SB_issue55_Digital

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