The drive to Bells this morning presented more obstacles than usual.

During the other 50 weeks of the year it’s generally a blundering kangaroo or a paunchy middle-aged road cyclist in mustard lycra who might try their best to wind up under your front suspension. This morning it was uprooted letterboxes, commandeered wheelbarrows and the abandoned wreckage of cars wrapped around trees after aborted sauced-up drives home.

Good Friday, it seemed, had been an unholy night of celebration across Torquay and car loads of Melbournians, who’d swapped their drab existence for a slightly less drab weekend at Bells Beach, had, it seemed, arrived. The usually snoozy ambience of this sleepy backwater was shattered throughout the night as drunken zombies in the valleys adjoining Bells walked the streets, looking more for mischief than brains. Welcome to Bells on the Easter weekend.

Many of the aforementioned living dead resurfaced at the contest site, albeit post-lunch, when round three of the girls event was run today. The surf was far from stellar, and you only had to look as far as the first heat to see why.

Here was a girl who’d surfed this event for 19 years looking like she was surfing her first. There wasn’t much Layne Beachley could do about it though. Facing one-to-two foot mushy onshore Rincon, no formula learned over the course of two decades was going to buy her a wave in her heat against rookie Sally Fitzgibbon.

“That was embarrassing,” said Layne, chuckling, after drying off. “That was not the way I wanted to go out at Bells Beach.” She’s seen Bells like this before though, and the secret to surfing Bells is knowing that sometimes a heat like that is just going to happen to you.

If the bug doesn’t bite between now and Hawaii, Layne plans to only surf in her own contest. “I’m not going to do a John Farnham and come back for ‘one night only’ for the next five years,” she said later in reference to the mull-eted Australian crooner of the 1980s who simply refuses to pack it up.

The current world champ, Steph Gilmore, didn’t set the world on fire in her heat against 14-year-old wildcard Nikki Van Dijk but still somehow managed to leave the water with a nine and an eight. It wasn’t silky Steph – her board looked a little long and bladey for the limp, mutating waist-high sections – but she’s going to be there on finals day, and whenever that’s happened in the last two years she’s generally won. The girls event has to finish by Monday, so all the signs are there that it will wrap tomorrow.

The grey pall that usually descends on this event about this time, as the swell forecast grows progressively bleaker has, this time around however, well and truly lifted. There’s gonna be waves. Hallelujah [the last Easter reference, I promise]. The swell bumps up Tuesday and holds all the way through to Friday, so the 32 guys left in the field after the first-day carnage can all look forward to better days.

RIP CURL WOMEN’S PRO BELLS BEACH ROUND 2 RESULTS:

Heat 1: Coco Ho (HAW) 15.66, Nikki Van Dijk (AUS) 12.50, Melanie Bartels (HAW) 11.70

Heat 2: Rebecca Woods (AUS) 12.00, Paige Hareb (NZL) 10.90, Jessi Miley-Dyer (AUS) 10.44

RIP CURL WOMEN’S PRO BELLS BEACH ROUND 3 RESULTS:

Heat 1: Sally Fitzgibbons (AUS) 16.50 def. Layne Beachley (AUS) 9.56

Heat 2: Jacqueline Silva (BRA) 10.83 def. Amee Donohoe (AUS) 8.17

Heat 3: Paige Hareb (NZL) 14.17 def. Coco Ho (HAW) 9.83

Heat 4: Stephanie Gilmore (AUS) 17.83 def. Nikki Van Dijk (AUS) 7.60

Heat 5: Silvana Lima (BRA) 15.53 def. Alana Blanchard (HAW) 14.17

Heat 6: Rebecca Woods (AUS) 15.00 def. Chelsea Hedges (AUS) 13.84

Heat 7: Samantha Cornish (AUS) 11.16 def. Bruna Schmitz (BRA) 6.33

Heat 8: Sofia Mulanovich (PER) 10.00 def. Rosanne Hodge (ZAF) 7.57

RIP CURL WOMEN’S PRO BELLS BEACH QUARTERFINAL MATCH-UPS:

QF 1: Sally Fitzgibbons (AUS) vs. Jacqueline Silva (BRA)

QF 2: Paige Hareb (NZL) vs. Stephanie Gilmore (AUS)

QF 3: Silvana Lima (BRA) vs. Rebecca Woods (AUS)

QF 4: Samantha Cornish (AUS) vs. Sofia Mulanovich (PER)