Tuesday Spotcheck: Shipsterns
Tasmanian’s stairway slab to heaven (and hell)
Editor’s note: I gotta lot of time for Shipsterns. I hadn’t long started working at Tracks in 2001 when Matt Griggs organised the trip that broke the joint with Sean Davey. Seeing the slides come into the office, wacking em on the projector and spending an hour gawping at the sheer madness of the wave with Griggs, Seano and Ronny remains a career highlight.
I went there a few years later with Jamie O’Brien and Andy King, plus Clint Kimmins, Ry Craike and Dan Ross (what a mad fucking collection) but it didn’t break. The surfers were gutted. I wasn’t. Anyway, I’ve tracked its progress, spoken to all key players over the years and written way too much about a wave I haven’t surfed. Still, it makes for a passable spotcheck.
Pioneers and Skins Style
Tasmanian surf photographer Sean Davey first heard on the Tassie grapevine of the potential of a wave at the southern reaches of the Tasman Peninsula in the mid-90s. He knew that in 1994, surf pioneer Mick Lawrence, along with his mate Dave Guinney, had led a reconnaissance to the remote bluff.
In 1996 Davey was due to travel there for a speciality surf event organised by the former ASP President Graham Cassidy. Cassidy had pulled together a Skins Style competition with a field made up of CT event winners who would be boated to the wave. A wildly ambitious project, even for these times, the event was eventually canned when the event’s sponsors pulled the pin.
Andy Campbell Goes All Jeff Clarke
By the late ‘90s local charger Andy Campbell had been known to walk alone and surf there, a mission that in hindsight was not that dissimilar to Jeff Clarke’s solo forays out at Mavericks. The only difference was that Clarke didn’t have a three-hour walk through dense Australian bush and that Mavericks didn’t have multiple steps down the face, or break only metres in front of 30-foot-high boulders.
The first video footage came out when Campbell had taken his mates Dave “Rasta” Rastovich and Brendan “Margo’ Margieson to surf it, both of whom claimed that it was barely a wave after suffering near-death experiences with the aforementioned boulders. That footage appeared in Justin Gane’s 1996 film Pulse in a wave they called “FluffyTonkas”.
Shipsterns Shown To The World
However, Shipsterns was finally revealed to the surfing world in 2001, when Australian magazine Tracks sent Kieren Perrow, Mark Mathews and Drew Courtney, plus photographer Sean Davey and scored 15-foot waves. It was one of the great surfing revelations of all time , and perhaps the last of the pre-internet age. It was a tube so big, so remote, so demented and fucked up that very few waves can close in terms of sheer cartoon enormity.
Mathews, just 18 and a complete unknown was by his admission quite scared of big waves. That trip was the start of his celebrated big-wave career and an experience he would never forget.
He was on his first-ever magazine trip (his Maroubra next-door neighbour Koby Abberton had convinced Tracks to send him, but Kobes bailed to chase a cyclone on the Goldy), and was left to share a room with Perrow.
“KP turned up, who I’d never met,” said Mathews. “We were sharing a room and everything he owned was neatly folded and in a row. I was like, ‘Fuck, this guy is the biggest dork I’ve ever met.’ I had absolutely no idea that this dork was the biggest charger I’ve seen in surfing.”
It was KP who, inevitably, scored the meanest and biggest wave of the day. On a 6’10” pintail the sheer thickness of the wave still stands the test of time 20 years later. It would be the poster shot that announced Shipsterns as surfing’s premier slab.
“That remains the biggest, thickest barrel I’ve ever ridden,” said Perrow who as a Pipe Master and Teahupoo standout has had a few since. “The sheer scale of it is burnt into my memory.”
Locals Take Over
As soon as the images were beamed around the world, it started attracting the best big-wave chargers in the world. Ross Clarke Jones and Tony Ray had multiple successful sessions down there, while the Maroubra contingent of Mathews, Koby Atherton and Richie Vaculic were on it every time it broke.
It was the local chargers however that soon came to rule the wave and today the likes of Marin Paradisis, Tyler and James Hollmer-Cross and Danny Griffiths (to name a few) have progressively pushed the boundaries of what is possible at Shipsterns and therefore what is possible in big-wave surfing. They’ve ruled with benevolence, opening their arms to all visitors as long as they surfed hard, partied hard and engaged wholeheartedly with the local Tassie surf culture.
“I feel we were so, fucking, lucky. Our group of friends came on the scene at a time when Shippies had just sort of taken off and slab surfing was coming of age,” said Marti Paradisis. “We were part of our group of friends who were surfers, filmmakers and photographers. We had a crew that owned boats and were ready for anything the ocean threw at us. We all fed off the energy of each other because we all had the same goals. To tackle anything Shippies could throw at us.”
The Mechanics
And it can throw a lot. Starting to break at eight feet, and holding a legitimate 20 (Hawaiian) feet, the raw Southern Ocean swells march out of 300-feet-deep water before oozing over a shallow ledge. That would usually be enough, however, a series of steps add incremental levels of fear and loathing. There’s no other access than by freefalling into a backdoor section that can be as big as Waimea and thick as Pipe.
If successful, you are blasted into a deep channel five seconds later. If unsuccessful, you are driven deep into the water in front of the ledge, or thrown against the huge rocks that line the break. Add sharks, cold water, freezing winds, and a two-hour boat ride to any form of civilisation and you start to see why this has to be the most challenging and intense wave on the planet.
And The Rest
The perfect day: Perfect isn’t probably the word most associated with Shippies, but for the diehards, a southwest 10-foot swell at 15 seconds, and light offshore northerlies will provide the perfect clean step-addled 15-foot barrels.
Getting there: Fly into Hobart and drive two hours south towards Port Arthur.
Boards: Sturdy barrel-riding semi-guns with four fins and tow boards as heavy and as fast as the Millennium Falcon.
Essentials: A boat helps, saving a brutal, though beautiful, two-hour hike each way. Oh and a thick wetsuit and a massive set of testicles or ovaries.
Accommodation: Marion Bay offers varied accommodations and also fun beachies if Shippies isn't breaking.
Other waves: Tasmania has a host of waves of incredible quality, but poor consistency. You’ll need a lot of time, a lot of driving, some local help and a bit of luck. Start with Eaglehawk Neck, and go from there.
Be honest. If it had been on, would you have gone? 😳