Whale Pot Bay Read Online Free PDF Page B

shouting match and got it out of our systems. Instead, we hardly talked to each other; and when we were working together, we communicated using little more than grunts.
    Then Milton Summer arrived. I didn’t see his planefly in, but I soon heard about it—the media was full of it. Summer’s Here said the headline in the paper. Below was a report on his news conference in Wellington. It seemed that the journalists had pestered him over and over, trying to find out why he’d broken up with Regaia Camp. Were they incompatible? Was she playing around? Was he playing around? Had he come here to get over it?
    Milton replied that he and Regaia were both busy people and it just hadn’t worked out for them; no one was to blame. He said that he would be spending the summer at Tarquins by himself; it was a time to relax between movies; he hoped that everyone would respect his privacy. The article finished with a photo of him taking off from Wellington Airport in his small plane.
    Of course, his arrival made me think of how Stephanie would react to the news: was she still a fan, or was she trying to block all things to do with Hauruanui out of her mind? Dad might have known, for I was sure he was getting emails from Vicky; he spent so much time on the computer he had to be doing something. He certainly wasn’t working on our website.
    The news about Milton could have been the catalyst for a discussion about our problem, yet neither of us made the first move. It was as if we had to keep punishing each other, so that we felt better about our own role in the matter.
    However, as they say, time does heal, and by mid-November I was feeling good enough to go back to surfing. The evenings were longer, the winter storms had passed, the sea temperature was rising, and there was nothing to keep me hanging around home.
    ‘I’m going surfing,’ I said to Dad one afternoon as soon as I got off the school bus.
    ‘Whale Pot Bay?’ he asked.
    I nodded.
    ‘You taking the jeep?’
    ‘Yeah,’ I replied, as if it was no big deal.
    He looked at me without speaking.
    ‘What?’ I asked when the silence became deafening.
    ‘You better drive it a whole lot better than you did last time.’
    ‘I will, Dad,’ I said, quietly. Then, after a moment’s pause I added, ‘I don’t plan to do anything that stupid again.’
    He nodded. ‘Good.’ Then he touched me on the shoulder. ‘Enjoy yourself. I’ll hold dinner in the oven.’
    That was all that was said, but it was enough. From then on we started having conversations again. While it didn’t stop Dad moping around the place all day, things between us felt more normal again.
    Most surfers probably wouldn’t think much of Whale Pot Bay: either the waves have multiple breaks or they’re too small for any excitement. Yet they’re perfect for me. That’s because I’m just a learner and I fall off a lot. Lots of the other surf beaches around the Wairarapa have rocks—I prefer to crash onto sand.
    The day I returned to surfing, I parked the jeep in the same place as on that horrible day, four weeks before. Things weren’t greatly different, except the Union Jack was now flying from the top of Tarquins.
    I hauled the surfboard out of the jeep and headed down the track. It’s a tricky track because it’s carved out of mudstone, and if you’re not careful you end up sliding down on your backside.
    Arriving at the bottom without mishap, I made my way around the U of the beach. That took me past the whale graveyard to where Milton’s elevator meets the sand. The rock there is hard sandstone, which is why it hasn’t been worn away by the sea.
    Beyond the elevator, the cliff meets the sea in a pile of rocks. That’s the best place to get into the water, as you don’t have to do so much paddling to get out to the waves.
    The surf at Whale Pot Bay is a left-hand point break, with the point being the rocks at the bottom of the cliff below Milton’s house. Most of the swells actually meet the