Every stretch of coastline has a guy like Sam; the person who's always at the best spot for the conditions at the right time, the surfer who has the place dialled. Bottom line is that if you pull up in a car park or get to the end of a bumpy unpaved farm track to check a secret spot and see Sam's car parked up with no surfboard in the back then you know that you're in the right place and you'll be getting the best waves on offer that day.
We all thought that kid number one would crimp Sam's water time and he seemed to be surfing as much as he could before Daddy day-care duties kicked in, but even with a second lighty to bounce on his knee he's still getting in the sea a whole heap whenever it's good.
A couple of weeks ago we went to check a little nook just up the coast, looking for a corner that wouldn't be affected by the big, bumpy, blustery conditions on all of the main beaches. We pulled into the little gravel car park next to Sam's car: No need to walk down and check it, if he's here then we won't be getting better waves anywhere else nearby. There were a couple of other cars with empty boardbags and rolled up piles of clothes on the front seats there too and when we got down to the lookout on the cliff there was a lone figure surfing the next cove along, away from the little pack of local surfers on the main peak, catching wedgy little rights in towards the rocky point separating the two bays all by himself and tearing them to bits before kicking out right on the rocks. Right place, right tide.
If your beach has a Sam then learn to keep an eye out for their car. It might just save you a load of fruitless walks to check the waves when there's a sign right there in front of your eyes that where you are is as good as you'll get today.
It was St Piran's Day, the national day of Cornwall, last Monday on March 5th so I thought it about time I celebrated the beauty and rich, ancient culture of this little corner of the UK.
The shot above is maybe 9 or 10 years old, straight out of the shoebox archives and so old that I lost the negative years ago and this image is a scan of a print. This late winter's day we'd driven from spot to spot to spot and never once got in the sea; everywhere was too big, too bumpy and battered by the wind so after a fruitless search we were despondently heading for home. I can't remember who spotted the whitewater out of the right hand side of the car as we took the minor b road along the south coast, but we must've nearly tipped the little car over as all five of us inside surged towards the drivers side trying to look out of the window as we slowed down, hoping to catch another glimpse between the trees. We had less than an hour of light left and after a handful of waves each we paddled back in over the rocks in the dark, our day saved. This spot usually breaks just a couple of times over an average winter, when big southerly swells wrap onto the shallow and jagged reef and back then it was still a secret spot that we'd happened to stumble upon. Proper Cornish gold.
Another shoebox special; Celtic knots on the headstones in Sennen churchyard a mile or so from Land's End down in the far south west of the county.
Squawk squawk, tweet tweet: For a long time I've been adamant that I don't have a lifestyle conducive to engaging with twitter, plus I'm keen to minimise the amount of time that I spend looking at a computer screen and increase the amount of time that I spend outside doing stuff. But I've relented, so you'll be able to follow me here or @matarney if you so wish, where I'll be posting An Tor Orth An Mor updates and occasionally retweeting great images or items of interest. You won't find me tweeting about what I had for breakfast or football scores.
WARNING: Reading this post about the problems of plastic pollution in our oceans and it's impact on the marine environment and wildlife might make you sick up in your mouth a bit. Also, it's a massive, massive, subject area and I can't do it justice in a single post (I've tried before) so I'll pepper this piece with links so that, should you wish to, you can click away and learn some more, and hopefully be moved to become a force of change.
Look what I found on my local beach during a beach clean last October. No needle but the plastic body of a syringe (held by Neil of BeachCare) on a beach that I run down without looking where I'm stepping and which we walk our dog on most days. Barf.
Spring is starting to show it's sunny self here in the South West of the UK which means that the beaches are getting busier; there are lots of people coming down to the beach, and there is also a load of litter on the sand that's been washed ashore by the winter storms over the past few months. This is a year-round problem on almost every single stretch of coastline on the entire planet and it's a problem that we can't tactfully ignore or shy away from.
The beach that I live on is part of a Marine Conservation Area and is cared for by a group of legendary volunteers. Part of their work is undertaking regular beach cleans alongside the BeachCare programme run by Keep Britain Tidy who organise beach cleans on 17 beaches across Devon and Cornwall. Neil who runs the project just sent out a newsletter detailing the past years work; 790 big bin bags of rubbish were removed from our local beaches over the course of 113 beach clean events utilising 2200 volunteer hours on the beach. Most of these events last for around an hour and they finish with tea and cake so it's well worth it, and if you can't make it along to one then here's an idea...why not take a couple of empty bags with you when you walking along the beach and pick up any plastic and trash that you find (use one as a "glove") or pick up anything that shouldn't be on the beach when you're walking back up the beach after a surf. If everybody picked up just three bits every time they visited the beach then it'd make a massive difference. Check out the inspirational Pick Up 3 campaign started by a 16 year old kid in California fed up with the state of his local beach.
Some friends and I explored the coast of Oman towards the end of Cyclone season and it seemed that all of the litter in the Indian Ocean had been pushed up into this corner and washed up on the mostly deserted coastline.
The two repeat offenders on the list of items picked up from our beaches are plastic pieces (aka nurdles or "mermaids tears") and fishing flotsam and jetsam such as line and nets. 2011 has seen a large increase in fishing related litter which is being investigated and combated by Fishing For Litter. The impacts of fishing nets and monofilament line, alongside plastic packaging straps, are best illustrated by the Gannets of Grassholm Island, just off the coast of Wales. Each year 40,000 nesting pairs arrive on the island to build or repair their nests, and often the nest-building males collect plastic litter from the oceans in preference to seaweed because it floats and is highly visible, then return to Grassholm to weave it into their nests. Juvenile gannet chicks often become entangled in this synthetic material and as they grow become trapped and tethered to their nests. When the colony returns to sea in Autumn the trapped juveniles are left behind and slowly starve unless released by the small team of RSPB volunteers who visit the island each year to cut them free. Grim. On Midway Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, miles from anywhere, seabird corpses decompose revealing just a skeleton and a gut full of plastic crap that they've eaten.
A juvenile gannet that perished after becoming entangled in plastic litter that was woven into it's nest on Grassholm Island. Image courtesy of the RSPB.
But it's not just seabirds. Plastic bags bob around the oceans looking remarkably like jellyfish to the large marine animals that feed on them. Postmortem examinations carried out on dead cetaceans and turtles frequently reveal guts full of plastic bags which do not pass through or decompose and accumulate and starve the animals. I've harped on about it before, but the fate of turtles who eat plastic bags and then float to the surface because of the increased buoyancy and bake to death in the sun particularly grosses me out.
A lot of this crap blows around in the wind as well as being transported by ocean currents. The correlation between onshore winds and beach pollution is plain to see. The wind blew from the west every day in December, and in January BeachCare removed over 200 bags of litter from local beaches. For ocean borne litter, much of it floats around in the currents until eventually winding up in one of the five Oceanic gyres which are points of confluence for major currents in each of the major oceans.
So that's all pretty depressing. How do we, little old "us", make a difference? Here's a few ideas of how you can think global, act local and be a small cog in a bigger engine for change:
Pick Up 3. Or more if you can join a regular beach clean event, details here and here.
Refuse plastic bags. If you visit the supermarket then take your own bags, buy a bag for life or if you're in the USA use a paper bag and recycle it. If you have your groceries delivered then click the option for delivery without bags so your shopping arrives in crates that the driver takes back to the store.
Carry A Cup. Keep a cup or small flask in your bag or car to take into coffee shops rather than getting take-out cups. Those plastic lids are particularly evil.
Drink from the tap. In many countries tap water is totally safe so if possible drink from the tap or refill bottles rather than buying expensive and pointless bottled water. I grew up just a few miles away from a plant that bottled water for a supermarket. Exactly the same water that came out of the tap at my home.
Try to buy grocery items that aren't overly packaged (loose vegetables immediately spring to mind). If enough people refuse to buy based on excessive packaging then the supermarkets will stop using it. It'd save them money too after all. If you're funny about the possibility of other humans touching your food at some point then wash it or peel it when you get home.
Following on from last week's stunning set of images by Chris Burkard by going back to the An Tor Orth An Mor's default setting of my own photography strikes me as setting myself a pretty tall order. Big shoes to fill huh. So what I'm going to do is try to transition back to standard service by picking up on one of the points that I mentioned last week and running with it.
If you pick up any "how to" photography book you'll be bombarded with hints and tips about composition ratios, f-stops and light temperature. But the one that has always stuck with me is about the "Golden Hour"; that hour or so at the start of the day and again at the end when the sun is rising or setting. The rule goes as follows:
"Get up early. Stay out late."
The light just after dawn and just before dusk, especially in the mid-latitudes, is soft, warm and golden and casts long shadows. It's the best light to take photographs with. It's also the time of day when the most interesting stuff happens like animals feeding, market stalls opening up for the day and people taking a deep breath before or after a busy rotation of planet earth. Make sure you're there to capture it by setting an alarm and going out with your camera, then take the middle of the day to go surf or do whatever it is that you do before getting your camera out again in time for the sun to say so-long and sink into the horizon.
This week the pictures do the talking. Even if you haven't picked up one of the many international surf publications that regularly feature his work (he's a staff photographer at Surfer magazine as well as contributing to numerous other magazines), if you've walked into a newsagents and just walked past the rack of surf mags recently then you'll have seen Chris Burkard's work jumping out from a front cover, like it or not.
There's good reason why the young Californian's work is so front and centre these days; simply put, he is all about good light. When you boil down photography it is just painting with light, but lots of people forget that in the rush for high octane images and their photographs don't have the same magic.
Chris was kind enough to send through a selection of images from his portfolio for this post, so scroll down and treat your retinas to some truly beautiful surf photography. Then right at the end, just when you're thinking about reaching for a pen and paper to write your letter of resignation so that you can go chase your dreams, there's a documentary video clip about Chris that'll tip you over the edge. Go ahead and get inspired.
Cornish photographer Karl Mackie took this photo of his Australian friend Tim Crabtree when they had a Cornish summer staycation in 2011, when rather than going off on a trip they stayed put at home and shaped a stack of boards each.
A shipment of fresh joistiks upon arrival in Cornwall after the long journey from Australia, about to be divvied out to some excited surfers.
On most of the rare occasions that I end up in an ice cream parlour I get vanilla ice cream. My friends used to call me Mr Plain when I did this, but I disagreed. Vanilla's a flavour after all; plain ice cream would just be milk flavour. It wasn't that I only ever chose vanilla ice cream, it's just that vanilla was my go-to flavour. I'd tried other flavours but preferred vanilla, and every now and then if I felt like something different then I'd have that instead and mix it up a bit. I'd claim that exactly the same thing applies to surfboards.
If you only ever surfed the same surfboard then there's no doubt that in one way or another you'd be restricting your surfing. If your board was ideally suited to your local surf spot then the chances are that if you went to a different spot, either home or abroad, your surfboard wouldn't be the best horse for that course. And what about when the surf is ankle-slappingly small? Or terrifyingly huge? Then what? Your 6'2" x 18 1/2" x 2 1/4" squash tail probably wouldn't be doing you any favours; you'd be grovelling and flapping around in the small stuff and paddling yourself into a too-little too-late air drop straight to oblivion when it got big. Surfing the same surfboard all the time isn't as good as surfing the same surfboard most of the time and surfing other boards every now and then when the conditions call for it.
That's why I think it's worthwhile, over time, collecting a few different surfboards to give you a range of options. You might choose a fully functional but minimal travel quiver with a small wave weapon, a standard shortboard and a semi-gun for when it starts to intimidate (because if you go away for a surf trip with just one surfboard then in reality you're probably kidding yourself and you're going on a holiday but you might sneak a surf in, unless you're travelling really light), or you could set yourself up for every eventuality at home. You might want to try out all of the different feelings that you can get from riding waves by getting your hands on every weird and wonderful wave riding vehicle or fad that you can. It depends on a a variety of factors.
Former ASP world champion (1982 & 1984) Tom Carrol once claimed that he couldn't tell the difference between a squash tail, a square tail and a swallow tail when he was surfing and defied most surfers to be able to notice a difference. So unless you're a tour chasing professional who doesn't have to pay for their sticks and snaps them within the first week, there seems little point in getting a stack of for all intents and purposes identical boards with a 16th of an inch added here or shaved off there. Having a couple of different boards to cater for a variety of circumstances, from tiny summer beachbreak surf or a trip to peak season Indo, would surely be a bit wiser and allow you to surf to the very best of your ability with confidence in what's under your feet, whatever the Ocean throws at you. Horses for courses, even if you do choose vanilla most of the time.
At least, that's the excuse that I use for being so cash poor and surfboard rich.
When I joined my friends from Surfing Dubai for an exploratory trip down the Arabian Peninsula we piled every single surfboard under the sun into the back of Scott's enormous truck (Scott's not particularly pint sized, that Chevrolet is truly massive) - everything from hand planes through shortboards, an alaia, a 70's single fin and a stand-up paddle board - planning for every eventuality and not leaving a whole lot of space for camping gear.
My friend Harry from Surf Simply: 6’0 x 185 lbs, then from left to right:
- 6’1 x 18 3/4 x 2 1/4, 28.5 liters
Round pin, single concave, thruster
Step-up
- 6’0 x 19 x 2 3/8, 27 liters
Round Diamond, single to double
5 boxes, quad fins set inboard
Standard shortie
- 5’10 x 19 3/4 x 2 3/8, 29 liters
Double wing pin, single to double
5 boxes, quad fins on rail
Small wave ripper
- 5’10 x 21 1/4 x 2 5/8, lots of liters
Big swallow, Flat to Vee
Keel fin twin
When my friend Alex spent the winter of 2010 on the North Shore of Oahu he called in some Hawaii contacts and was put up by a friend of a friend who was a pillar of the North Shore surfing community. How's the ceiling of the guy's living room?
The contents of my stable, Autumn 2011. Cash poor, surfboard rich and totally ok with it.
Initiative Surf coach Alex Espir, layered up and dry on the search for winter waves.
Drive, walk, watch, wonder, repeat. Sometimes whole days are spent in this cycle looking for waves when winter storms roll through.
It was -8 degrees celsius one morning this week when I got in my car to go to work. Damned cold. We're having a proper cold snap at the moment and it's coincided with a nice little run of good waves, with the cold easterly winds coming from Russia being straight offshore. It's times like this when I'm glad that my friends at Finisterre make fully functional technical clothing that keep me warm when it's cold and cool when it's hot.
Tom Kay started Finisterre making fleeces and hoodies in his attic in Perranporth. When the business grew into a workshop in St Agnes he brought a university friend of mine called Ernie onboard as the marketing manager and Tom Podolinsky as a technical garment designer. The brand has slowly grown and picked up a shelf-full of awards along the way for it's ethical business practices and environmental conscience. Alongside considering every step of their products life cycles, they also brought back a rare breed of fine fibre British sheep from the edge and used a Land Rover that ran on bio-fuel to get them all down to the beach for a surf. All things considered, they're the sort of company who deserve all of the praise and success that they get.
"Take this and just do what you do, be as hard as you can on it, and let us know how it goes" were Ernie's words to me as he handed me a Brisa synthetic base layer the day before I boarded a train for Morocco last Spring. The Brisa was a new addition to their range, and a controversial one being a synthetic performance base layer rather than their normal preferred material of merino wool. Synthetics are well known for their ability to wick sweat and keep you dry when active, but they're also regarded as being a bit stinky. So I stink tested it: I wore it for a week straight all the way to Morocco by train with all of the stresses, all nighters and running for trains involved in hauling surfboards across a continent, then climbed a mountain in it and made it to the coast. The Brisa's construction is like a double skin, with "pores" on the weave of the outside surface, kind of like human skin. When static the pores are "closed" but when the fabric moves (due to movement of the wearer) the pores are stretched open, allowing sweat to be wicked away. Here are a few select extracts from my product testing journal:
My friend Kyle in a Bise insulation layer, waiting for a train somewhere in France.
"Put brisa back on at 5am after a wash, underneath a Coho and Etobicoke and it's smelling ok. Had my camping knife confiscated and binned by security at St Pancreas (I've had it for 20 years, so upsetting) then spilt milk on the brisa. Not a good morning."
"Hauling a boardbag across Paris in the sunshine made me appreciate it's wicking abilities, plus black hides sweat. Note: Parisian cafe baguettes fit perfectly into the pockets of our Etobicoke and Bise insulation layers."
"8 hours on a "regional" train to Madrid, I did some yoga on the floor of the luggage area and then a night in a cafe bar next to the train station. 5 and a half hours so far of coffee, beer and backgammon, still 3 and a half hours until our (potential) train. The Brisa has now done 24 hours straight since it's last hotel handbasin wash and it smells alright. My eyes feel as though they've had fire spat in them though."
Day 6 of the Brisa stink test; drinking from a mountain stream whilst trekking in the High Atlas Mountains.
"Ferry. Bus. Tangiers. The Brisa has done 39 hours straight. Carry my bag and boadbag all around the crowded streets and alleys of the medina until we find a nice old hotel. We get offered hasish eight times and I have sweat my rig off. The Brisa gets a wash in the sink and the evening off."
We trek for miles up to the "roughage" climbers hut. It was damned hard going, hot and at altitude (up above the snow line) but the Brisa worked absolutely perfectly - kept me warm, kept the sun off and wicked sweat well so I didn't get cold in the wind." Back at the gite the armpits smell but the rest seems ok, hung it up to air.
"Could I wear it as a rashie? Alone with boardies or under a wetsuit? Our surf issues meant that I didn't experiment with either - it's not cold enough to need a rashie under my 3/2 and it's too windy for just boardshorts and a surf-shirt. I wonder what SPF rating the Brisa would have?
Lost down the lanes around the River Severn back in the UK looking for a "secret ledge" that turns the incoming tide into a surf-able river wave.
The Finisterre Landy: ever-ready for wind and tide to align ready for the dash downhill to the beach.
Finisterre have an online sale happening right now and are having a workshop sale next weekend, on Saturday 11th February at The Tubestation on Polzeath, with some big reductions on this past seasons range. It'd be worth your while swinging by if you're in North Cornwall.
