Deadmans Big Wave Surfing

These are the biggest waves I’ve seen breaking at Deadmans in person.

There was a 4 metre swell that came through today around lunch time, the swell forecast said the cause of it was :

“a front sweeping across Bass Strait forms a rapidly deepening low off the far southern the NSW coast on Monday night. The subsequent increase in southerly-storm swell is looking about as steep as it gets – and the gale-force southerly change preceding the increase will also be strong enough to wreak serious havoc across the coastal fringes as it kicks in at 30 to 45 knots early on Tuesday morning.”

I absolutely love days like this, nothing more exciting then watching massive waves roll in to the shore.

When the swell gets this large around Manly, Deadmans is the only real place that is surfable, all the sand breaks get washed out.

At about midday I headed over to Shelly Beach lookout, from their you can see the surf spot named Deadmans which only breaks in big swell.

It was raining and cold and I thought there would only be a few people there, when I got there the car park was full and a crowd had formed at each of the lookouts.

During the video at about 1:11 you can see a huge set marching in, they didn’t quite break well enough for anyone to catch them but when they broke on the rock platform they barrelled and the lip of the wave was thick and heavy.

I took my DSLR with me and my 300mm Canon lense, my hands were freezing and was hard to keep the camera steady but I still managed to get some good video!