Real Axe Starring Creed McTaggart: West Oz

Creed McTaggart doesn’t fall victim to the red-eye strain of travel. He relishes it. While other travelling surfers need their time at home after a year living either side of the zips, Creed’s drawing air lines to new waves, new locations. It’s the Real Axe grind which he and best mate / house mate / filmer Toby Cregan love and document here. But even so, Creed’s gotta go home every now and then. And in this episode, we land in West Oz.

You already knew that Creed’s from West Oz, right? He’s a product of Margaret River: He knifes big North Point barrels, and he jumps big into windblown chunks. And both of those types of surfing feature heavily in this episode. “The waves are best in the West of Oz,” says Creed. “It gets props. It’s nowhere near as blown out as the East Coast because it’s not as big. But don’t bother going surfing in West Oz unless you’ve got a car. In the South West particularly it’s at least an hour’s drive between surf spots. I’ll wake up at 5:30 am and I won’t go surfing until 11am because I’ve lost myself to the road. Sure, there’s lots of options, but get a session under the belt. Now that I live in Byron, when I’m in WA I’ll go surfing as much as I can and don’t fuck around. Because I don’t live there anymore, I get excited surfing good waves. You’ll get that excitement when you travel to a new place, that’s the beauty of it.”

Another rule of thumb about WA from Creed? If you’re headed there, don’t always feel like you’ve gotta consult the swell charts. For the trip you see here, the crew didn’t look at one forecast, and happened to roll up to swell of the year (which probably won’t happen to you, but it does happen). They’d later have similar luck further south: “This episode is just West Oz, a prelude into the road trip to South Australia,” says our filmmaker, Toby Cregan. “We hugged the coast the whole back from Margies to Byron, it took a month!”

While the NZ episode was rather surf-centric, the boys couldn’t go to Creed’s hometown with offering slightly more depth in this instalment. “It’s a little bit more insightful,” says Tobes. “It starts a little cheesy and you could probably cry to it (laughs), it shows Creed’s teddy bear side. Then it goes into punk cause he’s like… an ‘edgy’ dude (more laughter). Then it goes back to being a pussy because that’s what he is. It’s Creed in his zone. Back to the source. He’s always pretty chill and relaxed, but it’s like any time you go home, you’re just more relaxed. We were stopping to chat to people the whole time. Which I tried to get across in the clip a bit – all Creed does is go surfing, and does the exact same shit as everyone else, he just looks edgy (laughs). He’s a sweetheart.”