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.