Looking for the Barrel : So I went to the South Pacific with the vague idea of getting barrelled. I hadn't been barrelled yet in six years of surfing, and wanted it pretty badly. I'd been almost barrelled, I should have been barrelled, I've certainly fallen off waves that would have barrelled me, but the magic moment hadn't yet happened. I figured that if I stuffed myself into enough big warm waves, I'd figure it out. So I booked two months off and shuffled off to a Pacific outer reef.

Here's some of what happened:

The Scene: a break, ten miles off the coast somewhere in the South Pacific. A great, consistent, beautiful left-hander wraps around the reef into the channel. The prevailing winds are offshore, more or less, and the water is warm. You get there by small open boat, leaving at dawn and returning in the evening after perhaps six hours of surfing and a break for lunch. There's nothing there except reef, waves, a couple of boats and ten or so surfers from all over the planet.

Day 1: I'm out with Anthony, a French guy, who is quite analytical - an unusal trait for a surf buddy. Two of us are out for six hours by ourselves. The waves are head-high and fast and lovely. I take one all the way to the inside reef and Anthony watches as he paddles out. "Nice wave" he says "nice and hollow". Which is funny because I didn't see anything like that. It occurs to me that all the interesting stuff was happening behind me.

Mental Note #1: I have to stay in the critical part of the wave to figure out where the damn barrel is. Obvious really, when you think about it.

Day 2: A small clean day. I spend the whole day practicing my horrible slow cutback. Bend the knees, weight on the back foot, twist the head and torso round so I'm looking at where I want to go, and whoop! round we go. Do this about a hundred times and it begins to work.

Day 3: Early morning. Dawn is just over, the sky is clear eggshell blue with a few hints of pink remaining, and the sea is glossy, metallic blue-grey. The waves are chest high and roll out of the horizon like they are on a conveyor belt. I'm out with a Friend of Wayne Lynch.

A digression.

A project of mine is to be on the lookout for role models of men in their 50s. Why? Well, as I proceed through my 40's, I notice that most of the "role models" for men in their 50's are together-looking dudes with steel hair who are concerned about their mutual funds and happy with their lovely new Lexus "luxury sedans". Few of them seem to be, oh I dont know, writing comic novels, or having new and wonderful relationships, or, say, getting barrelled regularly in the South Pacific. Golf seems to be about as far as these guys go to breaking a sweat. Which, needlesstosay, is not Good Enough…

So who are the men in their 50's we should emulate? (When I say "we", I mean anybody that's interested - if you're in your 20s or 30s, you could skip to "end of digression" if you're even still reading).

Wayne Lynch and Gerry Lopez are good places to start. Wayne Lynch is hard-core, aged about 51. Looks like a wolf, lives on a farm in West Australia, raises his kids, and surfs smoothly and aggressively. Gerry Lopez is mid-50s, smiles like a Zen monk, lives in Oregon with his kid while snow-boarding all winter and traveling in Indonesia in the summer. He gets barrelled at will, shapes his own snowboards and surfboards and looks like he's 42.

Both of them apparently live as though things are just starting, not starting to wind down. This is a good thing.

End of Digression.

Anyway. The Friend of Wayne Lynch is a bit funny-looking. He's wearing a waterproof safari hat which is attached to his head with a strap that goes under his chin. He has white zink ointment all over his face to keep the sun off, and has a large handlebar moustache. He's about 50, and surfs like a bandit – enormous speed and power.

I hang on the shoulder for a few minutes and watch him, and then a much larger wave appears on the horizon. I paddle hard towards it, turn at the last minute, barely get the board over the lip, and for a tiny moment, hang there like some suspended Christmas ornament. Plenty of time to look down about ten feet, and think "I'm f*****d". At the last split-second, the board releases, airdrops to the bottom, where I land on it, amazingly still under control.

I look to my left, where the wave is just about to break in front of me and think: "wow, I'm going to make it, there's the shoulder, what a lovely color, better jam the bottom turn hard, and…" at which point half a ton of white water hits the back of my legs and I go flying.

As I paddle back out, laughing from the adrenalin release, the Friend of Wayne Lynch gives me a pleasant, sardonic, Aussie grin and says "nice drop".

But here's Mental Note #2: once you get to the bottom of one of these fast buggers, there's no time to screw around before the turn.

Five minutes later, another large fast wave. I make this one. There's a continuous noise of a wave breaking, lots of spray everywhere and a sense of tremendous speed. Somewhere close behind me is the barrel, but I can't figure out how to get there because I'm barely hanging on.

Day 3: conditions same as Day 2. Right at the end of the day, I see the wave begin to break in front of me. There's a little tube right there! Thinking "this is IT!" I crouch down and prepare to enter the Cosmic Eye. There is an immediate and violent sensation of being stuffed hard into a washing machine and I'm off to the reef, mostly under water. What happened, I have no idea.

Day 4: a very good day of surfing. The waves are a decent size. The Aussies, with typical understatement, describe them as "4 to 6 foot". Actually, when you take off on the big ones, they are well over twice your height. And powerful. The first half hour is somewhat anxiety-producing as these chunks of water appear out of the horizon at speed and don't give us a lot of time to think (avoid them? take off? go under them? all good choices – but the wave doesn't hang around and wait for your decision).

We all pretty much mess up on the first wave, and howl as we are dumped. After the first trip to the bottom, body chemistry jacks up the adrenalin, throws in some beta-blockers, adds a pinch of endorphins, and we're just fine fine fine. Cheaper than Prosac (if you ignore the air fare), cleaner than booze and more enervating than old mary jane.

People start getting barrelled all over the place. I still can't find the damn thing. I am stuck on the takeoff – each time I go deep I don't get round the turn fast enough and end up getting hammered. If I don't take off deep, the barrel is nowhere to be found. Close observation of the excellent Aussie surfers shows that they outrun the whitewater by not making the bottom turn until very late, using the speed of the drop to get way out in front of the wave. Looks scary. I try it on a little one. Hmm. Seems to kind of work. Try it on a big one. Blam - I get stuffed under several tons of water – back to the reef, sigh, paddle round to the boat – 300 yards of white-water paddling back to the channel, then back to the lineup (300 yards in the other direction). Tiring, this business.

Finally, I make a late takeoff, see the wave curling, curling in front of me – it's about to barrel!! - andddddd… fall off. I fall off because the wave looks exactly like it's going to collapse and dump me, so I bag it. But the whole point of tube-riding is that the wave looks like it's going to collapse, but it doesn't.

Mental Note #4: You have to stifle your desire for self-preservation and charge into a situation that your instincts tell you is not going to work out. Trust Mother Nature. Believe the world is a more optimistic place than you imagine. Know that more things work out than fail.

To quote Bernard Levin: "art... can keep simultaneously in view the lesser truth that the world can fall apart at any moment, and the greater truth that it will not". He was using Bach and Dostoievsky as examples of art as a positive force, but my guess is he would have dug Andy Irons' tube-riding just as much. Given my personality, fully understanding this may involve considerable therapy and Growth Work when I get back to California. I can hardly wait.

To be continued. Possibly.