Last Week in Oz

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working a lot, so not much has been going on. We had a birthday/goodbye dinner for Carolien at Opera Bar that also served as my brother’s farewell. It had been the most continuous time we spent together in the past 10 years… it wasn’t always smooth but we both had a great time.

As soon as I got back to work I had to hit the ground running as we went live with SAP at the client site. Nothing too exciting happened and I stayed really busy. After 3 weeks of long hours and weekend work, we finished the project and everything is running smoothly. We scheduled my return to the US a week after go-live just in case there were any problems. Since there weren’t, I really had nothing left to do except a few clean up items every day. That being the case, I skipped out of work early every afternoon and hit the surf.

Krista and I said our goodbyes early... she had planned a two week trip to western Australia and left a week before me. We made tentative plans to have a surf vacation somewhere in the world... Hawaii, Bali, California... it was all very vague and pie in the sky.  One of our last days together was Australia's version of Independence Day - Australia Day.  We found a party on the rocks next to Tamarama that was amazing.  Every outcrop and spot of sand had people dancing, laughing and drinking.  Someone brought a generator and set up a DJ booth.  It was one of the coolest parties I've ever been to.

I rented a car during the week so that I didn’t waste too much time on buses getting from work to home and home to the beach. I had lived the past 10 months without a car and I forgot how nice it was to be able to get places quickly. It was a week of record heat in Sydney, with 6 days in a row over 95 degrees. One day it got up to 105 but I didn’t really notice when I was in the water. If you tried to walk across the sand your feet burned.

I went down to Maroubra one afternoon and saw a pretty scary incident. I was surfing in the chest deep whitewash (I’m still not up to the green waves yet) and I saw a few people crowded around someone laying down at the edge of the rip. I got out of the water because they were talking with animated motions and pointing out to the water.

I got out and started scanning the waves and a woman with a surfboard came up to me. “Do you see anyone out there? I pulled that guy in (pointing to the one laying down) and I swear I saw another one.”

Over the next few minutes the lifeguards towed two jet skis across the sand and put them in the water. I went back out and continued surfing for a little while, still keeping my eye on the action 50 yards away. A few life rafts came and then two helicopters joined the search. The lifeguards eventually waved all of the surfers in so they could search the entire beach. As I left a news crew showed up but they never found the guy’s body.

I advise everyone that goes to beaches in Australia or anywhere else with big waves to understand rip currents and how they work and how to swim out of them.