Cyclone Yasi

Good news for North Australian surfers but bad news for the rest of the country as Cyclone Yasi hits Queensland.

Wind gusts of up to 125 kilometres per hour are already being felt in Cairns and Townsville, but they are expected to intensify to about 290km/hour as Yasi closes in and crosses between Innisfail and Cardwell about 11pm tonight.

Here's how BBC have covered it.

I've encountered a few over the years on various surf trips. My closest escape was in Mexico when a Category 5 like Yasi struck a few miles up the coast from where we were staying.

I'd been watching it on the weather charts and phoned the airline the day before to ask if the flight/holiday was still okay and they replied ti was all fine. I tried to explain what a Category 5 hurricane meant i.e. 'catastrophic' but they just told me not to worry about it....clueless idjuts!

Luckily it dropped to a 4 on the scale as it made landfall and although a few villages completely vanished, there was no major loss of life. The hotel had been a scene out of disaster movie with guests boarded up in the nightclub and staff having to fend for themselves in their rooms.

The beach had lost much of it's sand and the roofs which were locally weaved were being repaired but apart from that the hotel seemed fine.

Apparently lots of surfers had arrived the day before and surfed 15-20ft waves out front with the manager screaming at them to get out of the water! Surfers eh? ;)

I visited Puerto Vallarta one day and the scene there was very different. The sea walls had been destroyed, houses left in rubble and seawater damage had travelled a long way up side streets and onto the main road.

I bought a photo off a local photogrpaher which shows a 15ft wave rearing up about to break, right where I was standing on the esplanade where tourists normally go for a stroll at night.

The rest of my stay we only had 3-4ft with a fresh 6ft+ swell on the day I left which I got to surf as our flight was delayed :)

I also surfed a cyclone swell in Northern Queensland once upon a time...

I was travelling in Oz in the late 90s with a rucksack and board for company and decided to hop on a bus to Bundaberg to get some extra cash, fruit picking.

I remember wandering through town at night (as the bus arrived at some ungodly hour in the morning) - around 2am on a Friday night just as all the fights were kicking off outside.

Anyone who has been to Bundaberg knows it's not the kind of place to wander about on your own late at night.

It's a sprawling cowboy town built on the profits of sugar cane, rum and full of fruit pickers scraping a living. It also had a large contingent of drunk Aborigines with a taste for Bundy Rum (who can blame them?) who disliked backpackers (or at least did when I was there). Our hostel even got attacked and stoned one night!

Anyway...apart from a few shouts of "surfs up!" followed by laughter I made it to the hostel in once piece. It's the only place in the world where I've kept a hand on a knife - granted it was my chopping knife for cooking ;) but I figured it was better than nothing if push came to shove.

Bundaberg feels a million miles away from the surf but the coast is actually only about 8 miles away. Luckily enough I bumped into a sponger from Devon who told me a cyclone was coming and that we ought to go check out the beach and see if a wave had pushed in - I was not expecting this!

The next day we drove down to a beach, can't recall where it was but it may have been at Bargara as I notice there's a surf shop there now.

A normally flat beach had been transformed into clean 2-3ft waves - which is considered pumping in a place that normally has no surf due to the Great Barrier Reef blocking any swell.

A few weeks later I moved on and scored 3-4ft surf at a spot called Agnes Waters - which used to be considered the most northerly surfing beach in Queensland although the Barrier reef has plenty of waves...if you have a map, some balls and a boat.

Agnes Water was a strange place, arriving at first light, there's not much there apart from a few supply shops and a campsite but the little beach had surf!

The water (although brown, murky and apparently very sharky - not a good combo) was nice and warm so we surfed in boardies in the rain but I can't say I felt comfortable knowing what was swimming around underneath me. I found a nice clip of surfing here and the sea looks nice and blue?! so maybe a storm had just passed through when I surfed it causing it to discolour? Now I feel robbed...

Final clip is from Pete in Porthcawl who sent me this mad footage of guys jumping of harbour walls into pretty big surf - they've got to be Cornish!


Let's hope the cyclone loses some oompf before it makes landfall. Goodluck to any Ozzies staying put and battening down the hatches. It must be a very scary time, just waiting.