The S-Factor

Flashback to the middle of winter:  I am bloody freezing.  

My hands are doing that claw thing where they get so cold that you can’t close your fingers together and that, along with a thick, heavy wetsuit, makes paddling anywhere more mission than movement.  Crossing my arms and hugging my numb paws into my armpits just hurts, so I decide that holding them under the water and keeping them out of the wind is a better idea.  The light is flat and grey and there is a band of rain being carried towards me on the onshore wind; I watch the opaque curtain envelop the headland a mile away and wonder what’s keeping me out here scratching around for waist-high onshore mush?  A small part of me is secretly hoping that the angry bull seal who took up residence here last winter, and who’s developed a reputation for bullying surfers back to the beach, will turn up so that I have an excuse for catching a wave in. 

I’m not living some sort of cold-water surf adventure right now; there are no scenic mountains when I look inland, the beach isn’t covered in snow and there are no killer whales cruising the line-up or bears stalking the shoreline.  Just our territorial seal whose intentions none of us are ever absolutely certain of when he surfaces within kicking distance of one of us.  But it’s plenty cold enough and to be honest once your extremities are numb I’d argue that the difference between the water temperature being 7 degrees and 5 degrees Celcius isn’t noticeable, particularly once you factor in the wind-chill.  Cold is cold, it’s as simple as that.  And this is the reality for an awful lot of surfers.  Life isn’t one long boardshort advert.

So what keeps so many of us in the sea for so long when often it’s uncomfortable and not the most productive use of our time?

What is the “S” factor?

There’s a strong case for the argument that those surfers who you see bobbing around the line-up on a distinctly average day in mid-winter, or obsessively hopping from look-out spot to look-out spot searching for waves just because it’s the weekend, have another thing driving them.  It’s that little something that separates them from the multitude of humans who have caught a wave at some point in their life but not succumbed to the obsession and let it take control of their day-to-day.  It stands to reason; if every person who learnt to stand up on a surfboard had this then the line-up would be just as crammed on a dreary onshore morning in mid-winter as it is on the sunniest day of the summer holidays.  But it’s not.  It’s just the select few who have mastered the ability to turn the key in the car door when their hands are too cold to function properly or who often don’t get the feeling back in their toes until the end of the evening news, long after dark has fallen.

Take yourself as an example:  Have you ever made a decision where the dominant influence in your choice was surfing?  A big decision perhaps, like where you live or what you do to earn a living?  Could you blame surfing for a less than desirable financial situation or the break-up of a relationship?  You see?

The simple answer would be to blame this sort of behaviour on some kind of addictive behaviour trait.  But that’s too obvious to ring true.  If that was the answer then regular surfers would display those sorts of behaviours in other areas of their lives, but the vast majority of us don’t.  Some surfers are happy to forego daily surfs unless the waves are actually good, preferring to survive off memories of better waves and just to scratch the itch when absolutely necessary, on a weekly or fortnightly basis when a new swell shows up on the charts.  Others just have to get in as soon as there’s a lump of water to paddle into; a bad surf is better than no surf sort of attitude, regardless of how frustrating it is.

Call it stoke, call it sensation seeking, or scientifically attribute it to varied levels of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin in surfers.  Both dopamine and serotonin help our brains to regulate mood and emotion, are responsible for levels of arousal, and determine how we perceive reward.  It has been put forward that many surfers display behaviours indicative of heightened levels of dopamine, but whatever it’s down to, regular surfers can’t seem to get enough of it in one way or another which is why we keep going back.  The best things are often the most difficult to explain and we all have our own reasons, so don’t worry that when somebody asks why you insist on paddling out whilst everybody else retreats indoors to the comfort of their favourite chair, you struggle to come up with an answer that comes anywhere close to explaining why.  You don’t have to.     


Author's note:  This article first appeared on the Surf Simply Magazine on March 24th, 2015. 

Chasing Unicorns

The depths of winter, for a surfer in high latitudes, can be like an enormous game of meteorological hide and seek.  Rainbows abound, but the proverbial pot of gold is always retreating over the brow of the next hill.  Swells are often raw and powerful, generated by storm systems that follow closely behind and move over the coast bringing strong winds that swing on a dime.  The clock is there to race as daylight hours are limited and large tides can cause good sand banks and reefs to turn on and off within an hour.  It's all too easy to spend hours on end driving country lanes and slip-sliding down muddy tracks to check obscure little coves only to find out that you've missed the best of it someplace else.  It can feel like you're spending all of your precious free time chasing unicorns - you know that you'll never get one, but it's worth it just to catch a glimpse every now and then.

What Goes Around, Comes Around.

Cagoules and canvas back-packs are back in; I'll bet that not many of them get worn whilst ice-climbing Ben Nevis these days, though.  This short film was produced for National Geographic by Yvon Chouinard (he of Patagonia fame) back in 1976, featuring famed Scottish climber John Cunningham.  Take 8 minutes sat in front of your screen and, whilst you probably won't end up wishing that you were John wearing a small avalanche on your head half way up a frozen gulley, you'll certainly wish you were outside getting some cold air in your lungs.

3x Warmth

Storing, splitting and burning; if you find yourself heating your home with an open fire or wood burning stove this winter then you're pretty much guaranteed to get warm at least twice before you even place a log on the grate.  

There's something incredibly satisfying about having a full load of logs dumped outside your home and carrying and stacking them like a grown-up game of tetris in a log-store, leaving you looking upon a winter's worth of warmth in physical form at the end of the garden.  Splitting logs then becomes one of those pleasant daily chores; heading out with a log basket and knocking rounds down into sections small enough to burn well, and selecting the straight-grained lengths for splitting down further into kindling.  The axe is the oldest tool known to humankind, and using one on a daily basis through the cold months of winter is a pleasant reconnection to physical work that so many people lack in their daily routines.  And then, after all that, you get to build a fire and cosy down in it's flickering orange glow.  

I'm not actually all that disappointed that the temperature's dropped over the last few days and winter has started to make it's imminence felt.  For one thing it has given me a good winter project to be getting on with, as I didn't own a small hatchet for splitting down kindling (the felling axe pictured above is for splitting logs and, as the name implies, dropping trees) until I found a couple of really "well used" old examples in a local charity shop for a few pounds each.  They are in need of some restoration though, so at some point soon I hope to be able to post a "how-to" article if I do a worthy job and they turn out well.  

Winter On The Wall

I bounce on the balls of my cold feet and wave my arms limply above my head, trying to stop the lactic acid from getting a grip on them.  It’s dark outside; cold; absolutely rodding it down with rain, which is blowing in sheets out of the West. 

  

You see, it’s mid-winter and at these high latitudes that fact severely hampers even the most valiant attempts at surfing regularly.  It’s 7pm and it’s been dark for about 3 hours already, and this morning I left to go to work in the dark too.  The sun sees the day whilst I’m daydreaming about waves at work, then I emerge into the evening again.  I get in when I can; on weekends mostly, but even that depends to a large extent on if there’s swell, how strong the winds are, and what the tides are doing.  Some spots see the best time of tide when it’s too dark to surf, so not even pulling a mental health day at work can score me waves when there’s swell.

That’s why I come down to the wall.

A good friend of mine can’t indulge his pastime very easily in winter either: he’s a climber and you can’t climb very easily in the dark or the rain.  We’re both hindered by the elements and the low track of the sun at this time of year.  He took the initiative however, and built a bouldering wall at the back of his garage.

 The wall is the full width and height of the double garage.  It leans out at a twenty-degree angle, although my friend now wishes with hindsight that this were more like thirty or forty.  I’m quite relieved that it’s twenty.  Twenty’s plenty.

The wall has two routes set out on it, noted with scraps of masking tape or climber’s finger tape with numbers scrawled on in sharpie.  The handholds are characterized by the odd dark smear of dried blood contrasting the white chalk.  The footholds have semi-circular arcs of black rubber over their tops, deposited by countless scuffs from our climbing shoes.  One route, the one that I battle with, has nice big, juggy, holds and the harder moves have “cop-out” holds alongside them.  It weaves from the bottom left corner of the wall, across to the right hand side and back across to the start line.  Side to side and up and down, with forty moves in total. 

And the other route?  Well that’s fifty moves, and the holds are almost all smooth little nubbins that slope off away from the wall, so small that there’s only really space for a couple of digits, be they fingers or toes.  I can’t comprehend how my friend can hold himself on these, let alone move between them.

The wall is often hidden behind rows of drying wetsuits because the garage is used as the storeroom for the outdoor activity centre that some of our friends run.  Pushing through the cold, damp, shapes puts me in mind of some sort of awful abattoir experience.  Behind them though is the dim glow of a 40-watt light bulb in an upright office light stand (put there since the incessant flickering of the strip-light all became too much) and the grimy drive of dubstep throbbing out of an old stereo. 

The wall taught me to warm-up properly.  I’d taken it for granted before; a run down the beach and a few brief, token, stretches.  Swaddled in hoodies and jackets with a thermal long-johns under my trousers, I soon learnt that climbers roll their trouser legs up to avoid catching their toes in them whilst transferring their feet between holds, not for any sort of misplaced sartorial statement.  Soon enough though, after the first couple of laps of the wall the layers start to come off.

Bag of chalk, rub, clap: Like a weight lifter at the Olympics.  I sit down on the blue gym mat at the bottom left corner of the wall, my toes on the small footholds just centimetres from the floor and my hands on the smooth chalk-caked hold with the numbers “1&2” stuck next to it. 

Breathe, count down with the beat of the music, inhale, exhale, inhale again then simultaneously push legs and pull arms to get going.  Less of an explosion out of the blocks and more of a considered commencement.  I try really hard to move in time with the tempo of the music, to keep my movements slow and considered like those of my friends who have been climbing for as long as I’ve been surfing and who are valiantly trying to coach me through all of this.  They tell me not to snatch at holds and remind me to exhale when my face turns red.

Climb to failure:  I crab my way up and down and across the wall until I fall off, my forearms pumping, then rest for four minutes and try again.  Four minutes takes an awfully long time when you’re clock-watching, in fact it’s a bit like being in detention in school.  Four minutes of stretching and bouncing on the balls of my feet shaking my arms loosely above my head until I can have another crack.  I repeat sections until I succeed and then again until muscle memory takes over.  Holds one to ten, followed by holds eleven to twenty and then I try to link them all together, getting me from one side of the wall to the other.  Then I do the same thing from twenty to forty, and have to learn to climb from right to left because so far I’ve only climbed the wall in one direction.

These days I manage to get from one all the way across and back to forty.  A four minute rest and then another lap, and repeat until I fall.  If I follow the regime of my friend then I’ll soon start to reduce my rest times from four minutes to three. 

Spring rolls around, and the evening start to draw out.  Soon enough we’re hanging off the wall with the garage doors open, blasting dubstep across the dirt road outside whilst the evening sunlight catches the dust drifting in the breeze.  I no longer turn up to work in the mornings with red-raw fingertips; instead I now sport a row of tough yellow callouses across the pads of my fingers, often still caked in the residue of climbing chalk that’s bedded right in there.  The garage is devoid of wetsuits because our friends seasonal business has started again in earnest for the summer.  So why am I still on the wall? 

Well, sometimes it’s flat.  Sometimes I’ve surfed already and fancy a change.  Often I just want a quick blast on the wall whilst dinner cooks.  Heck, it still gets dark, even in summer, so sometimes I’ll head down late at night with a bottle of beer and turn the lights on.

But mostly it’s because it’s nice to learn new things and to rise to a challenge.  I still get this from surfing, still have a long way to go in that respect, but it’s nice to be learning and improving out of the sea for a change.  And moving.  It’s good to keep moving.

Don't Buy It, Build It: My Yellow Submarine

Surfing and making photographs are two pretty defining passions of mine, and every now and then they inevitably cross over. 

But, if I’m honest, I’d always choose to be in the sea rather than stood on the beach watching it.  With the cheapest commercially available waterhousing for a decent camera costing at least a grand (I’m not talking about swimming out with a go-pro here) it would seem that water-based surf photography is a game for an ever-shrinking number of professionals or those with a hefty hobby budget.  I mean, how many jobbing photographers these days have at least a grand burning a hole in their pockets for a piece of kit that they’d be lucky to see generate a few hundred quid in sold images?  

Not me.  So I made one.

Measure twice and make a model.

I ended up making two waterhousings actually.  I have long held on to the philosophy that if you’re able to do something yourself then you should do so – not just as a way of saving money or acquiring something that you couldn’t otherwise afford, but as a means of learning new skills and challenging oneself.  Perhaps it’s just that I have a problem with writing to-do lists and not sitting still, born of an awareness that time is a precious commodity. 

I started out researching waterhousings for surf photography – commonly known as “splash” housings and different to their deep-sea diving counterparts.  I had the choice of fiberglass and resin as construction materials (the honours project for my degree involved the use of advanced composite materials for marine engineering applications, so I was comfortable with that option) or folded and welded aluminium which I'm slightly less au-fait with.  I went with the aluminium challenge.  

A photographer who runs a gallery at the end of my street, Nick Wapshott, kindly lent me his commercially bought waterhousing overnight to take a look at, and I asked a few questions of Tim Nunn (editor of Wavelength Magazine and professional surf-lensman) who gave me some advice on how to trigger the shutter mechanism.  This was the biggest issue – I had no problems making a waterproof box of some description to put my camera in, but finding a way of pressing the button without springing a leak was a challenge.  As with most of my projects, I started out with fairly modest intentions until I realised how much time and effort I was investing and then figured that I might as well do a proper job.

I measured up my cameras (I shoot with the slightly puffed-up digital version of an older analogue camera and they’re such similar sizes that I wanted to make a housing that they would both fit and function in) and made cardboard models.  Friends and acquaintances kindly rummaged in the scrap bins of their workshops and garages, and from a range of sources I ended up with some odd lengths of aluminium tubing that I could machine into lens ports, a bigger piece that might fit a camera, and some offcuts of thin-guage sheet aluminium that I could fold into a box. 

Now, I like to think that I’m fairly handy but I definitely know my limits and one of those is TIG welding aluminium and another one is precision milling.  Luckily for me, just down the raod from me on Bradfords Quay in Wadebridge are two companies who specialise in fettling metal:  Daften Die-Casting specialise in precision aluminium work and Grant and Kevin there took my crude CAD designs and machined the face plates for my housings with the incredibly fiddly grooves for the o-ring seals.  I then delivered a box of bits to Will Irons at MGC Engineering a couple of doors along for the guys there to TIG weld together for me.  Where I would undoubtably have blown holes in the thin aluminum they executed seamless joints that are not only functional, but beautiful in that functional raw metalwork sort of way.

The MGC magicians worked wonders with welding.

I now had two containers that looked a lot like camera housings.  I took them back to Daftens where they were powdercoated bright yellow because if you’re going to make a submarine then it really ought to be a yellow one, right?  I’m sure that there’s a functional reason for marine submersible equipment often being this colour but I don’t need to know about it.

The "Soucoupe" and "Jacqui" nearing completion.

I sourced some thick, clear acrylic and had it cut to fit the face plates and ports then got back at the handles of a lathe and surprised myself at my ability to actually work accurately when I turn my mind to it, turning down the tubing into lens ports to accept my 50mm prime lens.  A fisheye lens would require a domed port, something that there is no way I could produce, so I settled for the fact that I would be shooting from slightly further away from the action and capturing a realistic point of view of what the human eye would normally see.

I stayed late at Otter Surfboards one Friday and mixed up a small batch of epoxy glue to nervously assemble the faceplates and ports, horribly aware that just one tiny smudge of resin on the lens port would bin the entire project.  Finally, to solve my switch concern, I found a company that produces housings for underwater dive cameras and scientific survey equipment (Greenaway Marine) and ordered a simple mechanical switch from them that I could machine to fit my housing and camera.  I assembled everything and then, in early December, took one of the empty containers for a swim in the waves, relieved that it didn’t fill up with seawater and drag me down to the seabed like an anchor.  I then put a roll of film in my analogue camera and took that out, realising just what surf photographers would have had to go through in the days before the digital revolution – swimming back to the beach every thirty-six shots to take the whole business apart and change the film must have been hard work: Thirty-six shots really doesn’t last very long in the sea.

Then the “weather” arrived, and the sea was near enough off-limits for any sane attempts at water photography for weeks on end.  Until this week.  Torn between making up for a lot of lost wave-riding opportunities and testing my handiwork, I tried my best to strike a balance in between actually doing some work.  Having surfed on one day with great waves and beautiful flat, grey, wintery light that looked as cold as it was, I returned to the following spot with my housemate Ben the following day with my digital camera nervously ensconced in it’s (hopefully) waterproof yellow case.  With more than thirty-six exposures to play with, I think that in between swimming against a rip like a river, wearing some monstrously thick wedges on my head and getting bounced off the seabed a lot, I got some alright shots for a trial run.

Here below are some of the results:

Under a pitching lip.

Foam textures.

Scratching over a lump.

Difficult conditions for surfing and shooting.

Benny dodged this barrel and tore into a massive turn just as the whitewater engulfed me.  He's been kicking himself ever since for not tucking himself in there.

The lefts here are normally not much good.  

Not on this day though.

Pitching

Rapid Trajectories

It’s nice to see grommets these days who are hungry to surf better; kids like Liam Murray-Strout here.   

These kids see coaching as a way to improve rather than as some sort of stigma as so many surfers do (I plan on touching on this sometime in the future but, really, why do surfers have such an issue with accepting advice on how to improve whereas it’s the norm in almost any other activity?), and they train hard to improve both their technique and fitness.  They’re also hungry for it; days were when it seemed that the only British surfers with the support of a sponsor came straight out of Newquay and nowhere else, but now the field’s wide open and there is way less sponsorship money going about.  I’m not talking about free stickers here, but kit like wetsuits, surfboards and travel allowances that will help them to perform at their best, year round.  Less help and more competition for it means that grommets these days can’t rest on their laurels and a cool haircut, they have to act and train like young athletes.  But why you may ask?   Can’t they just be happy to go surfing and enjoy it for what it is?  Well yeah, of course.  I’m chronically un-competitive but if I was able to chuck an air, get the tail of my surfboard higher than my head, and ride out of it then I’d be smiling for days. 

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to surf well and working hard for that, because barrels are way better when you get spat out of them - even if nobody’s around to see it happen.