Rocketeering

The house that I used to live in was, without doubt, the best place to go if you wanted to know what the weather or swell was going to be doing for the next few days in North Cornwall; we worked, breathed and slept the forecast and it was normally displayed on at least one screen in the living area, and not because we surfed:  My housemates founded and run Cornish Rock Tors Ltd, an outdoor activity company specialising in coasteering and sea-kayaking, and are masters of reading weather forecasts because of the central role that it plays in operating their business.  

Coasteering is the pursuit of exploring a largely inaccessible stretch of coastline from the water with a guide: swimming, traversing across the base of cliffs, going in and out of coves and caves and, of course, jumping from the rocks into the water.  It's a journey involving many different disciplines and challenges, and has become an enormously popular summer activity around the south and west coasts of the UK.  My friends were one of the first providers to offer coasteering as an activity alongside sea-kayaking and climbing;  they swam the coast, plumb-lining the water depths beneath safe jumps, measured the effects of the swell and tides, and explored the multitude of caves with waterproof torches and glow-sticks.  It's a strictly controlled activity with a licensing body and some full-on insurance requirements, and as such it demands the utmost professionalism from guides.  That is why it is such a shame that when coasteering is featured in the national press the article is often beneath an attention-grabbing and sensationalist headline that does more to damage the industry through negative associations rather then applaud it for its stringent safety standards.  Tomb-stoning this is not.  Planned, assessed, controlled (as far as you can in the natural environment) and led by experienced and qualified local guides, it is.  

I recently headed out on a coasteering session with Cornish Rock Tors, the first time that I've been out with them in several years, with my camera rig in-tow to see what sort of imagery I could capture.  The stretch of coastline where they operate is truly stunning on a summer day (although I'm heavily biased because home is where the heart is) and never more so than when viewed from the water - a perspective that not many people ordinarily get to experience. 

I asked Jon (CRT's Head Guide) to wave to me from the top of this jump.  He misheard and instead pulled out his party-trick, this enormous back-flip.  Jon is an incredibly experienced guide and has perfected this "stunt" through a great deal of time spent training in a pool, so don't try and copy him.   

A moment of calm in the sea caves.

Cornwall looks positively Caribbean when the sun shines, with beautifully clear and turquoise water.

Whilst I was coasteering a kayaking group paddled past so I swam out into the bay to get some photos of them too.  They're able to travel further in a half-day session and access some really beautiful and remote coves and beaches further up the coast.  

If you're interested in exploring the Cornish coast from the water, learning more about the marine environment and perhaps jumping from a few rocks along the way then give Cornish Rock Tors a call. They offer guided coasteering, ecoasteering (with an emphasis on the marine environment), sea kayaking, wild swimming and climbing around the Polzeath and Port Isaac area, Cornwall.  

Humble Pie For One

I would say that I am a pretty patient person, at least with most things besides computers.  

I've been waiting for the perfect combination of quite specific conditions for a couple of summers now with the hope of taking the boat that I built, an outrigger sailing canoe, on a short overnight expedition to surf, spearfish and camp onboard. I won't go into the details of my plan, but because of my planned route and the nature of my trip I had to wait for the stars to align with favourable winds, tides, swell and weather all falling over a 48 hour period.  Last summer I took the boat on a maiden voyage along a short stretch of my route; this spring I tested the boat's abilities to launch through surf and return again, using the experience to make some minor modifications; then this July the weather was perfect however I had work commitments.  I scoured the weather forecasts daily.  I started to become impatient.  In mid-August there was a day that looked do-able; not ideal, but I thought that I could give it a shot.

My alarm was set early and I got up in the dark.  I'd set the boat up on the beach just above the high tide line the evening before, so I arrived early and loaded it whilst the local small-boat fishermen prepared their boats and reversed them into the water.  I launched twice, and I returned twice.  I never did make it to the beach where I had planned on surfing, or to the small cove where I had intended to moor up and sleep under a boom tent on the hiking boards strapped across the outrigger arms.  I spent hours at sea out in the bay battling against the wind, swell and the power of a big spring tide.  I couldn't sail upwind so had to drop the sail and paddle, but for a solid hour I made no progress against the elements.  I measured my progress against the flow of the pushing tide by triangulating my position with a lobster-pot buoy and the westernmost point of a small bay.  If I paused my paddling the wind pushed the bow around so that I was broadside on to the large swells so I had to pull relentlessly.  Continuing to my intended camp spot would have been foolhardy so I turned around, put the mast back up, raised sail and then slipped.  One leg went overboard into the water and I landed heavily on the gunnel.  With the sail up and a following wind it took me less than ten minutes to retrace my course which had taken over three hours in the other direction.  

Back on the beach one of the fishermen, Lloyd, told me that I did the right thing coming back - he didn't think it a good day to be out in a little boat like mine without a motor.  The next day the bruise under my leg came out, a proper deep one the size of a dinner plate, and I ached from the hours of paddling.  I felt pretty humbled by the entire experience.  What must it've been like for the early Polynesians who explored the Pacific Ocean on boats not dissimilar to mine, or for modern day fishermen who still use these boats across the Pacific and Indian Oceans to scrape a living?  The Ocean is massive…my small boat was like a grain of rice in a swimming pool out in the bay, and yet only ever a mile or so from safe harbour. 

And now the seasons have started to turn.  Perhaps next summer...

Explore Your Own Backyard: Part 4

The story of Ducky's

Show us yer fins! The "staffroom" at Kitchen Windows, clockwise from top left is Brett, the real locals, myself and Kim.

Kim a.k.a. Ducky, slipping under the lip on a left at Kitchen Windows shot by a gent named Tom Harington.

Libya running up the point at Phantoms. Ducky's is just out of shot to the right.

Nobody called it Ducky's. It didn't have a name because it wasn't a surf spot. It was on the Wild Side and that was all there was to it until Kim started talking us into it.

I don't even have any photos of the place.

I guess you'd define Duckies as the patch of sand and rocks around the back side of Phantoms, the most easterly of the point-breaks in Jeffreys Bay. It was the start of a stretch of beach called the Wild Side on the edge of town that just looked incredibly sharky, was always windswept, bleak and very empty. There was a big yellow sign warning of the possibility of muggings stuck in the middle of the beach, which was a fair call because whilst I lived there somebody had their camera stolen when they took it out to take a souvenir comedy photo of the sign. I had to smile at the irony.

This place was the polar opposite of the world class wave at Supertubes five clicks along the beach. It was just a funny rippy little shorebreak with bits of reef sticking up out of the sand. Kim started running down to go bodysurfing there before work because it didn't require a lot of swimming, but before long we were all joining him and we nicknamed it Ducky's after Kim's favourite cap which had a big orange peak that looked like a duck's bill. So if time was pressing before work or the sunset, or we wanted a laugh rather than a serious surf, then we'd bypass the two regular respectable surf spots right in front of us and head around the corner for a splash & dash. We'd take a nominal "normal" shortboard, a surf-school foamy, a polystyrene belly board and a set of swim fins which we'd switch around between us. The waves almost always closed out, the currents were weird and there were odd bits of rock sticking out all over the place, not to mention the whole shark vibe that was going on there. We planned on building a driftwood clubhouse and having monthly "Ducky's Days" when we'd just hang there all day.

Nobody else ever surfed the place, and that's probably still the case today.

But it was ours, and because of that we loved it despite all of it's shortcomings.

Find a place and make it your own, just like Ducky did.

Explore Your Own Backyard: Part 3

Up the coast, shot early one morning by Harry Knight.

Alex, on our regular am routine.

"How far d'ya reckon it is?" Down the coast.

Alex reaping the rewards of looking around the corner, shot by Nosara Shack.

Sunday arvo, down the coast.

For my friends at Surf Simply out on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica, there really isn't much of a need to explore their back yard because their front yard is so damn good. The beach where they live and work is a long expanse of sand with numerous peaks along its length, more than enough to spread out all of the surfers there so that you can surf with just your friends. When I worked out there (Ru and Gem have employed a few of us for varying lengths of time over the years) Alex and I would get up when the howler monkeys started roaring in the dark every morning and ride down to the beach to get an early surf, then start work in wet boardshorts.

But every now and then we'd all get up a little earlier, throw down a coffee, water and banana (Ru's dawny routine of wake-up, hydrate, energy) and straddle the quad-bikes to go surf someplace where we'd not only be the first ones in the sea, but we'd be the only ones in the sea.

The best of the backyard breaks was a twenty minute quad ride away in the dry season (before the rivers became impassable due to rains). We'd unload the boards and carry them across the rope bridges then tentatively ease the bikes over the bridges, pulling back the cables to get the handlebars past. There are three rivers to cross and it's a hassle but there are heaps of crocs in the rivers. And it's worth it when you get to the beach; a remote turtle sanctuary with a board-buckling beachbreak to wake you up.

North or South, every now and then we'd climb aboard one of the quad-bikes and go looking; guaging the paddle to off-shore reefs or trying to figure the optimum swell direction for nearby coves. The crew currently out there are still doing it, exploring safe in the knowledge that their fall back option of surfing out front is still the sort of surf spot that we're all doodling in the margins of our notebooks.

Go take a look around that corner and see what you find.

Explore Your Own Backyard: Instalments 1&2

Coming off the back of the good reception that "Patience" recieved, and on a similar theme, I thought I might roll out the first of a couple of mini-series that I've wanted to kick off for a while. Here's the first two instalments of the new "Explore Your Own Backyard" series:

Whilst I love nothing more than new places and faces, I'm as guilty as the next man of suspecting that the grass is always greener some place else. Not always so. It's easy to overlook your neighbourhood for providing you with the environment, ways and means to get your kicks, and when you realise that fact and make the most of where you are right now rather than pining for someplace else, you get a lot more enjoyment, a lot more often.

Part 1:

This is Pete. He runs his familys dairy farm in Westland on the South Island of New Zealand and works flat out. I worked for Pete one Spring time a few years back. Being a dairy farmer is rewarding but damned hard, especially during calving when we spent weeks working 14 hour plus days in the cold and rain milking, delivering calves and doing all the other hard graft required to keep the farm going - "A whole lot of death and mayhem" was how he described the calving season.
The farm stands under the shadow of the Southern Alps, and the Franz Josef glacier is a 15 minute drive away, we were on the edge of the nearest village. One of Petes oldest friends had been one of the original guides on the glacier, but despite this and his lifelong proximity, Pete had never been more than about 20 metres onto the ice. Until now. Myself and the other guy working on the farm wanted to climb the glacier, and Pete figured that if we got up super early and got the bare minimum of farm chores done by day break, we could all go up with his friend. So we did, kitted up in a rag-tag array of old crampons and ice axes, we spent a day up there, first on and last off looking down at the identically dressed tour groups tramping the well cut steps far below. We got to cut our own steps and searched for giant quartz crystals.
When your backyard is one of the most accessible Glacier National Parks on the planet, it's well worth exploring.

Part 2:

I must've looked at this cave and patch of cliff a thousand times whist sat out in the line-up surfing, but not being a proper climber I never really appreciated it. That is until I moved in with Matt, who IS a proper climber. At low tide you can walk out around the base of the low cliffs and over the reef, to patches of secluded beach in the mouth of the caves, and we carried around a crash mat, climbing shoes and a bag of chalk to try and suss some bouldering routes. Here's a shot of Matt with a vicious heel-hook, just about to haul himself up and over the lip of the cave onto a patch of rock that is "merely vertical" rather than massively inverted.
The whole coastline around here is like this, if you've got a climbers eye and can spot the routes. Lucky for Matt he runs powerboat Sea Safari tours so every day at work whilst pointing out dolphins and seabirds to tourists, he gets to explore our backyard looking for climbing routes.