Twenty five years to pop-up because of Point Break

👋 This is Shari’s story

Shari was 28, out very late on the Greek island of Ios, and had just finished watching Point Break at the Red Lion Restaurant. She climbed onto the table.

"That's it," she announced. "I'm gonna learn how to surf."

All the guys laughed.

That was 1993, give or take. Shari is Canadian by birth, has lived in Australia since 1995, and to hear her tell it, every consequential decision of the thirty-odd years in between traces back to that table in Ios.

She left her family behind. She went bankrupt twice. When Shari met the man who would become her husband, she laid down a single condition for a second date: he had to be willing to live within 100 meters of Dee Why Beach.

"I came here because I wanted to surf," she says, "and I didn't leave because I want to surf."

The road from Ios to Dee Why ran through two ski seasons in St. Anton, Austria, and a London doss house in Hammersmith. 31 people in a two-bedroom walk-up. Shari started on the living room floor, graduated to a bedroom floor, and finally graduated to an under-the-stairs closet. "I was the only person out of 31 people who had a door I could close."

She fell for the Australians in that house. Things had gone sideways. Thefts, "bad things." And the Aussies kept saying, you got to do the right thing, you got to do the right thing. "I thought, well, any country that has that as a saying has to be a good place."

But first there was Maui.

A friend she'd skied with in St. Anton called her in Canada: Shari, we're all down in Maui. I've got a room, a job, and a car for you to buy. Get down here. Shari quit everything and inside ten days, flew to Pa'ia, and moved into a house with ten surfer guys. She was working, and she was, finally, learning to surf.

A Hawaiian man at Pu'amana, on the south side near Lahaina, took her under his wing. Every morning she and a German friend named Franziska made the 45-minute drive across the island to practice surfing in the small waves.

Then Shari decided she had to surf the North Shore.

She paddled out alone on a mini tanker into a messy swell. Shari took off on a wave. As she dropped in, a backwash wave came off the shore and met the wave under her, which doubled in size instantly, vertically, beneath her body.

"I just remember looking down," she says, "and I could see my whole board below me."

She landed on it stomach-first. The tail punctured her abdomen.

But Shari didn't know yet. She caught her board, climbed back on, paddled in, sat in the shallows, went to pull up her bikini bottoms, and her fingers disappeared into her stomach. She looked down at the gaping wound, sand and water pouring into it, and started to freak out.

There was, thank God, a Hawaiian woman on a longboard nearby who helped her in. Some other surfers on the beach ran up and got her to the hospital. Shari's board was left on the sand. The Hawaiian woman, whom Shari had never seen before in her life and who had no obvious way of knowing where this random Canadian lived, took her board and returned it to the surf house Shari had been staying at for five months.

"Hawaiians talk, eh?"

At the hospital, they pulled a surgeon out of an operation as they were afraid she was bleeding internally. They found the board had come within one millimeter of puncturing her stomach.

After three weeks, Shari simply had to get back in the water before she flew to Australia. She was leaving in days, and she knew. Knew with the clarity of someone who already understands what surfing is going to mean to her life, that if she didn't get back on the horse before the flight, she might never get back on at all. The doctor handed her a roll of duct tape. From under her boobs to her hip bones, she taped herself together, and she paddled out.

She got lucky twice more. The surf house next door was owned by her landlord's brother, and two of his tenants were German doctors doing their residencies in Maui. One came by every morning to dress the wound. The other came by every afternoon. She left for Australia without an infection.

Australia took a few years to settle. Shari tried Noosa with her friend Fiona, hated it on sight ("this is just plastic"), and decamped to Mooloolaba on the Sunshine Coast. She came down to Sydney in 1998, and to Dee Why in spite of her ex, who was from there. In her view, the point break is the best right-hander near Sydney. The beach runs two kilometers in a long D-shape that catches swell from every direction. The cafes are good. How could you leave this place?

Layne Beachley used to surf there a lot, back when Dee Why was still mostly men in the water. Shari remembers being one of very few women out. The lineup at Dee Why was famously unfriendly, many of the men then believing that women don't belong in the water. So, they surfed as though the women weren't there: dropped in, flicked their boards.

But sadly, the single worst piece of treatment she's ever received in the water came from a woman, a 25-year-old Swedish surfer Shari had been trying to paddle away from for months. The woman cornered her one day: You suck. You can't surf to save your life. You shouldn't even be in the water. Shari got out crying, walked up the beach to a different break, and the woman somehow ended up next to her again. Their boards collided. Shari didn't realize. When she came in, the woman's boyfriend, "the biggest jerk ever," was waiting on the sand. You're gonna pay to fix my partner's board.

Shari, 58 at the time, walked them to the lifeguard tower and got the woman's bank details. Shari turned to her.

"I really, really hope," she said, "that when you get to my age, you get treated with the same kind of respect that you've shown me today." Shari transferred $125 to her.

The repair came in at $75. The woman wrote back asking how to return the leftover $50. Shari told her to give it to Surfrider Foundation. "But just don't put it in your name, because you disgust me."

Another lineup story Shari tells right after this one is darker. Too dark to tell really. Let's just say that this particular surfer is now in prison.

What's changed at Dee Why, Shari says, is the women. The lineup is something close to fifty-fifty now. The men behave better. A couple of the worst offenders have quietly mellowed, because there are too many people willing to turn around and say shut up.

The reason any of this is a story she's telling now, rather than a story she told ten years ago, is that two years ago, Shari more or less stopped surfing.

Her mother was dying. Shari went to Canada for eighteen months to help look after her. She wasn't getting much exercise. Menopause was doing menopause things. She came back to Australia, went in for a checkup she'd put off, and learned she had breast cancer. She had also, by her own account, gotten really fat. Forty-something pounds heavier than she is now. Embarrassed beyond belief, she spoke to Jeff, who happens to be one of the best-known shapers in the area, has known her for thirty years and is a fantastic surf instructor.

That was it. Shari started taking lessons again. From the very bottom.

Around the same time, she found a women's surf group online and posted: Anyone in Dee Why? Within forty minutes a woman named Claire had messaged her back. There's a bunch of us. We want to take lessons. Now there are 37 of them, the Dee Why Wave Warriors, and inside that there's a smaller cell of five women who go out every Sunday at 8:30 a.m., almost without fail. They call themselves the 8:30 a.m. Sunday Fabulous Five. They all live within four streets of each other.

Shari has lost that forty pounds. She is back on a 7'0" funboard and working her way down to the 6'3" fish she used to ride. And she has, after twenty-five years of surfing, finally fixed her pop-up.

This is the part she most wants people to hear.

She learned to pop up from Point Break, the scene where Lori Petty tells Keanu you gotta get up with two feet on the board at the same time or you're fish food. Shari took it as gospel. For 25 years she pushed off with both hands and tried to land both feet at once. Her back hurt. Her placement was inconsistent. She avoided bigger waves because she didn't trust the pop-up to hold up.

What she does now, what every pro does, she points out, Kelly Slater included, if you watch the slow-motion footage, is the chicken leg. Back foot down first, then front foot, almost in one motion. Hands lower on the board, under the chest, not up by the shoulders. "When you're pushing up from here, you're just pushing yourself away from the board. You push from here, you push your whole body up." No back pain. Right foot in the right place every time. People in the lineup have started telling her she's surfing well.

Shari wishes she could grab every young woman starting out and tell her this. "I wasted two decades doing that hard pop up," she says. "It stopped me from getting on really good big waves, because I wasn't confident I could get to my feet."

Surfing is, by Shari's estimate, 25% of her life. And that's only counting time in the water and time consciously thinking about it. The rest of her life is largely arranged around it. Three walks a day to the beach with the dog. Friends who are surfers. Conversations that land on, eventually, the surf.

Shari has finally got it all figured out, wouldn't you agree? Well, she says, she still hasn't gotten a job after applying for over 80 of them, but her surfing has certainly improved!

Asked what she'd tell someone just learning to surf now, she didn't hesitate.

"Have fun. And be kind to yourself."

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