I won’t lie to you. I really hate getting up. I love my bed, I cherish my sleep and the daily transition from slumber to a state of awakeness pains me dearly. It’s always been the same ever since I was a baby, in the first few years of my life I apparently only woke up to eat and poop, sometimes at the same time, a few decades later nothing much has changed…
The simple fact is I love being horizontal. There is only one thing in the world that makes me wake up and jump out of bed like a CIA torturer has electrified the mattress. One pure reason: just give me a reasonable guarantee of good waves and a breath of offshore wind and I’m up before the sun has even thought about cracking its head over the horizon. Nothing else has this effect on me not even a fire alarm coupled with an overly pungent whiff of acrid smoke.
“It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom.” Aristotle, Greek philosopher bloke who knew his onions.
Of course that reasonable guarantee of good conditions is a lot easier to come by these days, with web cams, swell buoys and a plethora of surf forecasting systems at our disposal. Not to mention mini-computery iPhone devices that you can hide under your pillow.
The real super dawny days are easy to spot, generally the second day of a long range swell, after a day of big, leading edge, unruly, wobbly swell you know the more lined up, clean, perfect waves are coming on the morrow.
We had one of these days a few weeks ago. I’d been chasing the aforementioned unruly swell without much luck on the first day and after hundreds of miles and what seemed like a whole day in the car punctuated only by a few hours shooting on a lacklustre reef somewhere I collapsed in a delightfully chintzy £35 a night hotel room. The kind of hotel that doesn’t even have a star rating, just a rusty bracket where the star sign use to hang. It did have some snazzy free biscuits that sufficed for dinner, the walls were thick enough to mute the sound of the neighbours dumping and humping (not the same time I hope) and it had a sea view so it wasn’t all bad.
The forecast for the next day was perfect: three to four foot, sunny and offshore- the optimum conditions for Cornwall’s beach breaks.
“Morning glory is the best name, it always refreshes me to see it.” Henry David Thoreau, Early pioneer of environmentalism and log cabin fan.
Of course the night before a dawny is always tricky. You do your best to become a sullen hermit, blowing off invites to barbecues, avoiding drinks with friends and generally switching your phone off. All so you can get some of that magical sleep. Of course it never happens, the excitement of knowing the surf is going to be pumping taps into the elusive feeling you used to get as a kid on Christmas Eve.
The end result is you lie there staring at the ceiling tiles hour after hour as your sleep time ticks inevitably down on the cheap red LED alarm clock.
As animals we are prone to respond to our circadian rhythms: sleep when it’s dark out and hunt when it’s light. In these latitudes at this time of year it doesn’t get dark until gone 10 and starts getting light at silly o’clock. British Summer Time is a right twat for that.
Anyhoose. Exhaustion takes over sometime around three o’clock, and you get a few fitful hours sleep until the orangey-purpleness of first light worries the window. From this point on sleep is out of the question … the dawny is on. Thanks to the cheap hotel being built before anyone cared about land prices in Cornwall the sea view is a killer. Clean three-foot lines are rolling in and the dawny buggering sea mist is nowhere to be seen. It’s at this point you realise you’re exposing your naked self, full frontal, meat and two veg to anyone else daft enough to be up at this hour and go put some clothes on.
“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive- to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.” Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor and the cool old dude in Gladiator.
As the fiery rim of the sun starts peaking over the moors I’m in the car and getting an eyeball check on the surf. The waves are for once, as predicted, the dawny has been vindicated. Corduroy lines are stacking to the horizon, there’s not a cloud in the sky and the wind is a light zephyr from the south-east. Of course more often than not a well-planned dawny comes to naught. The swell will have buggered off overnight, the wind made an unplanned switch to hell onshore and to add insult to injury it’ll be blowing in a heavy sea fog. This is normal, this is why I don’t dawny unless I feel in me bones the day is going to be epic or near as damn it.
First things first on the dawn run: a decent hit of caffeine. Getting a decent coffee at silly o’clock has always been a problem for those of us with a coffee addiction and liking for early surfs. Thankfully the arches that are golden now open at daft o’clock. So there is time for a sneaky cup of java and the ultimate in drive thru breakfast cuisine: the double pork pattie, cheese and chicken ovulation sandwich known by its trade name as a Sausage & Egg McMuffin.
From there it’s onto the beach. This is why we dawny: because there’s a) no one in the sea and b) you can park where you like, nailing those elusive free spots, sticking it to the council’s obscene parking charges and bully boy clampers. To borrow an awful cliche it’s a win-win situation.
The world’s a magical place at dawn you owe it to yourself to see the sunrise…
. DAWN FACTS
•Dawn is defined as the time that marks the beginning of twilight before sunrise. Recognisable by the presence of weak sunlight while the sun is still below the horizon.
•The duration of which varies wildly depending on latitude, lasting mere minutes on the equator to hours in the polar regions.
There are technical definitions of the different stages of dawn:
•Astronomical dawn: the moment after which the sky is no longer completely dark; formally defined as the time at which the sun is 18˚ degrees below the horizon in the morning.
•Nautical dawn: the time at which there is enough sunlight for the horizon and some objects to be distinguishable; formally, when the sun is 12˚ degrees below the horizon in the morning.
•Civil dawn: that time at which there is enough light for objects to be distinguishable, so that outdoor activities can commence, formally, when the sun is 6˚ degrees below the horizon in the morning.
The conversation slash kerfuffle generated by Mick’s run in with the Snake made it timely to unearth this piece from the archives. So many internet warriors are convinced they know exactly where it is posting grid refs with certainty. Hand on heart we don’t know, as the story goes only the handful of folks involved know, and we don’t really want to either.
Knowing moments like this are out there is the point. Not a Google Earth search blabbing lots of potential sandbars in war zones or banging on about inevitable crowds and giveaways when there’s not a landmark to be seen. It’s sandy, they drove in and that’s all there is too it. And FYI it was flat on the date of the shoot in the majority of the popular FB theorists picks. It could be anywhere in the tropics. It might break once every five years. Who knows. That’s all you need to know. It does raise the question of ethics (not Essex, we won’t mention the superbank there) in surfing. Which the following essay explores:
Have you got a secret spot?
A real secret spot. One that you never, ever, EVER, mention to other people. A spot that is only surfed by you or just you and a tight local crew? A wave that’s never been on Facebook, Instagram, in a guidebook, a TV doc, a magazine or pimped in a video?
Didn’t think so.
You’re too late. That ship has sailed my friend. The era of secret surf havens has all but passed (well it had, thanks for proving me wrong Mick).
The reasons: Google Earth, people can’t keep their gobs shut, everyone has a cameraphone with them at all times now and in the last few years the all pervading tentacles of Facebook and Instagram have blown the lid off some spots once deemed sacred. Not to mention the old school: 50 years worth of surf magazines, guidebooks, films and surfer fish tales not all of which were that subtle. Add in the exotic, remote, hard to access, previously awesome, feral secret spots being colonised by expensive pay-to-play surf camps and safari boats and you can see we’re in a bit of creek/paddle situation.
Back in the day (as in last millennia when the years began with a 19) nobody was particularly bothered by the concept of the ‘secret spot’. They existed, of course, but they were secret, and devoted, small local crews knew how to keep it that way.
Crowd pressure wasn’t an issue you see. Surfing was more of a brotherhood back then. You used to honk at another car with boards on the roof and throw a shaka. As it was honestly a rare thing to see other surfers away from the marquee beaches.
Wherever surfers gathered (subtle code for ‘the pub’) they would talk story and share information verbally. This was pre-internet. Information moved at a, from our current perspective, a geologically slow pace. Back then was pre-guidebooks. Accessing Mr Google from a pocket computer and having satellite imagery at your fingertips was a long way off. So being a hardcore British surfer was an ongoing quest. A mission to get the most out of your surfing: to understand the squiggly lines of the weather charts, to learn new spots and figure out when and where to go and to make the most of any available swell. There were no forecast websites. Just a few phone lines like PJ’s. So it was a hell of a lot harder.
Every little bit of info built on your personal knowledge base, maps were scrawled on, journals kept, and when, by virtue of this and some exploration, you found a spot the locals were cool: “We don’t mind you surfing here, just keep it to yourself, eh?”
It was a more caring and sharing environment. Surfing wasn’t cool. It didn’t feature in every second advert on TV. It was cold and hard. Wetsuits weren’t anywhere near as flexible, comfortable and warm as they are now. If you surfed you had weeping sores under your arm pits and around your neck. Surf schools didn’t exist on every beach. People just learnt the slow, painful, hard way, solo, by trial and error. Committed to buying a, usually totally unsuitable, dog of a secondhand board to learn on and persisted for months until it was mastered. People surfed for themselves. If you managed to persist and master the art you were welcomed by your fellow surfers with relatively open arms. If you were born after the mid-eighties odds on you won’t ever remember it being this way. You only know surfing post its mainstream tipping point.
Back at the dawning of the nineties I was at uni. Sure I had a Ned’s Atomic Dustbin inspired haircut, lumberjack shirts de-rigueur, just like Kurt and Eddie, but everything was surfing. Mid-Wales where I spent five blissful years is home to a bunch of high quality but ridiculously fickle waves, they only break properly once, or in a good season, twice a year. Deep local knowledge ensured you scored. Scouring the coast found you spots.
The recently released all-singing all-dancing Stormrider Guide that everyone was frothing about had handily missed out this corner of the world so all was well. For some unknown reason in their eyes there was no surf between North Pembrokeshire and North Wales? But no one complained.
Most of the areas waves were not in anyway secret, one of the mags published a comprehensive guide in 1989 (the reason I picked that uni in the first place), the old classic British Surfing Association handbook had basic maps and guides to the known spots and that was fine not to mention most of the main waves being in plain view from the coast road. Who would ever drive all the way up there through the tortuous mountain roads to surf anyway?
The few secluded gems were surfed by the tight local crew and our devoted handful of students. Max number in the water at the any spot was ten people, generally less, if work schedules/lectures cooperated. Generally you would surf with the few friends you shared a lift with. Or often by yourself. This was cool, some of the spots had tricky access over private land and this was agreed with the landowner. Crowds wouldn’t work.
A new uni year and a new crop of surfers arrived at the college. Doubling the number of surfers in town. No one let the secrets slip. A year passed without any of them finding out, you’d think they’d notice how the main locals always disappeared when the swell got good, but no.
My final college year started, with a strong swell, September sunshine and offshores, we were straight on our favourite secret spot.
The dismay on our, and the locals, faces as we arrived at the, remote, limited parking, gravel patch to see the college canoe club unloading along with ten other mini-mal riding, newbie surfers was palpable. The bare arses and blaring car-stereos only made it worse. The farmer was furious. How did this happen? Who blabbed? Turns out another new guidebook had an entry for this, and every other previously secret spot in the area and pretty much every other around the country with grid references, maps the lot.
After the witch-hunt the source was found to be a guy that no longer surfed, but had in the seventies. The author had befriended him over a few pints in the pub and wheedled it out of him. Result: the landowner shut his gates. Access was denied. The rot had started. And this was decades before Google Earth made it impossible to hide…
Knowing that a secret spot is yours and your mates’ special place is a fantastic feeling. Especially if you’ve bothered to pore over the Ordnance Survey maps (for the youth a ‘map’ is like Google Earth but made of paper), hiked the coast, explored on different tides and found them for yourself. It’s not a localism thing. Entry to these places is not restricted. If you’ve done the hard yards and found a spot as well then no one can begrudge you that. It’s just that a careless word to the wrong person can easily snowball to having half of the world at your once secret little nook (the recent example being the madness at a certain low key, but admittedly not totes secret, southwest left that needs a massive black hole swell to get going and breaks good about once a decade).
But the clue for modern times comes in that word: hiking. If a spot has a beach car park, is visible from a coast road or in a town you’re kidding yourself if you could have ever called it a secret spot. Quiet maybe. Under used perhaps. But secret? No. Secret does not mean hiding in plain sight. It’s the tricky thing, especially in the UK, with it being such a small, densely populated land there’s not much wild space left. The Celtic fringes with their sparser populations and greater stretches of wild coast have much more scope for protecting their charmed spots and thankfully still hold on to a few nuggets that have never been in the guides and the photogs respectfully avoid.
As for the guidebooks… It’s a tricky moral question. The ethics of surf guidebooks could be the subject of a degree thesis.
Low Pressure’s Stormrider Guide to Europe, first published in 1992, is the most famous and has spawned a host of imitators.
Anyone that surfs and travels will have used one. They come as standard in any Euro-road-tripping van. The Stormrider, as it’s become known in some circles, opened up new horizons for many.
Originally written with the assistance of prominent locals the contents managed to tactfully avoid giving away many secrets and also included some deliberate red herrings.
It’s debatable now whether the inclusion of some sensitive spots, and particularly Easter egg photos of unlisted spots, was the right way to go in later versions, but that’s water under the bridge.
No one that’s travelled can really put their hand on their heart and say they’ve not got more waves because of it. Surfer Magazine’s Travel Guides to Europe and the world’s other surf regions were legendary and oft photocopied way back when also. Keeping in mind that in the nineties the most important method of communication was the fax machine. This was how we got our pressure charts (£1.50 a pop for four days worth of badly printed isobar info) and how, if desperate you laid out the green for the Surfer guides. But they were comprehensive and thorough. So in reality the surf world was 90 percent explored, mapped and shared before most of you were born.
The ‘respecting the locals wishes’ when it comes to guides is a Pandora’s Box. It depends who you talk to. As with anything there are a spectrum of people: from rabid, anti-everybody dickhead locals that hate everyone, including the other locals through sensible, well-balanced people, to groovy, welcoming ‘the ocean is there for everyone’ dudes. If you try it’s easy to find someone that’s not bothered about sharing. It’s the same today.
Case in point: someone working for a guidebook company contacted me, wanting to use my photos from some remote islands off Norway, I declined. Citing our Norwegian surf guide (and friends) wishes that the photos only went in the magazine without naming the islands, only the country and that they didn’t want any to go to any guidebooks. Fair enough.
The company came back saying they had talked to a local from the islands and he said, ‘It was okay’ to put the islands in their book. And the more ‘spots were in the book the more the crowd can spread out’. Seeing as there weren’t any active locals on the island, or any crowd for that matter I was suspicious.
But it’s not just the guides. The world’s surf magazines have to take the major portion of the blame. Surfer magazine especially, as they actually had an active policy for years of flat out naming spots that, intentionally or not, bulldozed many secret spots off the map.
Madeira was a name unheard of in the surf world until Surfer published Ted Grambeau’s seminal trip there. A new Atlantic island big-wave paradise had been found, the photos were great.
They named the article Jardim do Mar, Portuguese for ‘Garden by the Sea’ and also, bafflingly, the name of the village where the waves were. One look in a decent world atlas and there you go. The Euro surfers that had been secretly tucking into the waves on the island since the seventies were mortified. Irony being not long after the island government ruined the wave with an ill-advised new sea defence system.
Bali and much of Indonesia are the mess they are because of unsubtle surf mag (and originally surf movie) exposure.
Kuta was a small fishing village of wooden shacks until the images of Ulus and Padang reached the outside world in the mid seventies. The film Litmus turned the world on, and indeed myself, to Ireland in the nineties. Even though it had been in the mags since the seventies. But the crowds don’t flock to the cold. People want warm holidays and the debate around sustainable development and surf tourism warrants a PhD in its own right.
But not all secret-spots are ruined by the media. The most famous case being Jeff Clark’s gift of Mavericks to the world. After surfing it for years by himself he took it public. The ‘wave will look after itself’ is the oft-repeated quote. Whether he regrets that decision now is a moot point. It is possible to find good waves and keep it on the down low. Tony Hussein-Hinde found one of the world’s great surf zones by accident after getting shipwrecked in the Maldives. He surfed the North Male atolls by himself, and later with close friends for many years, until he took it public to make a pot of cash. Now, it’s a mess of exclusivity rights and suffering from an entitled crowd of folk paying through the nose for the privilege. The certain right hand draining barrel in Mexico that went from known secret to WCT spot is pretty much unforgivable in long time Centro America devotees eyes. Ironically the sandbank there has gone to hell now anyway. Sands shift. Times change. Just look at Kepa, he breaks new spots all the time, in places that took days of travel and a lot of risk to get to. Waves in remote war torn deserts will stay quiet, no matter how sick the tubes.
One plus side: many discoveries in the last decade that occupy the bulk of the column inches in the mags are off the radar of the travelling surfer. Shipsterns Bluff, The Right, Skeleton Bay and Mullaghmore are all relatively recent ‘not secret anymore’ additions to the surf consciousness, but they won’t get crowded with anyone but pros and filmers trying to keep their mortgage payments going, because they are so damn nasty. Actual life threatening spots pandering to our car-crash-but-must-look mentality only tend to get crowded with watchers not surfers.
In the Britain there’s a strange stalemate. Many of our finest waves are rightly not in the guidebooks, because they are considered secret, which seems at odds with them being:
a) visible from a car on their respective coast roads
and
b) being surfed by all and sundry, photographed and videoed every time they break and pimped out on Instagram the very same evening.
Anyone with a bit of knowledge knows exactly where the secret-not-secret waves are. Locals serve their time and know their local spot best. Hence should get the best waves, as any visitors, hopefully, respectfully wait in line. The ugly spectre of localism, intimidation and bad vibes is not something we want in British surfing. We’re too nice for that and thankfully with a few minor exceptions we’re a good natured bunch.
It’s a simple fact: our good waves are not going to get super-crowded, you need local knowledge of the weather, they are fickle as all hell anyway, often only working for short windows of a few hours and sometimes not at all for a whole season. The last decades upsurge in surfing’s popularity doesn’t take away the fact that 95 percent of surfers are scared shitless of reefs and rocks and will never progress past beach break surfing.
And when I write “super crowded” I mean dysfunctional, Superbank/Mundaka/Uluwatu style crowds of 150+ frothers. 20 people in a line-up is a mellow crowd these days. Something which needs to be appreciated more here as in the grand scheme of things we are very lucky. And year in year out, no matter how many webisodes you see those spots maintain at a constant level. Unless you’ve been surfing for ten years plus you’ve not got anything to compare it to anyway.
There are few true secret spots left. The Internet, iPhones, Google Earth and social media have seen to that. Once a secret is out it snowballs. One FB post can be the surfing equivalent of the butterfly flapping its wings that starts a hurricane.
If you know a secret spot keep it that way. Don’t talk about it; especially online. Don’t brag about it and certainly don’t let someone get you really drunk and tease it out of you.
Don’t scoff, it happens. The location of a carbon-copy of Mundaka in the southern hemisphere, with no surfers for hundreds of miles, was divulged this way, and it’s still secret. You’ve just got to know how to keep your powder dry.
It’s holiday time for the World Tour guys and gals. Traditionally a welcome break for a bit of downtime and once the batteries are recharged some pre-season training. The off season is now a bit more tense as the new fad is hunting for sponsors who dig the idea of putting their sticker on the beak of your board. It’s tough times for a lot of pros unless they’re talented enough to reside in the gilded John John/Jordy/Medina/Tyler stratosphere.
Folks with massive profiles like Josh Kerr have come down on the wrong side of the balance sheet and for the mid-level pros it’s even harder. Budgets aren’t what they were, there’s lots of newer, smaller brands without the clout to afford a large team so the short version: tough times in pro land. Unless you’re actually hitting the finals and getting those oversized cheques on a regular basis.
Sure being paid to surf is a dream job, available to a few charmed souls, and if you’re not bringing huge exposure and value to your brand then why should you get a lavish free lunch? If you’re not in the top 16 on tour or get Dane/Ando/JOB/Dion video views then a six figure salary is unlikely.
Managing a surf team is tricky biz for any brand, ideally you’d want a marquee freesurfer or two, a top CT guy and girl and a big wave dude. Then a top level domestic guy/girl in the countries you operate in to support the local market and media; that and a few promising groms on product/travel deals to help the next gen. Anything past that is going to be frowned at by the accountants department. Every pro needs a niche now, and to be a one man production team, giving the brand a return on their investment is more essential than ever. Seeking out sponsors outside of surfing is also vital.
So is the news that the WSL boss Paul Speaker is kicking out of the WSL a harbinger of doom or just innocent boardroom restructuring? The temporary CEO taking over the reins is Dirk Ziff, the benefactor and co-owner of the WSL with pockets so deep you need caving gear to reach the bottom, it’s his families ample funds and interest that keeps the wheels turning at the WSL. So thanks DZ!
There’s no question the WSL is going in the right direction, sure we were all suspicious of the motives and ‘sports!’ branding when it changed from the ASP to the WSL. The webcasts are now consistent and polished, way ahead of the game when it comes to live streaming even if we headbutt our phones occasionally with the mangled English that sometimes emits from the commentators. The flip side: commentating on a live event is ridiculously hard. Just think about the reality of trying to bring colour, commentary and insight all day when sat in a metal box out the back of the event site watching the same feed as everyone else. It’s a hard job. The whole production team delivers, whatever the locale.
The structure of the WSL is strong, the events are delivering, as to viewing figures, who knows. No surfer watches them all but most of us will tune in for events and surfers that pique our interest. The mainstream will, of course, never tune in. It’s like expecting someone that has no interest in tennis watching every Grand Slam. When personally I might watch Murray in the Wimbledon final.
Read the release below, draw your own conclusion. One key paragraph: I am incredibly excited for our future. The Kelly Slater Wave Company offers a tremendous and unprecedented opportunity for the League to dramatically shift the landscape of high-performance surfing around the world with guaranteed conditions, total fairness for the competitors, greatly enhanced live viewing, and major television coverage at a scheduled time. Our sport’s inclusion in the 2020 Olympics is a testament to the continuing rise of surfing as a global participatory and spectator sport, and will allow WSL athletes to represent and compete for their countries for the first time ever on arguably the greatest sporting stage in the world.
Interesting times lay ahead for professional surfing. We’re not so sure contests in pools are the answer…
WSL RELEASE
To the WSL community:
I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday with family and friends, and is looking forward to 2017. For many of us, the turning of the calendar is a time for reflection, and sometimes, a time for decisions.
Holding co-ownership and CEO positions at the World Surf League over the last five years has been an incredible honor for me. It has also been an awesome task that has required long hours, heavy travel and family sacrifice. It has always been my intention to pass the baton to someone at the right time to lead the next phase of what we have all created. I believe that time is now. With the acquisition of the Kelly Slater Wave Company, we are at a remarkable inflection point in the League’s history and we are ready for a new leader who can guide the organization to even greater accomplishments.
It is with this in mind that I have decided to step down as the CEO of the WSL at the end of January. I will continue to be a co-owner of the League and will work with the ownership group and Board of Directors to ensure a smooth transition until a new CEO is in place. As many of you are aware, Dirk Ziff has been a deeply committed and passionate co-owner of our League and he has agreed to bring that commitment to the role of interim CEO until a new chief executive is brought on board. Dirk and I have a close and collaborative partnership and will work together on a seamless transition.
Nearly five years ago, I journeyed to Australia to meet with the Board of Directors of what was then called the Association of Surfing Professionals to raise the audacious idea of an acquisition. Since the transaction was completed some months later, I have done my best to build an organization with a best-in-class product and culture. It has been a pleasure and a privilege to oversee the transformation of professional surfing into the globally-recognized sport it is today. I have been privileged to share this journey with a great and committed group of people, and I owe so much to all of you who have worked tirelessly to elevate this sport to new heights. Your passion and dedication brought us to where we are today, and will be the driving force of our future success.
Among our many accomplishments together are: the remarkable increase in fan engagement; the highly professional quality of the broadcast; our stellar event production; the various athlete development programs, and the introduction of the sport to a new group of non-endemic corporate partners.
The commitment to our athletes in and out of the water has led us to many firsts for surfing, including: a pension plan for our athletes; the creation of the commissioner’s office to secure the integrity of the sport; prize-purse parity between the men and the women of our championship tour, and the first multi-year surfers’ agreement.
The WSL has pioneered new technologies and digital strategies that have been ahead of the curve, and have led to recognition throughout the sports industry as a first-mover in many areas. With a focus on the fan, surfing is now enjoyed on multiple media platforms around the globe, through traditional broadcast, but most frequently on our mobile app, website, and social media channels. We have also acknowledged the global nature of our sport by delivering our live event broadcast in English, French, Portuguese and Japanese.
I am incredibly excited for our future. The Kelly Slater Wave Company offers a tremendous and unprecedented opportunity for the League to dramatically shift the landscape of high-performance surfing around the world with guaranteed conditions, total fairness for the competitors, greatly enhanced live viewing, and major television coverage at a scheduled time. Our sport’s inclusion in the 2020 Olympics is a testament to the continuing rise of surfing as a global participatory and spectator sport, and will allow WSL athletes to represent and compete for their countries for the first time ever on arguably the greatest sporting stage in the world.
I have enjoyed working with all of you more than you could ever imagine and now I am going to enjoy being a co-owner and a fan and spending time with my family who have been incredibly supportive over the last five years. I will miss you all dearly. You are a dynamic, committed and fun group that in many ways have become an extended family. Please keep up the incredible work.
It’s a simple question that has a personal answer. Mainly coming down to time and circumstance.
There’s no shortage of waves on most coasts from Storm Babs here in the UK so there will be some festive sheltered spot action. Question is can you fit it in? Light is limited after all and there’s a calorific feast with three times your daily allowance imminent. Not to mention a possible Christmas Eve inspired hangover.
If you live up country, sure you’re never more than 80 miles from the coast in the UK, it might be tricky. If you live on the coastal fringe then it’s doable from a geographical point of view. And if you’ve spent many years on the surfable bits of our coast it’s odd how many Christmas Days come with a watery unwrapped present in the form of fun waves.
Considering the feast that’s coming of mutant dry chicken, sorry turkey, assorted veg no one likes, roasties, yorkies (if not you’re missing out, it’s a roast, therefore you can serve yorkies with it) and then assorted puds, cheeses, chocolates and veritable melange of drinks you’d be wise to get some exercise. Stretch those arteries before they get filled with double cream.
Best bet is nipping out for the early. Get in at dawn, it’s guaranteed to be quiet, get an hour in and get home for breakfast and get on with helping out the family. Or at least offer before being banned from the kitchen.
If you’ve already escaped our shores for somewhere warmer then enjoy the experience of festive times on far shores. Being away from the family is weird at first but you’ll soon find a new temporary family of friends for Christmas wherever you are. And barbecue teriyaki turkey for example is a wonderful thing. You are obliged to go for a surf, just for braggin rights if nothing else. And being away means a party that lasts from Christmas Eve until New Years Day…
If you’re alone this Christmas for whatever reason then a surf is a good way to start the day. Reflect on the year gone by and get the blood pumping. It’s your day to do as you please, say hi to folks in the line up and enjoy a welcome day off the rat race.
Whatever your situation, if you can fit in a wave without getting in the dog house then it’s worth it. There’ll be like minded souls out enjoying the calm before the Christmas storm.
Alternatively you could just time your surf for when Frozen is on. If you’ve got kids you’ll have seen it 50 times already…
Take a look out the window. What do you see? Dull, grey, metallic clouds, rain, perhaps sleet, swirls of leaves, rubbish and a confused pigeon being blown around in a circle by the gale that’s been blowing for the last week straight?
If so you might be experiencing a curious meteorological phenomenon known as: winter.
This bizarre seasonal occurrence happens most years. Generally it’s identifiable as the portion of the year that’s grey and not quite as warm as the grey and warm bit of the year known as summer. It is generally a tad windier also.
Other sure signs of it being winter are:
• a lack of tourists at the beach,
• a five percent lessening in the amount of surfers in the water
• your 3mm wetsuit being mildly uncomfortable
• parking not being a problem
• old folk asking if it’s cold out there and insisting you wouldn’t catch them out there and that you aren’t right in the ‘ead.
In the last few years this status quo has shifted, winter has got its claws back, no longer does it hover in the low double digit ˚C for a few months before returning us to the warmth. It has been proper nasty, with snow, ice, 50 year storms, floods, travel woes and lots of other chaos type things that make the rolling news networks very happy.
Not so much the reporters that have to go out and stand in it all day to let you know the weather is still happening. You’d think we have never had a proper winter before. Half a day of snow and everyone runs around with their hands in the air like the world is about to end in a frozen water based apocalypse. The roads turn to ice rinks, the trains curse selling off the snow plough attachment they used to have in the old days and the airports, those bastions of high tech, grind to a halt. No one seems to have suggested adding some little skis on the bottom of the 747s so they can land on our woefully unheated runways or using them oh-so-hot and powerful jet engines as weapons-grade snow blowers. Things have got so bad we are now naming our winter storms also. We look forward to the looming storms this winter eagerly, Nigel, surely will be the worst of them.
If you can make it to the beach through the snow drifts, downed trees, wrong kind of leaves, floods and general winter carnage however then you may be granted with something special: waves. Bruce Brown and his Endless Summer buddies got it all arse about face.
Surfing is all about the Endless Winter. It is the time of year when real swell marches in to our coast (and let’s be honest, pretty much every other coast in the world), the little known deep shelter spots that slumber most of the year come to life and those mysto reefs, that you’ve heard about but never seen, get their one afternoon a decade shot at glory.
Conversely the open beaches become a veritable victory-at-sea scenario: endless walls of white water stretching to the horizon in an unpaddleable morass of spume. You’d have to be an ironman, a sadist or mad to even attempt paddling out at Watergate or similar in winter on a big swell.
Winter separates the men from the boys … Well, those that are actually in the country, and haven’t taken the soft option of going somewhere warm where they can flounce around in silky boardies, drink chai lattes, eat acai bowls and get one of those vitamin D boosting sun tans.
It’s a simple thing winter. You just need a good wetsuit and a sound attitude.
You’ll have noticed I managed to get near the end of this piece without mentioning piss. That’s right. The elephant in the room. The dark secret of winter surfing. Thing is times are changing. Once upon a time, before fluid welded seams and state of the art hooded 6mm suits, drinking a couple of pints of water before a sesh was essential to give you the oh-so-warming flood of urine-based warmth halfway through.
Because you knew by the end of the session a few good drubbings would have flushed you out. These days wetsuits are so good, so tech, so well fitting and sealed that pissing in your suit, whilst still infinitely pleasurable is actually a bit minging. The days of cold water flushes are gone. It’s toasty warm and that pish just works it way right around you so when you get changed your whole body honks of slash. Which ain’t cool.
The only solution is about as welcome as punching yourself in the face: actually pulling your wetty neck out and flushing yourself manually.
I’ll leave it up to you to decide. Just let it be known that the general public would find the concept of smearing themselves in their own urea and then going out into the world, well, a bit odd…
Winter surfing. Can’t beat it eh?!
To deliver a British and Irish film means a lot of road and ferry time…
Oli Adams has been evolving as a surfer and a filmmaker. His latest visual feast, which has the honour of being a Vimeo Staff Pick, Trip the Light documents a British and Irish winter. We asked him what it takes to deliver a class film.
THE PREMISE
I wanted to make a high performance clip that showed the UK and Ireland’s waves and lifestyle in different way. There have been a lot crazy slabby/big wave clips and some moody destination pieces but this was all about surfing fun waves although I did want some bigger conditions in there but last winter there were really no high quality big swells, instead there were a few small windows that only local surfers would have scored while having their eyes on the lineups.
STEPPING UP PRODUCTION
I’m always thinking of ways to move forward with my career. Being from the UK means that you are very low down on people’s radars internationally unless you can make or put out content that is up there internationally in terms of surfing but also largely the level of production. I realised this and looked for a way to get my productions up to that level.
One was to essentially sell project ideas to production companies who then get the project funded through sponsorship. This was long winded option that can work but takes time to get off the ground. The other was to invest in high level equipment myself and make my own films which will in turn help me run my social media better too. Around the time an opportunity came about to buy a second hand RED Epic camera(5K 300 frames a second).
They are super expensive so after a lot of thinking I decided to set it up as hire business and the hire income would eventually pay off the camera while in the mean time I could use it to film my surf projects when it wasn’t on a job. It’s the only camera like this available to hire in Cornwall so it has done loads of mainstream productions for film and TV and has been round the world without me. I’ve also had to invest in computers and hard drives capable of dealing with extremely big files as each quick surf clip is around 3GB. In terms of editing it’s been a massive learning curve and I couldn’t have got through it without the help of pro guys like Timmy Boydell, Mikey Corker and Ollie Fawcett and also Google tutorials. I feel like I’ve been to film school. Also my wife is always a big help as a sounding board plus she always nails the title names.
Timmy Boydell one of the high end film crew.
COMING BACK FROM SURGERY
Since being ill I feel like I’ve been on a constant upward spiral in my surfing from learning to walk and get around again, to getting up on a surfboard for the first time and then as you start loosening up and adding strength you start being able to finally put your mental approach to surfing together with a physical platform of support that wasn’t there pre-op when I was extremely malnourished for most of my career.
I started production on Trip the Light less than a year after my surgery and I can see my surfing improving though the course of filming. It’s great to film often because you can really analyse what you are currently doing but you also have a great reference as to where you were at in that moment. I can really see this in each video I’ve released since I’ve been surfing again. I went to Canada three months post-op, Mentawais five months post-op and then now this one which started filming 11 months afterwards.
Cornish waft. Photo: Luke Gartside.
HOW THE PROJECT WORKED
Basically I started thinking I could work with one filmer on this but after a few months realised that charts in the UK and Ireland are so unpredictable and last minute that even asking every filmer in the UK the night before the trip might end in the waves not being documented. I ended up using six filmers who all nailed their parts apart from one who forgot his tripod after we got a wild ferry in January out to a remote Irish island haha!
Luckily a bird twitcher randomly lent him one. The stress of calling the trips on was intense as filmers day rate is £150 minimum, if you’re lucky, so with travel I was dropping heavy coin on one swell or even a session. I would be checking charts, wind, tides right until an hour before lift off and by that point I usually hadn’t managed to get a filmer.
On one trip this one filmer who lived up country was 50/50 and to make it in time for a ferry I had to set off with the equipment in the car for an hour just in case he could make it and then as I got near his turning he pulled out so I went anyway and scored better waves than were in the film and had no footage to show. So tricky!
There’s more to surf films than just surfing…
ROAD MILES
Probably 5000 miles at a guess were covered during filming. During the winter probably more because I didn’t film all my trips. When you’re on the way to epic surf I don’t care how long it takes. The trick is to travel with mates and then you can catch up on the way. That’s my version of going to the pub.
Shooting with a RED makes for epic footage.
OTHER SURFERS
The idea to put other surfers in just came in a really natural way and wasn’t pre-organised. The guys in there are all shortboard surfers that I really admire in different ways and they just happened to be out there for the session. My mate Felix came with me on the trip to Beefies though as I had been promising to take him for years. He wasn’t expecting to be in a film but ended up probably getting the best clip of the trip.
Oli deep in Kernow. Photo: Luke Gartside
NEXT
Is a jumble of ideas, drive and froth but most of all a continued life long love of surfing. I have a million ideas ranging from more high performance stuff to adventure stuff, business stuff. A few new exciting projects are up and running already (luckily I’m not producing them just surfing) and there are many more burning away in my head but the thing I learned most from this project is family is more important than anything!
You have to find a balance and they have to come first. Being a pro surfer it’s easy to think ‘I’ve got to do this right now because my career is short’ and if you are driven it’s easy to over commit so moving forward I’m going to take it one step at time and work within realistic deadlines.
It’s been horrible saying to my kids all summer, ‘Sorry, Daddy is busy with his film.’ Balance is the key to life and surfing good waves will follow.
