As part of our learning journey, we had to consider what we needed. Rick arrived with a board 'Ando' and he also had a steamer. Mark and I were completely unprepared for the experience but a couple of trips to Ulladulla had us outfitted with spring suits. Even though we couldn't surf, we at least looked the part. Ironically the brand of suit chosen was 'Adrenalin'.

The other challenge was learning the lingo, the correct language or jargon to use as surfers.

After one of our first dalliances with the surf, walking exhaustedly back to the camping ground along the bush track, a couple of young local surfers questioned of Mark "What's it like?" He was a little aghast at the question, not quite knowing how to respond.

Should he say "Really good man!" or was there some other saying that would communicate to this fellow surfer how the conditions were that afternoon.

Arriving back, we realised we had arrived, as these obviously experienced surfers asked us that question, even though we didn't have a clue how to answer, without ruining the illusion.

We have since discovered that 'Gnarly' and 'Etch' are two surfing terms to describe fabulous surf and of course we quickly added those terms to our vocabulary as over the next two days we continued the quest to stand on the board.

Learning to Surf

It is quite fun that when one takes on the position of being a learner, you receive all sorts of advice. Some of our peers who actually ride a board were very generous with their time and gave us a lot of assistance.

We quickly discovered a few things about surfing though.

1. It is very tiring and takes a lot of energy, especially when the surf is reasonably big.

2. Getting on the right spot on the board is very important. Each of us managed to be too far forward and nosedives and then wipeouts were the order of the day and quite spectacular.

3. Board riding is a lot more fun with a few blokes than being alone. Having encouragement and support from others helps.

4. It is very different to body-boarding or bodysurfing. In those exploits riding down the wave is the first step. In surfing, once on a wave, one has to jump up rather than focus on riding down the unbroken wave.

5. Riding a board is a skill that is very slow to learn. It took a couple of days before any of us started to look like actually standing.

These lessons were good to learn - though our progress was slow at first due to having just the one board and three aspiring riders.

More was ahead of us.