In 2003, I moved to England, ten thousand miles from the beaches I grew up on and the waves thundering on wild sands, echoing across the paddocks and resounding through my bedroom window. Instead, the smell of west country cows and sweet robins drifted through the cold air. The country smelt different. Gone was the salt air, the sound of magpies, the vast open spaces. It didn't take me long to beg to move closer to the sea, which was Dorset's Jurassic coast, full of fossils and white cliffs and freezing waters even I dared not dip my toe in. It was something I struggled to explain to my husband, who had a different upbringing to me.

Whilst moving closer to my son's grandparents, affordable land, and better wages and schooling was a grand excuse to move back to Australia, there was a big part of me that was moving toward the Victorian ocean that I had been immersed in since I was barely a baby.

My best mate knows the feeling. Both of us were raised by surfing fathers, daddy's girls pushed into waves with a shout of 'paddle paddle paddle'. We stood next to our fathers in awe as they talked and swore with their mates, conversations we were not privy to when our mothers were around. We were forgotten, shifting warm sand with feet and toes at their feet, but we listened, and sat in back seats whilst they drove from break to break and disappeared into the water like supermen whilst we were left to frolick in sand dunes. Whilst both our fathers are at the end of their surfing lives, we cannot imagine the ocean without them, that is to say, even when they are gone, the ocean will hold them in stasis, so that when we enter it when are loved by the memories we have of them in wetsuits and with boards smelling of strawberry wax.

Surfing was also freedom from the expectations of being young woman and all that meant in the eighties. Embraced by the boys as one of them, our bodies were allowed to be: to swim, dive, surf, to rise above what it meant to be a girl. We loved it. We surfed for hours and hours and hours, coming home sunburnt and tired. There was nothing like it, and nor would there be in the years to follow: not drugs, not relationships, not careers. To sit out there in the water and just be, looking at the swell and down into the tunnels of waves, down to the clear water below, to the red cliffs, that was pure freedom.

Within a week of returning to Australia, we had borrowed my Dad's boards to give my new husband a go of the sport I'd grown up with, and to start surfing again - an avocation, but also a desperate need. I found it hard to believe I had spent some six to eight years without it. Travel and love, and a need to get out of the small town I grew up in, had pulled me away from something I had loved so completely I needed to forget it completely.

Now, I drive down the back roads to the beach before dawn with a rising thrill in my chest. As I come over the hill to see the swell lines I'm tearing off my rings and earrings and slapping sunblock on before I'm even in the car park. The sun's early light, the moonset if the timing is right, perhaps a rainbow in the Autumn with the rain in the air, the first dousing in cold water, the colour of the horizon cobalt, purple and steel - how could one not love being out on the ocean?

Ten years ago I started stand up paddleboarding, riding a performance SUP which moved like a shortboard on the waves. I loved it. I got more waves, more often, surfing waves too small for a board or being able to sit deeper and get on waves faster and more often. People don't believe stand up paddleboarding is surfing, but perhaps they just imagine those big boards on rivers with dogs and kids on the nose.

The last few years I've been swapping the paddleboard for the longboard and back again, depending on the mood. Sometimes it's fun to be out on a longboard with the girls - there's a lot more woman surfing these days and sometimes they are absolutely the majority. If it's windier than twenty kilometres I'll choose the longboard, though I can easily SUP in the wind these days too. People ask how I can possibly balance or not lose the paddle - it's a really hard sport to learn - but I feel like it's just another limb, and extension of my body, and I don't think about it. I'm more graceful in the water than I am on land, though I do end up with a lot of bruises sometimes.

Surfing is god to me and goddess both - it is the closest I can come to divine oneness. A week without it and my nerves are frayed and jarred - an ocean swim might calm me down, but I'd rather be out there on a board. My husband has accepted this now, finally realising how much it means to me, and how saltwater runs through my blood. He rolls over and sleeps whilst I get up in the dark, thinking I'm crazy but admiring me at the same time. I'd have to love it to get out in the winter freeze, tearing down the beach with a big grin on my face, driving rain and sleet in my face as I fly down the face of a peeler. I love winter surfing: less crowds, more stoke. Wim Hoff aint wrong when he talks about the benefit of cold water.

I dream about it, often. I imagine most people do about things they love doing the most: skiing through white powder, flying over mountains, running along forest paths. I dream of corduroy waves in spectacular bays, the water moving under my feet, the board gliding. It is as perfectly peaceful in my night musings as it is in real life. Riding a wave is like slipping into a time warp. There is no past or future, just that moment, salt and water, perfect motion.

With Love,

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