Welcome to Surf Camp

Hey guys

well I'm in Sydney for a short visit so I stopped at a cafe for a few mins with Helen and Sarah (Helen works at Surf Camp and Sarah is a Punter who is coming back to work with us next season)

Anyway, I'll give you a brief rundown of my trip to Surf camp. The night before I left, a bunch of us that were left over from my tour went and met up with the crew again at Cheeky Monkey's. Ali, Lucy, Julia and I got more than a little tipsy before going, just to make it that much more fun. Anyway we headed up to the restaraunt where they go every week and found out that Zack, RobBob and Dylon had come up on the tour that was cool, except poor RobBob buggered his knee while playing soccer. It was swollen so bad it was gross. But his buddies grabbed a shopping cart to wheel him around town in all night. It was funny. It was slave auction night at Cheekies, and the girls and I won ourselves the only male on the auction block he came with a $50 bar tab, and a half hour of indentured service. We didnt really make use of him though, except when the girls just kept ordering drinks and stacked up a massive $97 tab! then pissed off without paying! Lucky for us that our "slave" worked for the bar and smoothed things over. The night wore on, with much dancing, and many a sad goodbye for me. Robbie the sweet Scottsman was heading back to New Zealand soon, the girls were going up the coast to Surfers, and I dont really know what Rory was doing, but I do know I'll likely never see any of them again. We partied hard, and had alot of fun, and grabbed the bus back to the hostel, where a very very drunk Manchester was waiting for me. Poor Sarah, she was going to be on her own for a day, and wasnt handling it very well. She drank way too much, but lucky for her the girls in our room were really sweet and took care of her till I got there. I felt bad because she was still passed out when I went to catch the bus the next day, I'll probably meet up with her and Charlene again in Cairns though, so thats no too bad.

I nearly had a panic attack waiting for the bus on Saturday morning because Steve-O was late! and I had no idea where to meet the bus at. All was well though, I managed to get on the bus ok, and grab some breakfast. Turns out there were only 4 people on the tour! so we had this huge 40 man coach with all of 9 people on it. It was here that I met a new Sarah, and three of the craziest english people I've ever encountered, the twins Oli and Dan, and their friend Shawn. They were a little hard to take at first, but when you get used to them, they arent too bad. Since we had so few people we decided to skip the night at Wei Wei, and go straight to surf camp. Poor RobBob managed to hobble onto the bus with his messed up knee, and get settled in, and we were off. we drove to um .. Red Cliffs I think, to surf, only to find out there were almost literally no waves, so most of the first day was spent getting dumped by white wash and sunbathing on the beach. I think it was Dylon who did most of the teaching the first day, which was cool, since hes so funny and helpful. RobBob and Zack were sleeping off their hangovers in the shade of the big blue bus. I helped Steve-O set up lunch, and we decided to drive straight to Surf Camp. It was a very very long bus ride, and everyone was really tired by the time we got in. In their usual style, the guys went off and did their own thing, leaving the rest of us to flounder around and figure out what to do on our own. Turns out that the girls (helpers) were staying at the HIllHouse, which is where I stayed on my tour, so it was a nice little walk with a large back pack to get to my lodging. I got settled in though, and headed back to the Cabana to help out. It was a funish night, despite being dead tired. I met Helen again (she was a helper on my tour) Simon, TK, Vicki (my boss), Sam, Michelle (from Edmonton!) Shanon, and Sophia. Turns out Saturday was a bit of a party because Kev, the owner of the camp, was out with some friends and a bunch of the other instructors were also up for the weekend. The rest of the night was spent on drink, so I wont bother to go into it. Nothing that great happened until it was bed time anyway. Helen was so drunk she was all but passed out. Kev ended up having to carry her to the car and drive her back to the Hill House, where she got stuck in the bathroom for a bit before crawling into her bed. Simon walked me up to the house, and climbed into Helen's bed, I dont remember why. Sam had other plans though, and threatened him with Castration if he didnt get off Helen's bed since she was going to need it very shortly .... so instead he slid off her bed and under mine! In the mean time, Helen had come back and was laughing so hard at Simon being under my bed that she just crawled off hers and undermine with Simon ... I promptly switched to the top bunk for the night. IT was hilarious! Sunday night, all our weekend crew had gone, and it was just the 4 punters from the southbound crew and all the helpers hanging out at the Cabana. Now that was a weird night! The crazy English boys bought so much alcohol it was gross. They had Ducat doing flaming Sambucca shots, and beer bongs all night. At one point, Oli disappeared with Sarah, only to come back 20mins later in one of her dresses! It was hilarious! at some point in the night he lost his boxers as well, which made things infinatly more disturbing. I think at some point they started a mosh pit in the cabana, and Simon passed out on the freezer. I went to bed shortly there after. The best part was the next morning, Oli was still wearing the dress. We stopped at a shop quickly the next day, and in his hung over state, he spent $50 on a hot pink rashie. See the photos under Surf camp week 1 on my face book

The next day we got up early as usual to clean and set up for the day before heading off to the beach with Ducat and Moonie and the punters. Ducat took the punters in the coaster (small bus) and Moonie took the helpers in the death-trap Troopy. (the back door doesnt close right, there is a hole in the exhaust pipe that spews Carbon monoxide into the windows, and there are only benches to sit on. I'll get a picture on Friday when I go back. Anyway, we headed down to the beach and Moonie was nice enough to help me catch a couple waves I didn't even wipe out that much. It was cool. Most of the days were actually spent like this for the first week. Get up, make lunches, and clean, head to the beach. Surf / Swim / sun bathe, get lunch ready, and continue with what ever we were doing before. Its kind of all blended together now, but I do remember it was alot of fun. Helen came out to the beach and we hung out with Sarah (she was the only girl on her tour, so she wanted company) and eventually I think we managed to convince her to come back and work with us in December for Christmas.

Yesterday, all the crews had left, so it was only the 4 people from the 5 day southbound tour left, so Helen, Sophia, Shanon, and myself headed to the beach with the punters and Ducat. We hit the Light House beach, which is known a little for its rips, and mostly for its cool swells. The waves weren't very large, but they were big enough. It was really really shallow though, so surfing meant being battered a lot. Helen and I decided to go swimming instead. I should mention here that the boys had already been into the vodka, and Helen into the goon and it wasn't even noon yet! In short, the guys didn't do much surfing, so Ducat had a nice easy day. Lucky guy.

Right, so I was mentioning about rips. I had my first experience of being caught in one yesterday ... it was not cool at all, but also a little funny. Helen and I were messing around body surfing and stuff when we got caught in it. but we didn't notice until we looked at the land and realized how far out we were. Helen wasn't worried but I was a little freaked, so we started swimming, but couldn't make any headway at all! Let me tell you what a freaky experience that is, when you are paddling as hard as you can and you cant get any closer to shore. If you do get caught in a rip, you should swim horizontally across the shore until you get out, so we started doing that. We found out later that we would have swam into the deepest and fastest part of the rip if we continued on our way. Lucky for us Ducat and Shanon saw us from the shore and yelled at us to swim the other way. That could have sucked big time. After that little experience we were both exhausted by the time we had swam far enough out of the rip to get back to shore, we just collapsed on the beach for a while. And then the dolphins came! We saw them swimming in the shallows, and one bumped a surfer, it was funny. Especially since I was standing on the shore watching with Shanon and she freaked out thinking they were sharks. We saw them again a little while later, surfing in the waves. It was so cool. Ducat was out in the water with Oli, they were so close they could have touched them if they had wanted to. I was so jealous! Shanon and I set up lunch, and we all chilled on the beach (and I do mean chilled, it was cold!) and thats when Helen and I decided we wanted to follow this particularly hilarious group of punters to Sydney We got back to camp and made a mad dash to the HIll House to gather enough stuff for the weekend before running full tilt back to the Cabana to clean up so Vicki would let us go.

Well, now we are in Sydney, we spent the night at Maze hostel. Helen and I went and got trashed with Ducat and the boys, but Sarah stayed in because she's doing a bridge climb today. We headed to the good old Sidebar again and hung out there for a while. Helen kept doing jaggerbombs to keep herself awake so by the time the guys got there, she was really trashed. Eventually Ducat decided we should hit a different club, so he took us on a nice little jaunt to some place aptly named Scary Canary. Helen and I grabbed drinks and headed to the dance floor, where some creep tried to grind with us while we were dancing. We got fed up with it so we turned around to find the guys ... only to discover ... we'd been ditched! We were so pissed it was actually funny. We were swearing at the top of our lungs while we tried to figure out where the hell we were at 2am. Eventually we got a taxi back to the hostel, but the driver had no idea where our hostel was, so we told him to take us to Central station. Turns out our hostel was less than a block away >.< we got dropped off right infront of it by accident. After finding ourselves again, we promptly went and got lost all over again looking for pizza. We took it back to our hostel and chowed down while making embarassing texts to people. all in all, it was a fun night. We dicovered in the morning that it was an accident that we got left at the bar. The guys were too drunk and didnt realize that we werent there. Now we are off to Bondi to go shopping. I'll be in contact again soon I head north in about 2 weeks. Its going too fast!!!!

Ciao!
Amy