For months, the images filtered through my phone like slow poison – leafy sea dragons belly-up in the brown foam, stingrays limp on the shore, fish gasping for breath in a sea that could no longer support them. A coastline I’ve surfed, loved, and learned from was dying, and I could do nothing but watch.
My heart lodged itself in my throat. This is my worst nightmare: an ocean so sick she can’t carry her life anymore. And the science is clear—this isn't a mystery. It's climate change made visible, made visceral. A perfect storm of warm water, sunlight and excess nutrients, turbocharged by a heating planet, giving rise to a toxic algal bloom – Karenia mikimotoi – stretching two times the size of Canberra across South Australia's coast.
Enough watching. I needed to go. To witness. To listen. To stand beside the coastal communities who were breathing this in, day after day.
Our Surfers for Climate crew touched down as the algae filled St Vincent Gulf. First stop: Moana Beach. A brown scum blanketed the shore. The smell? Fermented seaweed and sorrow. Tiny crabs, fish, even stingrays lay tangled in the foam, their outlines barely visible under the death-drenched seagrass. Within half an hour, my eyes stung, my chest tightened. This wasn’t abstract. This was real.
Just inland from the beach, we sought shelter with the crew at Daily Grind – a family-owned surf and skate shop in McLaren Vale. Boards stacked like candy on the walls. A warm coffee in hand. Groms curled on couches, telling us how they hadn’t surfed in weeks. How the ocean they love had made them sick. How they didn’t know when – or if – it would feel safe to paddle out again.
Further south, the water looked clearer but the impact lingered. Warning signs at every beach. Locals surfing through scratchy throats and itchy eyes just to feel human again. Thirty of us hit a corner near Victor Harbor for a wintery session. The swell was up, the wind offshore, but you could feel it in the lineup – this hollow space between stoke and sickness. After the session I too was hit with a wave of minor flu-like symptoms for the next 24 hours – just a small taste of a South Australian surfer’s reality.
