"Back in my day..."

Groms, pay no heed to the old blokes when they start raving about their youth. All surfers over thirty are lying and deceiving scoundrels. Everything they say about the past is an untruth. Or, to put it a nicer way: They are so honest they tell the truth about things that didn't happen.

The best local swell that I can remember is the famous July 2001 swell. For three days the whole east coast from Noosa to Eden pumped under a ruler-sharp 8 to 10 foot east swell fanned by light offshore winds with clear blue skies. Everywhere was experiencing Hall of Fame conditions and even the coolest of cats were throwing 'best ever' calls around without anybody blinking.

The following month Sean Doherty wrote an article about the swell in Tracks. In it he asked many older surfers how the July 2001 swell stacked up against other historical swells. To that question, Terry Fitzgerald said of Narrabeen, which had been double-overhead, offshore and ridiculously perfect, "It broke like it used to".

When it comes to remembering waves the typical refrain from the old boys is that it was better back in the day. But to be fair, we're all prone to flights of fancy when reflecting on ye olde days and there's a couple of explanations for this.

So excuse me while I don the amateur labcoat...

The first explanation is what neuroscientists call 'reminiscence bump', a phenomena that explains why people can more readily recall events that occurred between the ages of 10 and 25. It describes why it is easier for older people to recall events during the reminiscence bump period than events that happened more recently. And for most surfers the years between 10 and 25 are when they spend most of their time in the surf, before families and careers start interfering.

Another explanation is the connection between memory and emotion. Memory retention is greatly increased if an event is attached to a rich emotion. A six second, spine-tingling barrel gets instant recall even 10 years after the fact while an ordinary nosedive gets tossed into the dusty corners of your cortex. A day of excellent 8-10 offshore perfection - the sort of day a surfer lives for - remains near the top of the memory pile while the many days of underwhelming conditions or abject flatness shift toward the back. They have no associated emotion to attach a memory for later recollection.

That is why when we reflect upon our surfing lives we tend to compress all the sessions we've ever had into just the ones that stand out. And they are the ones that have emotion attached – the good sessions. So a cursory recollection amounts to just the good days while the many uneventful, mundane and ordinary sessions are overlooked. The result is a version of history skewed toward the positive.

So that's what's going on up top, what about out in the ocean. Perhaps the old boys are right? Perhaps the weather is changing and the surf was better back in the day?

Well, amateur labcoat still intact, that doesn't appear to be the case. In fact, according to a recent study published in Science, the opposite appears to be true: the surf is actually getting bigger now. The authors of the report have found that ocean wind speeds and wave heights around the world have increased over the past quarter of a century. The ocean off south-western Australia, they found, is reporting extreme wave heights (the top 1% of wave heights) to be a metre larger than it was in 1985. By a process called 'wishful extrapolation' I'd say that transfers to larger surf on all Australian beaches.

So groms, ignore the old boys with their sketchy memories and rose coloured glasses. When it comes to the surf, your future is looking rosy indeed.