Tracks Magazine: Steve Cooney, November 1971 issue
STEVE COONEY: FLASHBACK TO FIRST SESSION AT ULUS, 50 YEARS AGO
From Tracks November 1971 issue.
As soon as you got there and unpacked your gear and sat down for a minute and looked around, you started to slow down. You’d kind of sit back and just be really pleased with yourself just doing nothing and it was really good.
It was just unbelievable. Nobody had surfed there before. You had to walk through all these places. The first time we went there, all the old natives showed us the way, it was really funny.
We arrived at this place, you know, we caught these little beamos out for three miles, no it was more than that, about six miles, and then we got off these little tracks and the guys were all stoked ‘coz we gave them money, you know, and everything like that – it was just incredible, and we had a coconut kid … a guy who used to carry our coconuts … But the only time we ever took him to carry our coconuts, he said he had to go back ‘coz he had to go to the temple before we reached the place, so we had to carry them ourselves. We got off the beamos and walked about two miles through these little tracks and things and you come to it, and you’re looking down about 150ft straight at the waves, you know.
When we got there it was high tide and the waves were hitting up against the cliff and I thought – oh no, we’ve blown it, you know, because it’s not looking really good. So we went down through all this incredible bush, you know. If you touched the bush it kind of stuck to you – it’s kind of all prickly stuff, and we got to this track that kind of goes down a hole in the ground. It was all kind of rocky, you know that sharp barnacle rock. We climbed down this hole and into this really giant cave with sand on the bottom, and we went out and it wasn’t really good because it was really sloppy. So we just waited for a few hours till the tide went out and then the waves were about six or eight-foot and so hollow – incredible. We were just surfing with the turtles...