not really knowing why until I checked the reports, airlines and every scenario I had in front of me to surf the sickest pits of my life!
This was the swell I had been waiting for, the one that was bigger than the last one! Only thing was I only had an hour to get to the airport to surf a swell that was still 4-5 days away??? If I didn't catch this plane I would miss the swell because this was the last flight from anywhere in the Southern Hemisphere until Friday, this would have dotted me down in Tahiti the day after the swell peaked!
The 1st call I make is to ensure that there is a hire ski available. On confirmation I hit action mode and have to sort my whole life out in half an hour! Gnarly!!!
I make the call and try to share some of this craziness with my bro Miles; but he can't pull it, the next thing you know Sammy Hawke walks in, "can you drop me to the airport bro" suddenly turned into "you wana come bro" and we are sitting in the car racing to the airport at 12:30pm to catch a 12noon flight to get to Auckland to catch the last flight to Tahiti at 3:50pm!
We stop at a random café to get the Flight Centres phone number on the way, make the call and get told that they can get us on a plane but they wouldn't recommend it as we couldn't book our gear right through and may miss the next plane and lose our tickets! We quickly reply with "just book it!"
Sam and I hit plan B mode, how we could surf another spot up north I had originally planed to surf on this swell. As we run to the check in, I explain our circumstances and we are told that Air New Zealand would book our luggage right through and that it would only cost us $1500 return, super stoked we run up to the counter, within a couple of minutes we are told the price was one way and that it was $2600 each, damn! There goes the entire budget! "Book it" was the instant reply as though the swell had possessed our speech!!! As I pay for my ticket Sam starts trying to shuffle the family fortune, suddenly 2 people cancel their flights and we can get their cheap fares so it ends out costing us half the price! Bullshit!!!!!!! We get to Auckland and manage to not only catch our flight but also get a couple of bottles of Duty Free and meet Sam's sponsors for some urgently needed gear that Sam had no time to get from his new student flat in Otago.
We arrive in Tahiti at 11pm on Saturday the 13th of March after sitting at seat 11D and C. Sam's lucky number is 11 and mine 13. We fork out for a rental car and drive up the coast to sleep in our board bags on the beach under the most star filled sky we had ever seen!
We awoke to a beautiful Tahitian morning and decided against hitchhiking to Teahupoo, holding on to the rental for one more day. As we drove to the end of the road it started pissing down with rain like it does on the west coast of the South Island! We pull up to Teahupoo chuffed with our decision not to hitch and see spitting pits firing off at the sickest left in the world!
Befriending some locals we go on the hunt for a place to stay, we hit the jack pot and base ourselves with an upstairs, in bed, view of the beast! All thanks to an awesome family that not only takes us under their wing but also feeds us and hooks us up in more ways than you could ever imagine! It's a Tahiti fever that fills ya heart with pride and a refreshing faith in the human race.
After another jam packed 2 days of madness we are now lying in our beds on the eve of what still looks to be a Millennium sized swell of epicness with a sick 4 stroke jet ski parked down stairs full with Gas and extra gas cans filled for a full day of Surfing! To top this off I managed to talk my good friend Danilo Couto to fly over from Hawaii and team up with us on a St Paddy's day that will go down in history! Luck of the Irish???
Only time will tell!