Three days of wet weather has started to send everyone lolo, as the Hawaiians would say.

Some have turned to the drink, others to Honolulu, others to cable TV, but it was clear Mick’s North Shore fever had reached its nadir yesterday morning he walked downstairs at 11am and declared, “Let’s get a tattoo!”

I figured he was still pissed from the night before… a half-dozen mai tais will do strange things to a man. Mick had also gone headfirst into the stainless steel barbecue on the veranda during an early morning drunken wrestle with good mate and Curl cameraman, Shagga Saffigna, and I figured between the mai tais and the barbecue concussion, his judgement may have been somewhat clouded.

Finding a tattoo artist was easy. Angourie surfer, Dan Ross’s older brother, Ben was staying down the road at Pupukea. Ben’s not only works as a professional tattoo artist in Melbourne, he also had all his gear with him. So we drove in the belting rain around to Chateau de Ross to see a man about a tattoo.

Mick’s original idea was to get a bird wing tattooed on his ankle. We couldn’t, at this stage, ascertain exactly the reasoning behind it, as Mick was still a little scattered from the previous evening’s carnage to make a lot of sense. But Ben quickly sketched up a design and stencilled it onto Mick’s ankle.

The ankle tattoo is pretty common amongst Mick’s crew. Rasta has, “Without love we perish,” scrawled along his foot, while Parko has a trippy floral number wrapped around his ankle, alongside his birthdate (which he’ll tell the more gullible is his prison number when he was incarcerated in Singapore for drug smuggling.)

Mick liked the wing, but Ben suggested, “It’s probably a good idea to think before a tattoo.” So while Ben had an afternoon siesta to freshen up, Mick went home to have a couple of hours to make sure he was ready to commit. It turned out those couple of hours were a good idea, because the design would evolve.

Mick and his wife, Karissa began fishing around online and started looking for bird images. Watching them flick through hundreds of tribal eagles and other assorted inky birds of prey, I soon cottoned on there was one glaringly obvious option he may have overlooked. Mick’s two other tattoos are the Fanning family crest, and his late brother, Sean’s name. Mick’s the kind of guy who only gets a tattoo for a reason, which is why I found it strange that one particular eagle hadn’t come up as an option.

“Why don’t you just get the Kirra eagle?”

Mick’s been a lifelong member of Kirra Surfriders club, and has caught thousands of perfect Kirra barrels under the silent gaze of the steel eagle perched up on Kirra Hill. He asked Karissa to marry him next to the eagle. His brother’s ashes are scattered up there. It’s the most iconic landmark in Coolangatta. As a tattoo it might have been a little too obvious at first, but once the idea gelled the debate ended then and there.

Within 20 minutes Ben had sketched up a stylised Kirra eagle. It looked gothic, it looked sick, and it was unmistakably the Kirra eagle. The stencil moved from Mick’s ankle, to under his right arm, finally to on his right wrist, which is where it stayed.

The kitchen bench of the Off The Wall house was turned into a temporary tattoo studio. Needles, gun, rubber gloves, cling wrap, Bepanthen cream, vaseline, ink. The buzz of the needle was soon followed by a hot sting in Mick’s wrist and soon there was no turning back. Despite a sweat moustache forming briefly, Mick handled the pain pretty well. Twenty minutes later Ben was swabbing his wrist down, and it was done.

Mick just stared, lost in it for a minute. He thanked Ben, gave him a hug, and paid him with a couple of pairs of sunnies. It was clear the eagle on his wrist was gonna mean a lot to him in years ahead. He looked at his other wrist and started thinking about something a little less sentimental and a little more practical for his next one.

“I might get ‘Coolangatta Sands Hotel: admit one’ tattooed on my other wrist.” //SEAN DOHERTY

The madness.

If you told someone you were on a stunning tropical island, expenses paid, on good money, staying at a luxurious pad, and then added that you were going mad, they'd think you really were nuts.

I can't even explain it, but we are all starting to wig out; cameramen, surfers and writers. I think it's the waiting, the agenda, the cause, the event that seems like it will never happen. (Of course, foul weather doesn't help either, on days like this we may as well be in Moscow during winter). If we were just here cruising, it would be different, but we are in The Waiting Period. The Maui Pro is melting, on call for a waveless horizon. God help the World Championship Tour surfers, who have to endure the endless "hang on" calls and then are expected to actually perform as high level athletes, often in heartbreakingly unclimactic conditions.

Stephanie Gilmore is in waiting mode now too, sleeping, checking the surf, eating, going for coffee, playing guitar, drinking cocktails, drinking more coffee, surfing dribbly slop at Frontskis, exchanging insults with travel partner Jessie Miley-Dyer, insults with photographers, sleeping.
We check the swell reports every hour and they just get less promising. There are endless rumours of "looks good for Friday" "looks good for Saturday" and the rest, but I can't see it. I don't know which magical buoy reports they are looking at, but all I see is small swell from exactly the wrong direction, extending way past the Waiting Period. These contests have spin doctors that put Bush's team to shame.

The funny thing is, I'm not even here to shoot the contest, I'm here to shoot Stephanie and Jessie. And while either of them remain in the event (at this point Steph is the sole survivor) I too remain here, stalking them, praying for them to go for a surf even though there is none. Watching and waiting for lifestyle gold from the poor girls, or trying to conjure some up in the bleak weather and hope they are into it. And trying to talk some sense into myself that where I am, both geographically and in my life in general, is heaven. I am so fortunate, so blessed to be a working photographer on assignment in Hawaii, that I should be pinching myself, or maybe punching myself for ever forgetting my lucky lot for a second. That's the trap of the personal paradigm, where the bubble walls can be amazingly opaque. And would you believe it, the sun has just broken through, right now this second, and bang !!! My paradigm instantly shifted to a new perch, a new view of a new world.

I'm gonna pick up a camera this instant and hit that world, while I realise just how beautiful it is. //DAVE SPARKES