The swell is coming up. I sit up and feel the hardness of the board rocking between my legs. My hands are dangling in the clear water, the dappled reef seems close enough to touch.

Yesterday I had seen a dugong and her calf foraging along this same reef, their grey humps clearly visible through the crystal waters as I zig-zagged our way up the Uluwatu cliff face during the late afternoon heat. Past the massage area where a little wizened Balinese woman was pummeling the supine body of my friend Craig with surprising strength. Past the shops. Past the Warungs. Past the trays of offerings.

The waves are bigger today, head high plus. The sparkling skin of the ocean bends and folds, a sounding board for the wind. My right eye is half shuttered against the glare. One of the ocean ridges lifts a broad brush of dark blue against the washed-out horizon. I take a quick glance at the other surfers.  We are staring out like a mob of meerkats about to be dive-bombed by a hawk. One of the muscular Brazilian guys slips prone. We follow suit and paddle into the deeper water where we sit up again, trying to gauge where the peak of the oncoming swell might land.

It teases us, jinking first one way, then the other. The hidden underbelly starts to drag on the coral bed. The wave rears slowly, majestically, like a menacing dragon woken from deep slumber. We are no longer meerkats. We are now hobbits, scampering about and trying to position ourselves for takeoff.

I face the wave for one more final appraisal. Then I pivot and drop low on the board. My arms dig deep and the water grips my arms like setting cement. I cast intermittent quick glances over my shoulder at the approaching wall while focussing on the two surfers to my right. The top of the wave starts feathering above us. The surfer closest to the peak stops paddling and duck-dives back under the curling head. The second surfer looks like he is going to take the drop but then pulls back.

He yells across to me “Go, go, go!”

My arms pull frantically and I give a quick kick of my feet and prepare my legs for the spring. My board tilts. I am now past the point of no return. The other surfers disappear from view, yielding me the ride.

This is a large and powerful wave. It has been pushed along by unceasing trade winds for thousands of kilometres across the Indian Ocean, catching and swallowing all smaller waves in its path, storing more and more energy as it rolls across the open ocean. It is about to make its first, and final, landfall.

I am now irrevocably attached to a towering sinusoid of translucent beauty, poised to smash against a bed of rocky reef in a terminal cataclysm of chaos.

On a wave of this strength, any hesitation on my part means that the curling lip of the wave will snag me and throw my hapless body over into the waiting pit below. With tons of falling water about me, I will be driven beneath the surface, hitting the reef and incurring deep lacerations to my unprotected body. Thrown about like a rag doll, I will be desperate by the time the ferocious tumult allows my head to reach the surface for a quick breath. Reluctant to let me escape, the swirling dragon will claw on the lower half of my body and I will be dragged under again and again until its energy is finally spent.

There is no going back. I have no fear at this stage, only the urgent imperative to get to my feet as quickly as possible. I feel myself falling and push up on my arms, creating the space for my legs to fold into position underneath me. I am dropping into the steepest, darkest section of the breaking wave. I stay crouched, head bent, holding onto the outside rail with my right hand. The board transitions out of its directionless fall and I feel the weight coming back onto my feet.

The fins take grip and the inner rail bites. My legs straighten and I am launched out of the dark pocket, with the lip curling above my head.

My arms are thrown out for balance. I exult in the power of the wave, feeling how it responds taut and muscular to the hard-carving surfboard drawing a smooth-flowing line up the glossy face.

If I were an expert, I would slow down to tuck into a barrel. Or ricochet upwards for a vertical turn off the lip. But instead I fly beneath the curving overhang, pure and harmonious, racing ahead of the exploding chaos behind, immersed in the exhilaration of being delicately poised at the very razor edge of being.

The last section closes out. I dive back through the wave as it expires in a final paroxysm of foam.

I retrieve my board from amongst the wash and start the long paddle back, where a dozen little dots sit and wait.