H2O2

I've had a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in my small but functional first-aid kit for years now, right at the top with an elastic band around the middle holding a bunch of cotton-buds alongside it.  It's been in there for so long, in fact, that the label's faded out so that only I know what it is.  Everything else in my first-aid kit comes and goes; sticking plasters and surgical tape gets used and replaced, whilst I soon ditched things like slings when I realised that they were bulky and that if I needed one then it would probably be enough of an emergency to warrant tearing up a t-shirt.  But the little bottle of hydrogen peroxide has seen a lot of use; nightly on some surf trips.  

It is a strong oxidiser, with a weak bond between one of the oxygen and hydrogen molecules which breaks to produce water and hydrogen (chemistry details here).  When diluted (the stuff you can buy from the pharmacist) it can be used to sterilise and clean skin abrasions, however as it turns out, whilst it cleans small surface wounds it can inhibit healing and cause scarring by killing newly formed skin cells.  That'd explain the state of my feet then.  When you've got reef cuts that might have little bits of living coral embedded in them though, it's just the ticket and more appealing than lime juice or the resultant brown scars of iodine.  Just don't forget the cotton buds, or you'll end up doing what I once witnessed an Aussie surfer doing, and cleaning your reef cuts with an old toothbrush.  Ouch.

My first introduction to the fizzing sting of cleaning cuts came when I kicked a rock walking across a Cornish beach (tough talk for stubbing my toe) and a friend told me he'd clean the sand out.  He dipped a cotton bud in a medicinal-looking bottle and applied it to my bleeding toe.  It fizzed white, I winced, and it felt as though my toe was being tattooed but it did the job.  A few weeks later I was packing my bag for Indonesia, and remembered the advice that I'd been given on cleaning the unavoidable reef cuts that I was about to enjoy.  But before too long, the nightly ritual of cleaning new cuts and keeping healing on track by removing the resultant dust and dirt of so much time spent barefoot became kind of enjoyable in a good-pain kind of way.  And I reckon I've got way less scars than I deserve having kept that old bottle close at hand after days spent trying my luck over shallow, sharp, reefs.

Image above by Mat Arney:
Sunset over the starboard rail of Partarma, Lombok, Indonesia, with my good friends the Williams twins Dyfrig and Cynrig (Cynrig sporting some brutal sunburn) and Ceri Pashley passing around bottles of hydrogen peroxide, coke, and bintang.  The fizzing white pain was a small price to pay each evening for getting such good waves to ourselves.

Repeat After Me: "I Am An Islomaniac"

The sunset before the storm, Nusa Lembongan, Indonesia.

Newland, due just North West of my front room window.

You can set me down just here thanks. The Maldives, appearing out of the blue.

My name is Mat and I am an islomaniac.

Ok, it’s your turn to say it too. It feels better to have got it off your chest no?

I’ve been putting off admitting my fascination with islands for a while now, I kept telling myself that I needed to wait until I had visited just a few more; a couple more photos of an island from the bow of a boat, maybe another image of a rocky outcrop silhouetted against the sunset. But it’s time to lay it out: I have a thing for islands. I can’t define it but their mysterious charm has cast a spell on me. The list of islands (and groups of) that I want to visit just keeps growing, and at this rate I’d never get around to writing this so strikes me there’s no time like the present.

There are thousands of islands on the planet. Trying to find out just how many depends on how you define an island and how you categorize them; The Vikings would only class land as an island if they could pass a ship with a rudder between it and the mainland, whilst the 1861 Scottish census defined an island as “an area of land surrounded by water and inhabited by man, and where at least one sheep can graze. Some are prisons, others holy, some are glorified cruise ship docks or have been razed and re-turfed as golf resorts, some are owned by film stars, some support the world’s biggest cities, some of them are islands at high tide and linked to the mainland at low tide, and a lot of them are knee deep in bird crap.

Big, small, sandy, rocky, volcanic, coral atolls; a lone palm tree, jungle, desert or bleak and windswept; cold, tropical, temperate; oceanic, freshwater, river; remote or a stones-throw from the mainland; there are so many variables that actually coming up with a definitive number of islands on planet Earth is nigh on impossible.

But why are so many of us entranced by islands? After all, they’re just bits of land restricted by water. But maybe that’s it; are they are reflection of us as human beings, individual and often isolated? “No man is an island”? Perhaps not John Donne. Perhaps we see a bit of ourselves in them and are comforted by the fact that when we view them in our minds eye we usually see an island that’s manageably small - the sort that you could walk around and get to know.

When I was little there were times when I exclusively read books about islands: Treasure Island, The Coral Island, Swallows and Amazons, Peter Pan, Swiss Family Robinson and later Robinson Crusoe, Lord of the Flies and The Beach all fuelled my over-active imagination. There was a pond near where I grew up which had a little island in the middle of it that my friends and I used to gaze at, but never swam out to it because we all knew that it would never live up to our expectations and imaginations. And these days when I look out of my window I stare straight at Newland, a rocky outcrop straight offshore from where I live. In the summer when the ocean’s flat some of us will paddle out to it but there’s nothing much to do when you get there; it’s just a lump of rock. At least one of us will still make the paddle year on year though. One day I’m sure that one of my friends will find pirate treasure out there though and make it all worth it.

George Orwell argued that we need solitude, creative work, and a sense of wonder as much as warmth, society, leisure, comfort, and security, and that “man only stays human by preserving large patches of simplicity in his life.”

It would appear that it is often much easier to gain and maintain this simplicity on an island than on a comparatively sized chunk of continental land (Thurston Clarke).

Simply put, we’re more human when on an island.

Tavarua, Fiji, as previously featured in a Desert Island Discs post.

My friend Jack casting for mackerel in front of Mouls Island, Cornwall.

St Michaels Mount, Cornwall. A mythical giant used to live on it according to Cornish folklore.

Prison island: Alcatraz, shot from the ferry from San Francisco to Sausilito.

Bay of Islands, North Island, New Zealand.

A friend of mine found this on the wonder of the interweb. There's no way it hasn't be photoshopped to turn it into every surfer's daydream, but who cares if it fuels some searching?

If islands are your thing too then take a peek at this book, be warned though, it'll only pour fuel on the fire.

Indian Ocean Faces

Old Tamil Lady, Ella, Sri Lanka.

Bhodisatva, South West Sri Lanka.

Village Elders, Nusa Lembongan, Indonesia.

Rickshaw taxi rider, Java, Indonesia.

My old boss Rod on a vineyard in the Margaret River area, South Western Australia.

My friends Dr. and Hotchy at Big Day Out music festival, Perth, Western Australia.

Little girl with an ice-pop, Tokyo-Sexwale township, Jeffreys Bay, South Africa.

Xosa family, Tokyo-Sexwale township, Jeffreys Bay, South Africa.

Young Bedu men, Al-Ashkara area, Oman.

Outside the coffee shop, Al-Ashkara, Oman.

Here's a grip full of portraits, old and new, from just a few of the places around the edges of the Indian Ocean.
Each of the Worlds Oceans are so great that there is a massive amount of diversity to be found around the edges, diversity of climates, cultures, religions, ethnicity, wealth and environment to name a few. Whilst I've splashed around in and traversed each of these Oceans, the Indian Ocean is that which I have probably spent the most time circumnavigating and exploring, and there're still a ton of places around the edge and islands in the middle that I'm desperate to check out, and a few that I still can't (Somalia, Yemen and Burma). There's still time yet though.

My thanks goes out to the people above for allowing me to take their picture, I fully squirm in front of the camera which is why I hide behind it so I appreciate it when people let me do this to them.

Mind-Surfing

I'll let the photograph do the talking this week. A certain fickle reef off the corner of a sparsely vegetated bit of coast on one of the seventeen thousand islands that make up the Indonesian archipelego. Bear in mind that this wave gets bigger, faster and hollower as it rolls down the line. Look at those waves (particularly the second one), think about that, and I'll leave you to get lost in a few minutes mind-surfing. Enjoy.

Surf Tax

Photos taken by Tim Delaney, punishment taken by Paul Anderson.

Everybody has to pay their dues some time or another. Whether you do so in small, regular instalments or save it up for the mother of all beatings like my friend Ando pictured above is niether here nor there. We all gotta pay.

Every single person falls off their surfboard, it's just the way it works. You come up, get a breath of salty air, get back on your board and paddle back out to do it all over again. The point is that you realise you survived, so it's ok to give it another go because taking that tumble wasn't all that bad. Well, most of the time. When you fall off the horse, the best advice out there is just to get straight back on the horse.

Wipeouts are the taxes of surfing.

The bigger the reward, the bigger the risk. Pulling into a massive barrel that you can't touch the sides of could be the best moment of your life so far, but the reason why it's so mind blowingly amazing is because most humans can't just do it every day, on every wave. There's a fairly good chance that you won't make it which is part of what makes it so incredible when you do.

But Ando's spill above is a particularly nasty one; the kind you don't forget in a hurry. I used to work for Paul and he's a solid surfer from West Australia, he had a successful competitive career as a junior and is happily comfortable in big, heavy barreling surf.

Here, he's about to get drilled by a chunk of water tripping over the reef at Lakey Peak in Sumbawa, Indonesia. The thing about Lakeys is that you have to try really hard to hit the reef there. There must be a trench in the reef just in front of the peak because it gets pretty deep. It's the only place where I've consistently had to climb my leg rope to find "up" and get to the surface after catching rail and falling off; it just pushes you deep and rolls you around for a long time. My friends Al and Cynrig climbed up each other in the race for the surface - Al got his head up, inhaled and then was pulled under by Cynrig who reached up from the blue depths and climbed his leg like a ladder.

Ando managed to hit the bottom pretty good though:

"I came up with my boardies shredded and hanging on round one ankle, pretty much nude, and looked down at myself just as all the little reef slices on me started to turn red. There were guys who'd been sat on the judging tower watching swimming out to get me..."

It would be easy having heard that cautionary tale and seeing the pictorial run up to it to just take the little wipeouts, the comedy foot slips and the almost enjoyable trips over the falls on small waves. But then you'll never find yourself stood tall in that cavern of moving ocean, and at the end of the day everybody wants a stand up barrel.

It's the whole point of surfing.