It was a bright sunny day when I swam out at (the stormy) Maroubra Beach just down from the north end of the beach.

My AquareWare water housing (made by John Ware) in hand which had a Canon F-1 with MF motor drive & a FD 135mm f2.8 lens. I used Kodachrome 64 (slide film) which was the surf photographers choice on a bright sunny day. I set my camera at 500th of a second & an aperture setting of f5.6.

I had been out for an hour or so & got some good shots. Then the clouds started rolling in so I had to drop my settings to a 60th of a second & f2.8 which was wide open. There were only 6 frames left on the roll of 36 exposes when Steve Wilson who was sponsored by Hotbuttered surfboards & whom I went to school with paddled into a nice clean wave. I pressed the shutter release button & kept it down (motor driving through the botton turn) till the end of the roll. I thought I had something special but did not know if I had frozen the action or if it was in focus. Back in those days (1980’s) you had to wait 2 weeks for your Kodachrome to be developed. The film had to be sent to Melbourne for processing in return envelope (yellow). When the slides returned I could not wait so I went straight to the last 6 slides to see if I had 1 in focus. To my suprise the 1st frame was pin sharp on his face & everything else was blurred (I was stoked).

My thought was then to enter it in the Tracks Photo Contest. To do this I had to make a B&W duplicate because Tracks was a B&W paper magazine. I developed the negs then made a 8x10 inch glossy print in my Mum & Dads bathroom come darkroom & dropped it into Tracks. A month later I bought a copy of Tracks & saw I had won 3rd prize where I received a Rip Curl short sleeve vest. I wore that vest to death & have great memories of that day & the anticipation of getting something special.