"I've Just Got My Head Above Water: Shane Powell's Quiet Fight for Survival," by Nick Carroll, ran in the December 1997 issue of Australia's Surfing Life. This version has been slightly edited and shortened.

Shane Powell is the only surfer in history to have combo-ed Kelly Slater in a WCT final. He did this at the recent Gotcha Lacanau Pro in France. It was Powelly's first contest win three years, and it pushed him to 3rd on the CT ratings for 1997. A month later he won again, this time in Portugal, at which point Shane was second behind Slater for the world title—his highest position since 1994. Powell may be the only male Australia surfer with a real chance of winning a world professional surfing championship before the end of the millennium.

A warm day, a hint of a change in the air. The winding drive off the freeway leads me down to Avoca Beach on the New South Wales' Central Coast.

Shane Powell lives in a small house off the approach to Avoca, a property co-owned by his parents who’re busy building extra rooms out front. “Come in,” calls Shane. He’s slumped on a mottled couch; 

is playing on the VCR. Shane's house is split into halves: one half a bedroom-bathroom, the other half a living room and kitchen, with a sunken back room that is home to a weights bench. “It just sits there,” he grins. The home decor is best described as Modern Australian Surfer—a few trophies and medals hung around the rooms, a TV dominating the living space. There are odd touches. A statue of an old man, hunched, hands cupped in front of him, squats on the TV. A bulletin board is propped against the wall: blurry photos of Powelly’s bright party moments, including one of Elko and Barton well-fired at an ASP gala; one of Shane holding up a Spanish mackerel and a dorado aboard an Indonesian boat.

Powelly looks up. He is hungover—last night was a big night in a long series of big nights—and for a moment his face is shadowed, weary. “I’ve just got my head above water,” he says. “I’m dog-paddling."

Shane Powell, 25 years of age, ranked #2 in the world, has no major sponsors. His longtime contract with Rip Curl lapsed earlier this year and was not picked up by the company. Powelly says he was just burned out on travel, particularly that associated with Rip Curl’s The Search promotion. Over the past two years, his world rating had stumbled from 3rd to 15th. “I really thought about it and decided I wanted to get myself back into the Top Five,” he says. “I was stressed out, doing bad, and felt I needed some time off from all the travel. Like, I got back from Hawaii at the end of last year, I’d been away for ages and I stayed a bit longer in Hawaii to do the Backdoor Shootout. But I finally got home. Four days later Gary Dunne (Rip Curl promotions) rings and says, "Get ready, we’re going to Morocco for three weeks. Fuck! I hung up the phone and just thought—no way. Even though I knew I'd probably get fired over it."

Derek Hynd, Rip Curl’s promotions director, says: “His contract was up. He was basically saying he needed a break from The Search. The very nature of The Search is that you can’t take a break, unfortunately.”

And is that not a superb irony? What appears to be a dream job is in fact a contractual commitment. Be careful what you wish for, kids, it might come true.

Anyway, Powelly got his last Rip Curl cheque soon after the Bells contest—and just like that his comeback began. He made the semis in Japan, then spent the two months between Grajagan and Lacanau just—surfing. Hard. “That was the longest period of time I’ve been home for years. It turns out I'd become really lazy. I’d come home and pretty much wouldn’t surf unless it was perfect. So for that two months I just learned to surf in shit again. I surfed every day, and got my edge back.”

Shane got on the plane to France with a horrendous case of the flu. “I was sort of in a different mood because I was on antibiotics, and I remember thinking, well, I’m for sure not going to out-paddle anyone. So I was more laid back and a lot calmer. I really had to pick my waves, and each heat I got better and could feel I was building momentum. Even though I was still nowhere near full strength, I had this weird feeling the whole contest that I could win. I wasn’t thinking about what anyone else could do because I couldn’t hassle them. I had no distractions. I wasn't drinking. Basically, I was just happy to be relaxed for once.”

The win at Lacanau earned him $15,000. Good money, until you factor in airfare, travel, three months of no other income. Is this OK? Can Powelly make ends meet? “Oh shit,” he laughs. “Money is the least of my worries."

It turns out Shane means this literally. "I lost five grand awhile back, in my house. Cash! Just lost it for a couple of months. Oh, I found it eventually. But yeah, my worry at that point was my health, not money. I knew where I wanted to get and I didn’t need money to get there. I needed time and some headspace. Money can’t buy that.”

Avoca is just a few kilometers as the seagull flies from the Sydney suburbs, but it’s still an hour and a half by car. Far enough that it seems another world. Powelly takes me for a drive in his Camry station wagon, around the old beach streets of Avoca, while we talk about growing up. “My Dad was in the surf club and one of his mates started a boardriders club for the grommets. He got us all on foamies in this rock pool down at Avoca and taught us all how to stand up on them. Then he’d have little contests every weekend. We formed a really tight little bunch.”

We leave the car, a light spring rain falling, and rock-hop out along the fringes of Avoca Point, a beautiful headland, with sandstone flaked off over thousands of years and shaped into rich ochre curves. “That’s where I started to surf, this little rock pool,” says Powelly, indicating a small lagoon. “It seemed to be a little different when we were younger. I think it might have been a bit deeper in the middle, but now the sand’s filled it in a bit.”

Powelly was late on to a glassed board compared to his mates. His Dad wouldn’t let him get one. “By the end, I could surf a foam board pretty damn good.”

There were the rocks from which he’d sit and watch his heroes: Ross Clarke-Jones, Bryce Ellis, Mark "Sanga" Sainsbury. Avoca has seen its share of heavy-hitting surfers over the years. Now Ross and Bryce are gone, across the world in Brazil, as far fr|m the quiet bushland as could be imagined. And Sanga, well, he’s gone too, somewhere else. [Note: former amateur world champion Sainsbury died at 25 from a brain aneurism while surfing Avoce in 1992.] "I always remember watching Bryce out there," Shane tells me. "Glen Winton used to come down when it was big. And a couple of the older guys around Avoca that’d just come out of the house when it was huge. They still do. When the surf’s really good they’ll just appear.”

He remembers a day when his Dad took him to a secret epic left nearby, telling him it was only about three feet. Powelly and Sam paddled out and it was more like 10. “My Dad was a really good ski rider. He and Sanga’s Dad were really good friends and they were probably two of the best ski rid-riders on the coast. They’d always surf out the center when it was huge on their skis.”

Small ripply waves bounce along the rocks at Avoca Point. Further out, the rock ledge extends several hundred yards around, exposed, open to swell from all directions. Waves can suck you off those rocks and 15 feet down in a second. Near one of the numerous jump-off points, a life-ring hangs against the curve of sandstone. Nearby is a plaque, in memory of a fisherman, Russ English, who drowned off these rocks. Just around the corner is another plaque: Sanga’s.

"We used to come out here heaps after his death,” says Shane. “We’d sit around, get a fire going, and just talk for hours." Powelly tells a story about being in a trails heat again Sanga a long time ago, at the Coke contest. “We were heading out and I paddled past him. A wave came and he spun around behind me, got me on an interference, just like that. That was my first big contest, too. After, we were coming in and I’m looking at him and he says ‘I’ve just taught you a lesson, don’t trust anybody.’ He was right. But I was still spinning. It was like, wow, we come from the same beach and I look up to you and you just did that to me.”

Shane stops for a moment, thinking about the harshness, the discipline. Then he smiles. “But it was true.”

Shane Powell's pro career began at the Coke Classic in 1990, when he took a 5th. Came out of the trails, out of the blue. A slim kid with a frighteningly sharp and mature style. A sponsorship deal with Rusty, engineered by photojournalist Paul Sargeant, helped get him through the first tough couple of years on tour, while he battled with the insecurity of trying to beat his heroes: Carroll, Potter, Elkerton.

Then came 1992, Kelly Slater, the New School. People forget this wasn’t just an American thing, this revolution of technique. Powelly, along with the brilliant and unpredictable Shane Herring and the powerful Matt Hoy, was a paid-up member.

But there was a difference between the US crew and the Australians; a cultural difference. “Yeah shit, you know, a lot of them don’t even drink,” Shane says, a bit amazed to this day. “When you’re on the tour every night can be a Friday night.” The two Shanes, Powell and Herring, tested this fantastic theory to its chaotic limit. Something, or someone, had to crack. It turned out to be Herring.

By the end of 1994, just two years later, Powelly had recorded a career-high second place behind Slater on the WCT rankings, while Shane Herring was back in Dee Why, sponsorless and broke. “We traveled a lot together," Powelly tells me. "We were really good friends, still are now. I still see him every now and then. I’ve tried to help a few times, but we’ve just got this Chemistry, you know. Like whenever we get together, me and Herro, we just go mad. Just crazy.”

There's a beautiful Australian generosity about Powelly, something that keeps him connected to Herro despite the latter’s descent into the whirlpool. There’s also a sense of terrifying vulnerability—that Shane himself, as he fights for this comeback, also stands on the edge of the whirlpool, barely avoiding its suction.

I call Barton Lynch, current Wise Man of the Australian tour crew, to see if he can help me understand where this feeling comes from.

“Ohh, Powelly,” says Barton. “I remember that Coke contest when he first did well and got a result. And afterward, I remember his mum Patty came up to me and said ‘My son’s Shane.’ Apparently she and I are related to each other in some way, I’m not sure how. She asked me to keep an eye on him. I said, ‘Yeah, OK’, as you do, and the two of us would have a few beers now and then going around the tour.

“Then everybody’s faith in Shane began unraveling. This is the classic thing that happens to you when you’re doing the tour. You are gonna go through ups and downs, that’s just life. When you’re up everybody wants to know you, and when you’re down everybody loses faith in you just straight away. You might not feel so bad inside yourself, but all around you people are flipping out. I think you learn things about people at times like that.

“My relationship with Powelly was simple. I just said ‘Fuck ‘em. I think you’re fine.’ I think it’s absolutely beautiful Rip Curl dumped him and he won. That’s exactly the way they all work.”

Shane tells me the best wave of his life was at J-bay one late afternoon, after watching for a while from Derek Hynd’s front yard. He jumped off the point, it was nearly dark, and there were orange and purple flashes across the face of this wave that he surfed right through the bay. Best session: a superheavy beachbreak afternoon at Pasquales, Mexico, with Matt Branson and Sunny Abberton. Other than that, many of his best surfs have been around home. Best surfing he’s seen: the heat with Occy and Curren at Bells 1986, on video. And Curren’s four-fin sessions at J-bay.

Greg Clough, his shaper at Aloha comments: “Shane reminds me of myself—he doesn’t like confrontation. He is very private, and capable of disappearing for some time at a stretch.” (I repeat Clough's remark to Powelly. “Yeah. Shit yeah,” he says. “When I get home I’ll just go into hiding for a week, two weeks. I won't even answer the phone.)

Finally, we come back around to his recent pro tour comeback. It’s a rickety sort of thing, this one, to be honest. Whether or not it results in a sustained surge—the kind of effort it takes to seriously challenge someone like Slater for a world title—even Powelly himself isn't convinced it's heading in that direction. Yet. “I’m sorta probably not ready for it right now,” he says, truthfully. “I can’t hold my focus. I'm really focused for a month or two and then I drift off. I’m just hopeless with everyday things. I just forget about this and that and end up putting it all to the side. So I’ve gotta get that in order, my everyday life. Get a good schedule. A good routine, before I can have a real crack at it. Yeah, I wanna get myself level and stay there for the whole year.”

The Central Coast is physically beautiful but there is human wreckage here, on these shores of curved sandstone. A lot of people don’t work—a lot are on the dole, struggling with casual jobs here and there. The economy just isn’t booming. The NSW Central Coast has one of the developed world’s highest levels of youth suicide: the unemployment, the hopelessness, the lack of an outlet for ambition. Down the pub, down the bowling club for the pokies—how many have been saved by surfing?

I quote to Powelly something 1997 Pro Junior winner Drew Courtney, who lives in nearby Umina, said when I’d asked about his heroes; he’d said “Shane Powell.” Shane looks honestly stunned for a moment.

“Makes me feel good,” he says after a pause. “Makes me feel like getting off my bum and doing something.”

He tells me about an older Avoca local by the name of Ray Smith, how they’d been running into each other in the water lately. “He’s one of those older guys who’s out there in the morning, in the evening, races around everywhere looking for a wave. He just said the other day: ‘It’s really good to see you surfing.’ It’s made me feel good that people notice.”

Maybe Powelly, by example, by his surfing, will save some kids. And maybe somehow in the process he'll save himself, too.

[Photos: Bruce Channon, Bill Alexander, John Seaton Callahan]

"I'VE JUST GOT MY HEAD ABOVE WATER" - SHANE POWELL PROFILE BY NICK CARROLL

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