Big-wave surfer highlights the Mid West as an adventure destination

He was the first Australian to win the world’s most prestigious big wave contest, and the first person known to surf a spot he says might have Australia’s biggest waves. The Mid West of WA wouldn’t seem an obvious spot for a movie about chasing Australia’s most powerful waves — especially not when compared to the famously heavy surf in places further south like Margaret River or further north on the remote station breaks. But big-wave surfer, adventurer and record chaser Ross Clarke-Jones said surfing Turtledove shoal, 80km offshore of Dongara near the edge of the continental shelf, was the climax of Storm Surfers 3D, a quest to surf the biggest and most dangerous waves the country had to offer. The film has hit worldwide cinemas and highlights the Mid West as an adventure rivalling anything in the country. “We were at the end of the shoot and we needed something big, something for Australia,” Clarke-Jones told the Midwest Times. “Tom, myself and Ben Matson went out there to have a look. It was so big — it was three times as big as the day we actually filmed it.” “Tom” is Tom Carroll, Clarke-Jones’s tow partner and a former three-time surfing world champion. That trip was in a light aircraft. Together with professional surf forecaster Matson, WA surfer Paul “Antman” Paterson and a crew of surfers and cray fishermen, they made it to the shoal on cray boats the next day and successfully towed into waves. The conditions were challenging. “It’s similar to the Cortes Banks in America, so far out to sea and there wasn’t a defined reef,” Clarke-Jones said. “It was fragmented, but there were massive waves everywhere. “It was really hard as it was, (but) what we saw the day before could have been the biggest wave in Australia. “(It was) what we were trying to achieve, trying that biggest wave. “(Turtledove) was one adventure I was pretty keen to do.” He said Carroll “nearly drowned” when falling on a wave and being sucked over the falls. “It ended up being a dramatic scene with Tom wiping out ... it made the film in a sense, the drama starting and finishing,” he said. “He copped a lot of salt water in his lungs, he swallowed it.”