Margaret River sits at the edge of the world, or at least it feels that way when you’ve been driving for six hours from Perth with nothing but karri trees and the occasional wedge-tailed eagle for company.
The waves here are serious. Proper, powerful, unforgiving left-handers that have been producing world-class surfers for fifty years. It’s not a place you come to mess around.
I came to mess around.
The drive
We left Sydney at 4am, which felt heroic at the time and catastrophic by about Canberra. The inland route via the Nullarbor is four thousand kilometres of flat nothing — beautiful, genuinely meditative, but not what you’d call stimulating driving. We did it in three days, taking turns, subsisting on servo pies and a borderline irresponsible amount of instant coffee.
Western Australia hits differently when you arrive exhausted. Everything is bigger, quieter, and somehow more itself than the east coast.
The surf
I’ll be honest: the main break at Margarets was above my pay grade. The sets came through at six foot, fast and hollow, and I watched from the beach for the first morning with genuine awe and no small amount of relief that I hadn’t paddled out.
The region has a dozen breaks, though, and we found one — I won’t say where, that’s not how this works — that was four foot, glassy, and almost empty. Three days in a row. I got my wave count, the sun turned everything golden around four in the afternoon, and I remembered why I do this.