It's a natural ampitheatre in the middle of a city, with no escaping scrutiny from the sand. Merewether Surfboard Club is world-class competitive and its members rule the break with a silent code built on ability. Prove yourself and you might be welcomed. Kook it and you'll never show your face there again.

When big swells arrive - like the one that poured in on Friday morning and stayed until Monday afternoon - it's one of the few places on the Hunter coast that can handle the full might of the ocean in such a mood.

"As good as I've seen Merewether": Charlestown photographer Michael Delore captures the epic swell

Saturday shaded Friday as the biggest and best of the four days. A southerly disrupted the perfection on Sunday before the westerly wind meant Monday was again insanely good and still very big.

Newcastle architect Shane Blue, the surfer and photographer behind the Novocastrian Waves Youtube channel, filmed Saturday's Merewether action from Henderson Parade and the hill next to the surf club. One compilation was picked up by the popular webcam and surf forecasting site Coastal Watch, as part of its coverage of the swell: "Day of Days, Merewether Saturday as Good as it Gets.

Blue said about 30 surfers were in the water early on Saturday, with the number dwindling steadily as the swell grew even bigger. An armada of spectators hooted and hollered at the titanic battle taking place out to sea, as line after line of ruler-sharp swell, brushed clean by the westerly wind, rolled in and broke across the outer part of the point, known as Third Reef.

Mick Adam, Mark Richards's great mate and the face behind the counter at Newcastle West's Slimes surfshop when he's not in the water, had no trouble putting Big Saturday up there with anything he's seen over his decades at Merewether.

"Merewether can be a burger sometimes," Adam said. A burger is a slow, fat wave that doesn't deliver on its early promise. "But this was amazing, it was ridiculously good. It was hollow, it was tubing where it doesn't always barrel, and it was just so clean, the wind wasn't too strong. It had everything."

Judging wave size is an inexact science. Most surfers still talk in feet rather than metres and Adam said Saturday was "easily 10 to 12 foot, 15 foot on some of the sets".

Big days inevitably lead to comparisons with previous swells. Exactly four years ago, on May 24 and 25, 2016, the first of two similarly large swells poured into Newcastle, with Ryan Callinan a standout, as he was at the weekend. A fortnight later, on June 7, another a huge easterly swell left Newcastle Point looking like an Indonesian reef break, with similarly long lefts at Dixon Park.

Paddling out in such conditions is an heroic act that proved too much for many at the weekend. Adam said "special mention" was needed for Merewether icon Tim "Spider" Lawrie, a grandfather, aged 65, with a hip replacement who did what surfers a third of his age couldn't do, and made it out the back on his own without hitching a ride on a jetski.

One ski put to good use on Saturday belonged to Sanbah surf shop owner Rhys Smith, who with his mate Paul Mountford took turns towing themselves and a bunch of mates into big Third Reef bombs.

Smith, 35, the son of Warren Smith of Surfest fame, said he got washed back in three times while "struggling to get out" on Friday.

Had coronavirus not put world sport on hold, Merewether pro Ryan Callinan, rated #14 on the World Surfing League's men's Championship Tour, might have been in Indonesia, getting ready for the Quiksilver Pro at G-Land in Java, postponed from its original schedule of June 4 to 14.

Instead, he was out at his home break on Friday, along with fellow touring pro Leo Fioravanti, from Italy, ranked #31 on the WSL rankings. Like his mentor, 11-time world champ Kelly Slater, Fioravanti has been stuck in Australia since arriving for opening event on the Gold Coast, which was cancelled a fortnight before its March 26 starting date.

Adam said Callinan's best wave was "crazy". So was one caught on the Saturday by the young man beside him in the Slimes shop, Tim Dickson, whose late and vertical takeoff into a five-second barrel on a double overhead wall is posted on the boardriders' club Facebook page.

"The best waves I've ever seen at home," was Dickson's description. Merewether was the go-to spot in Newcastle, but swells like this trigger strike missions to lesser-known places either side of Newcastle. Bigger boards are pulled out of their covers and cars packed the night before. Locals are fiercely protective of their home breaks and secret spots. "Don't ask, don't tell" sums it up, but everyone still pores over the photos posted on Instagram and Facebook, looking for tell-tale landmarks.

That's why my photos aren't here. At the height of coronavirus lockdown, I'd been gripped with nostalgia for a place I loved as a teenager, but hadn't ridden for more than 20 years.

It takes a lot of swell to break, so an old surfing buddy promised to tell me the next time it looked likely. We'd both expected it would take a lot longer than it did for the moment to arrive.

Just after 7am on Saturday I was heading along his home town sands when one of three surfers in the water dropped into a solid, picture-perfect right-hander and stood deep in the tube until it overtook him and detonated into waist deep water, snapping his shiny white board in half. Bigger than it looks, I thought to myself.

At 60 (and never the best of surfers at 20), I kept walking south for something smaller. I found it. The worst that happened in five surfs over three days was having a booty ripped off one foot in a wipeout. I had to work on Sunday, but that night, when I saw five massive walls of whitewater marching out of the dark towards the Bar Beach headlands, Monday was looking good again.

Surfer, photographer and IT specialist Ben Frawley said it was "the biggest and most perfect southerly swell I've seen in 30 years of living in Newcastle".

"The sweep was so strong that only a very lucky few managed to paddle out," Frawley said. "If Rhys hadn't have offered his jet ski taxi service for a lift out, there would have been far fewer people in the lineup."

Jackson Baker, Ben Walsh, Matthew Tynan, Zac Tinson and a lone bodysurfer, John Miller, were some of the people whose exploits caught attention.

Smith made international headlines back in 2007 when he snuck into the surf at Nobbys Beach after the Pasha Bulker had been washed ashore, catching half-an-hour's worth of waves breaking off the hull of the grounded ship with a film crew from Waves magazine before the authorities ordered him in.

Plenty of good surfers have drowned surfing big waves. In the past decade or so, a hard core of specialist big-wave surfers have taken the sport to new heights, with jet skis, inflatable westsuits and supreme fitness regimes allowing the cream of them to take on such monsters as Nazare in Portugal, where American Garrett McNamara rode a 100-foot wave in 2013 into the record books.

For most surfers, anything over six to eight feet is a supreme challenge, and while age might make for more experience, it also tends to rob you of skill. So surfing becomes as much about camaraderie as anything. On Monday morning, my mate paddled out with me for his first surf in eight years. The surf shop was shut so he'd fashioned a webbed cargo strap into a leg rope for his vintage twin fin. He rode the first wave across the point like he'd never left it.

Later that morning two more faces materialised out of the rain. Another mate. He didn't surf any more, either, but his daughter did. As he watched from the rocks, the three of us sat in the water, radiantly happy at having this wilderness wave to ourselves.

Everyone else who paddled out anywhere those four days would have had the same stoked feeling, and the same paddling aches. It was one of those swells.

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