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“When I first moved up here, I pretty much only surfed<br />
Mudjimba and Red Gate. I surfed there pretty much every<br />
morning on a shortboard. Now, I surf from Cotton Tree to<br />
Alexandra Headland, and it’s just beautiful.”<br />
Shay said her love of surfing truly came to fruition when she<br />
was 17, after her and a bunch of her dancing friends decided<br />
in the classic Aussie teenage spirit to skip school, grab some<br />
Macca’s and go down to the beach.<br />
“We pulled into one of my friend’s driveways to get some<br />
boogie boards and towels, but when she opened her garage,<br />
there was like 20 surfboards and all of this surf equipment.<br />
“Next thing you know, we are putting surfboards on top of<br />
my car. I didn’t have roof racks, so they were piled wax-down<br />
on my Mitsubishi Lancer – it was a terrible mess. We just took<br />
some rope, put it over the roof, looped it into the car and shut<br />
the doors. My friends had to hold the ropes tight in the back<br />
seat – it was very safe as you can see.<br />
“We drove them down to the water. I can’t even remember<br />
if we had leg ropes, but we paddled out in our dancing<br />
leotards and just caught whitewash – we didn’t even realise<br />
surfing was meant to be hard. We popped up without even<br />
practicing and it just kind of happened. I was on a San Juan,<br />
which was like an original board from the 70’s or something,<br />
and I didn’t even know it was.”<br />
Shay and her friends continued to paddle out a few times<br />
at sunrise and sunset every week, to the point where they<br />
skipped school for almost the whole year of 11 and 12.<br />
Shay’s natural tendency to get swept into the limelight and<br />
entangled in tricky situations had already started when she<br />
was young and growing up in Cronulla on the southern<br />
outskirts of Sydney.<br />
“When I started surfing, my parents were like, ‘what is this<br />
foreign sport?’ You’d think a Cronulla family would surf, but<br />
my brother was into soccer, my dad was into golf, my mum<br />
was a jazzercize teacher and I was a ballerina. So for me to<br />
be on a skateboard or a surfboard was very naughty.<br />
“My ballet teacher always made examples of why ballerinas<br />
should only do ballet. So I kind of stopped going. I actually<br />
took my ballet a lot less seriously because I realised I couldn’t<br />
do all the sports I wanted to. I started meeting some really<br />
cool people surfing, so I just wanted to stick with that. It was<br />
nice.”<br />
Despite all sorts of predicaments seeming to gravitate<br />
towards Shay, no matter what is thrown her way, she always<br />
manages to overcome it. We aren’t just saying that either.<br />
Many of Shay’s stories have so many unpredictable plot<br />
twists and bizarre coincidences that we struggled to keep<br />
our jaws from hanging open and our hands from covering our<br />
faces while listening to them.<br />
For example, her passion for being a yoga teacher flourished<br />
when she was 23 after she met someone on her trip to<br />
Thailand. Shay said their relationship was supposed to be a<br />
casual holiday fling, but by the end of her trip they just didn’t<br />
want to part.<br />
“After coming back to Australia I started flying over a couple<br />
of times a year and we kept coming up with these business<br />
ideas so we could stay together. One day he called me and<br />
said he’s going to open up a yoga school, and he wanted me<br />
to run it with him. I loved yoga, and I’d already done 20 years<br />
of ballet, but I didn’t know how to teach it. So he flew me<br />
over to Bali and I did my yoga teacher training there. I learnt<br />
so much – it really changed my life.<br />
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