Hallowed Ground

As a tribe, we gather in unusual locations.  Our meeting places, where stories are shared and surf culture is perpetuated are not, I would argue, in the ocean - that is where we surf.  In the water our conversations are often stilted and broken, interrupted by the catching of waves or made difficult by wind or distance.  The ocean is where the stories occur and where legends are made, but it is often the parking lot that is the incubator of our culture. Almost anywhere where you can surf there is space nearby to park a car, whether it’s on the roadside, in a large tarmac lot, on a patch of dirt, or in a clearing in the sand dunes or forest.  Sometimes where everybody parks is a walk away from the waves, but quite often the spot where you pull up, check the waves and get changed has a pretty good view of the surf.  It’s where, in mid-winter, surfers hunch over their steering wheels with the windscreen wipers squeaking across the glass trying to keep warm whilst drumming up the motivation to pull on a wetsuit.  It’s where we talk about the best sand banks and surf forecasts through rolled down windows, where we compliment each other on sick waves and look back at the sea whilst towelling off in the hope that it’s getting worse, not better, and where we take phone-photos to show our friends what they missed today.  Most photos of waves aren’t taken by water-photographers swimming with a housing or stood on the sand with a zoom lens, they’re taken by surfers stood in the parking lot; how many surfers actually walk back down the beach to take a photo?

It’s in car parks where surfers stand with a coffee in the morning evaluating how accurate the forecast was and rescheduling their day around planned surfs, and where surfers lean on bonnets or sit on tailgates in the evening sharing beers and talking story.  It’s in car parks where wax is gifted, where the secret of where car keys are stashed is guarded, and sometimes it’s where water-borne scores are settled.

The ocean is where we ride waves, and this is a personal and solo pursuit.  The beach is, more often than not, just the thin band of sand that we run across to get to the water.  For so many though, the car par is where we congregate.  It’s where we are “surfers”, not just a surfer.

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. 

A Four Day Festival of Froth

Ten days ago the second annual Approaching Lines Festival of Surf (presented by Reef) wrapped up, following 3 nights of surf films on an enormous cinema screen and a single fin surf contest that went down in classic conditions.  I was fortunate enough to be there as event photographer again, which meant that in between squeezing through the crowds to photograph everyone enjoying a beer in the intermission, I also got to sneak in and watch a few great movies from the back of the auditorium.  It's really great to see the various Approaching Lines events gaining so much popularity within the surf community, as British surfers continue to get behind the sort of events that bring us all together and break our bad habits of sticking to our own crew at our local beach.  It's a real pleasure to be a part of it all, regardless of the surf movies and complimentary beers...

Here're a few of my favourite shots from across the 4-day event, held in Newquay.  Hopefully I'll see a few more of you there next year.

Life size surf movies, and then some.

Shakas for Deus' new movie "North to Noosa".

Berads and beers, both courtesy of the fine folks at Sharps.

Event Director Chris Nelson, broadcasting.

There were sell-out crowds throughout the festival, not least for Kai Neville's latest shred-fest "Cluster" which had crew queuing out the door. 

Not least because the man himself was there to present his latest offering and do a Q&A after the credits stopped rolling, along with Saffa ripper Brendon Gibbens who features in Cluster.

Trying to make a multiplex look nice with light trails at dusk and all that...

James Parry about to paddle out for his heat in the Reef classic single fin invitational.

Sam Lamiroy running down the beach in front of the Headland Hotel.

A loomer rearing up out back.

Sam Lamiroy launching off the end section.  He stuck some solid moves in heat 1.

Heat 1 contestants (L-R) James Parry, Sam Lamiroy, Gee Piper, Toby Donachie, Neil Holland and Tom Anderson.

Heat 2 contestants Archie Cross, Sarah Bentley, Alan Stokes (Victor), Sam Boex and John Eldridge.

Alan Stokes did about 8 of these on the same wave, all the way to the inside at Little Fistral.  If I had been shooting film I would've burned through a whole roll on this wave alone.

Sam Boex took out the "Most Stylish" award, and rightly so.

This year's champ, Mr Alan Stokes.

The Inquisitive Mind of Tom Blake

Thomas Edward Blake is one of the most important figures in surfing, and probably the most important single person in the history of wooden surfboards.  Whilst Polynesians had been riding waves on wooden surfboards for hundreds of years, it was Blake whose experiments and innovations through the 1920s and 30s led to lighter paddleboards and surfboards, alternative (and widely accessible) construction techniques, the introduction of the fin and a rudimentary leash.  Esteemed surf writer Drew Kampion credited Blake with transforming surfing from a Polynesian curiosity into a 20^th century lifestyle, and rightly so.

In 1927, the same year that he pioneered surfing at Malibu, California with Sam Reid, Tom Blake built a replica Olo surfboard in Hawaii.  The board was fifteen foot long, and would’ve been enormously heavy (somewhere in the region of 150lbs), so he drilled hundreds of holes through the deck to remove excess weight and sealed the ends of the holes with a wooden veneer.  The reduced weight helped Tom to win many paddleboard races, so he continued to experiment with lighter boards.  He had some success chambering a solid board by cutting it into strips, carving out internal sections and then putting it all back together, before moving onto constructing surfboards from multiple component parts rather than shaping them from a solid timber.  Blake started to build his paddleboards using a skin and frame technique similar to that used in the construction of aircraft wings, which made them significantly lighter than the solid plank boards most widely used at the time weighing as little as 40lbs.  Whilst Blake’s boards had solid wood, straight-edged rails, planked or plywood decks and were held together with brass screws and pins sealed (caulked) with black pitch, construction techniques for wooden surfboards have improved in the intervening 84 years since he patented the design in 1931.  Nevertheless, the original design was used for decades on beaches around the world as a lifeguard rescue board, and produced commercially by several manufacturers (Thomas Rogers Company of Venice, CA, the Los Angeles Ladder Company and Catalina Equipment Company).

It was in 1935, however, that Tom Blake made his most significant contribution to surfing.  In an attempt to provide some directional stability whilst surfing, he attached an aluminium skeg salvaged from a speedboat onto the bottom of his cedar surfboard and encased it in a thin layer of wood for protection.  At a foot long and 4 inches high, many surfers would struggle to recognise it as a fin, however it was this that allowed surfers to ride at a tighter angle across peeling waves and to begin to effectively turn surfboards.  Tom Blake’s inquisitive mind and relentless quest to improve the performance of his equipment changed surfing forever.  It has been said that if Duke Kahanamoku was the father of modern surfing then Tom Blake was its inventor, and rightly so.  Modern surfers certainly owe him a great debt of gratitude, so why not say a little thank you to Tom next time you lean into a turn.

“Along the shore I wander, free,

A beach comber at Waikiki,

Where time worn souls who seek in vain,

Hearts ease, in vagrant, wondering train.

A beach comber from choice, am I,

Content to let the world drift by,

Its strife and envy, pomp and pride,

I’ve tasted, and am satisfied.”

Thomas Edward Blake

1902-1994

For a more thorough biography please take a look at the fantastic Encyclopaedia of Surfing or the Legendary Surfers website.

All images reproduced from the Surfing Heritage Foundation.

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.

The Way The Cookie Crumbles

Brad's backhand foam climb, somewhere north of Hossegor.

"We've got plenty of time, I'll definitely make my train." were the famous last words that I uttered as I walked backwards up the beach with Harry, still firing off shots of the rest of our friends surfing an empty, head-high peak on the beaches somewhere north of Hossegor.  We ran up the sand dune, got back to the car and set off along the track through the forest to rejoin the main road, both pretty confident that we would get there on time and that I'd catch my train.  Well, get me there on time we did, but I hadn't accounted for the queue that I would face at the ticket office which was clearly running on a skeleton staff.  I watched the clock tick down from quarter to twelve towards the departure time of midday; I was fidgeting, huffing and starting to get anxious.  With three minutes to go I left the queue and tackled the automatic machine which spat my ticket out at 11:59.  I ran under the underpass and up onto the platform where my train to Bordeaux was waiting and, just as I reached out to press the button to open the door, I heard the ominous clunk of the doors locking.  "Non, c'est parti monsieur.  Le prochain train est à quinze heures" the conductor shouted down to me, as I watched my train leave without me and taking with it any hopes of me making my flight home and getting back to work the next day.  Harry doubled back to pick me up, and on the drive back to Hossegor the exhaust fell off his car on the péage.  Clearly it wasn't our morning.  We limped back with the car sounding like a motorbike and rejoined the rest of our friends who were spending the afternoon watching the WCT surf contest, and I fired off a few frames of the world's best surfers in action.  

Sometimes a morning really doesn't go your way and there's nothing at all that you can do about it apart from try your best to make the most of the afternoon.  It's just the way that the cookie crumbles, but at the end of the day cookies still taste good.   

Julian Wilson, teasing me for missing my train 

by pointing straight at 12 o-clock.

Ol' green eyes on a nicely backlit green wave.

Contest winner John John Florence entertaining the crowd 

way down at the southern end of the contest zone.  

The beach was absolutely packed in front 

of the peak and the grandstand.

Miguel Pupo casting a shadow in round 3.

Taj Burrow and a rooster's tail.

Shoulder Season?

It's often called shoulder season - that period of time after the kids have gone back to school yet the chances of good weather are still high.  Summer lingers on but there's a slight chill at dawn and the odd leaf blowing on the wind.  The beaches are quieter aside from the sound of breaking waves, as hurricanes spinning off the far side of the Atlantic and the first of the northern winter storms send long period swells towards Europe's western coastline.  So pack the car, load the van, board the ferry or hop a flight and find a spot with a good view of the shoulder.  This season for surfers means solid swell and sunshine, and there isn't anything "shoulder" about that combination - it's the face that we all fell in love with.


If you want to see more of my work (smaller, sometimes squarer and slightly more regularly) and are on instagram then feel free to keep an eye on http://instagram.com/matarneyphotography - Thanks!

The Barrel Equation

Waves break when they become too steep and the velocity of the water particles at the crest exceeds the phase speed (the overall wave speed), so essentially they trip over themselves.  A wave will break when it reaches a depth of 1.3 times the wave height.  If the depth of the seabed is gradually decreasing (for instance, on a relatively flat beach) then this theory holds true and the wave will "spill" slowly, however if a wave comes out of deep water and hits a shallow reef then it will break much faster and hollower.

The Iribarren number can be used to classify breaker types depending on wave height (H), period (T) and beach slope gradient (B):

=(1.25H)T tanB

Spilling <0.4

0.4< Plunging >2.0

2.0> Surging

If you don't have an accurate measurement of the inshore bathymetry to hand though, and let's face it who does, then you can use Galvin's Breaker Type Parameter from 1968:

B=Hb/gT tanB

Where Hb = wave height at break point and g = gravity at 9.8m/s.

Surging B<0.003

Plunging 0.003<B>0.068

Spilling B<0.068

The length:width ratio of the cross-section of a barreling wave can be used to determine the intensity of the tube, from "wider then it is tall" through to the sort of head-dippers that you really have to contort yourself into:

Square <1:1

1:1< Round> 2:1

2:1> "Almond"

Have a think about that next time you see a photograph of Pipeline or Teahupoo shot from the channel, showing somebody stood in a keg wide enough to drive a car through with their arms outstretched and unable to touch the sides.  Maths for surfers:  Don't ever say that An Tor Orth An Mor isn't educational!

The Blue Blanquillo

Easily recognisable due to their streamlined bodies and blue coloration, with darker stripes running along their bodies and a white belly, the blue blanquillo is a truly distinctive fish.  Ordinarily found swimming alone in Indo-Pacific waters, lurking around coral reefs near the sea floor, it's remarkable to see one jumping out of the water in front of such a decidedly Cornish backdrop…

White surfboards can be stunning and certainly have their place, but I don't half love it when somebody goes for a beautiful resin tint (as is the case here) or spray job and gives their precious sled a name and a personality.  Surfboards are works of craft and art that we spend great deals of time with and money on, so it seems appropriate that when we get one with character we celebrate that.  Decorate it, name it, cherish it…and throw buckets with it.  

Nick Holden of the National Trust did and does with his Blue Blanquillo, making more than most would of a close-out under the Cornish cliffs.

Be A Haymaker

"When the sun shines, make hay.  Which is to say: take time when time comes, lest time steals away"

Patience

Seek a pastime that demands the development of patience: an activity with no final whistle; no finish line; no scoreboard.  Find something that you love and can lose yourself in for hours and hours without realising.  These days it seems that many of us can't handle being alone with ourselves for more than about twenty seconds - just take a look around next time you're stood on a railway platform or in the queue at the supermarket and watch all of the humanity around you reaching for their phones because they're so uncomfortable just being in the present.  There's real value in having to wait for a reward, be it waiting for the tide to turn, for the fish to start to rise or for the rock to dry out after a rain shower.  It gives you the sort of time needed to let things settle and to subconsciously process your thoughts.  Patience is becoming a lost art, and whilst there are many benefits to the immediacy of modern culture, the loss of our ability to wait for things to happen in their own god time is surely something that we ought to make efforts to salvage.  It's said that patient men win the day, after all.

Paipo-a-Go-Go

Me, a big baked bean and some deep-winter wedges.

What with it having been a long weekend here in the UK and many other countries, I should really have written this post a week ago so that the classic long weekend of DIY hammering and sawing could be channeled into producing one of these wonderful little surf craft.  But I've just moved house and spent the last few weeks without internet access, so now the challenge is for you to make one of these in two days instead of three next weekend…

But just what is it?

Dan Crockett on an Otter paipo.

When Captain James Cook dropped anchor in a Hawaiian bay in 1778 he witnessed many of the locals riding waves lying down on wooden boards.  These basic wave riding craft are called paipos (pronounced pipe-oh) and the name is derived from the Hawaiian "Pae Po'o" which means "to surf headfirst".  Generally around 3 feet long, the paipo is the little brother of larger finless Hawaiian designs such as the alaia and olo, the alaia having experienced a resurrection of sorts over the past decade in alternative surf-craft circles.  Travellers to and from the Hawaiian islands at the turn of the last century exported the paipo and it was adapted at various coastal locations around the world, becoming known most commonly as a "bellyboard".  In the 1970's Tom Morey introduced the boogie board and foam bodyboards instantly overshadowed the traditional paipo, with just a few small pockets of traditionalists keeping the flame burning - mostly in Hawaii.

I made my paipo a few years ago, and it's the sort of board that sits in my quiver waiting for a time when I've surfed enough good waves on my regular stick to make heading out on something a little different not seem like much of a risk to my monthly wave-count.  I managed to get hold of a 3'6" long paulownia kitchen worktop off-cut from a friend (the same wood that the majority of alaias are made from) and wondered for a while what I could make with it.  The worktop was made from a number of planks of varying widths, all glued together.  I cut these apart, trimmed them to uniform widths and then glued them back together with thin strips of a random hardwood (that I had some strips of lying around my workshop) sandwiched in between them.  I planed down the hardwood stringers and then drew out a template for my paipo.  It looked like a giant baked bean.  Once I'd cut out the shape of the board I shaped the rails using a small block plane (turned down at the tail, up at the nose and 50/50 through the middle section) with the board clamped against a workbench.  Because I have a bit of a thing for not wasting off-cuts I cut a band to go around nose on the deck, using the same template, and once it was glued in place I routed a groove into it to act as a hand-grip.  The whole thing was sanded smooth and then had a few coats of linseed oil to seal it before being taken for a splash in the sea.  All up it was a fun way to spend some time and I came out the other side with a new surfboard, of sorts.  It takes the bare minimum of tools (a pencil, saw, a few sash-cramps, glue, a block plane and abrasive paper) if you want to try making one yourself.  Essentially it's just a wooden bodyboard which makes it the ideal choice for shorebreaks, but it's also great just to run in with for a quick half hour in summer to catch a few waves and ride some whitewater back towards the beach.  It depends how seriously you take your surfing, I guess.  If you're open to different ways of experiencing waves though then I would definitely recommend sliding in on a few head first.

Ride anything: wave-wise and board-wise.

Check out the stoke that the crew at The Paipo Society have for these things, and keep your eyes peeled for the next Approaching Lines Slyder Cup event - celebrating finless surfing in all of it's many forms.