Daily Mail, By MATT FORTUNE, 16th August 2010
We've all splashed water over our face in a bid to wake up in the morning. But one Australian man has taken it to the extreme.
Standing perilously close to the edge of a rock face, the fearless individual stood head-on with Mother Nature as she threw giant whitewater waves at North Bondi Beach in Sydney yesterday.
Brave but foolish, he was soaked by the explosion of water which erupted over Ben Buckler headland in the Australia's New South Wales region.
Head on: The man stands on the edge of the rock face, bracing himself as the awesome power of a massive wave near Australia's Bondi beach
The man had climbed over protective bars several feet further back from the edge in his pursuit of the ultimate wake-up call and was fortunate to survive as the area was engulfed by water.
Right across New South Wales, coastline was battered by similar waves ramped up by 50mph winds.
Sydney Harbour was turned into a no-go zone for ferries after the Australian Bureau of Meteorology issued warnings of impending gales for most of the coast.
Dangerous: The man had climbed over a set of protective bars further back from the edge of the rock face
Specialist marine forecasting and surf camera service Coastalwatch said a rare weather event and the closeness of the low pressure system was the reason for the ocean's violence.
'We had something called 'captured fetch' happen and it's pretty rare here,' chief forecaster Ben McCartney said.
Waves are created when wind blows over the a certain area of the seas. This is called the fetch. A 'captured fetch' happens when a storm moves in the same direction of a fetch, so that the wind keeps pushing the same waves following them.
