Surf Nation

You can take the contest out of the Toon...

At last, it happened. The O'Neill British Surfing Championships found a venue with surf, and went ahead last weekend. The event had been scheduled for Tynemouth on no fewer than three occasions, only to be cancelled because of unco-operative surf, but O'Neill proved unafraid of making a radical move of their own and switched it to the North Devon beachbreak of Putsborough. For the last seven days the north coasts of Devon and Cornwall, not to mention the coastline of Wales and Ireland, have been battered by an immense and often unruly swell, and so it was last weekend. But Putsborough lies around the corner from Baggy Point, offering sheltered sandbanks when Croyde and Saunton are blown out, and proved a wise choice for the long-deferred British Nationals. Clean and chunky 4-5ft waves provided the backdrop for a win by one of the most charismatic and talented of the current crop of UK surfers, Sam Lamiroy.

Riding the Free Market

By Tim Kevan

Adam Smith once used the metaphor of the invisible hand to illustrate his argument that those who seek wealth by following their individual self-interest also inadvertently stimulate the economy and thereby assist the poor. With the recent death of another advocate of the free market, Milton Friedman, the question of whether so tangible - albeit invisible - an influence flows in surfing’s increasingly commercial wake is a timely one.

An Irish reef takes its toll

Here's a reminder of what can happen when you come off the top at an Irish reef-break, only to look down and find that you've run out of water. A technicoloured upper thigh, hairline fracture of the hip, oodles of pain and enforced time out of the water. The surfer in question has asked, through gritted teeth, that his modesty be preserved.

Beachley looks for title no.7 at the Roxy Pro

Cassandra Murnieks sets the scene at Sunset Beach

Kelly Slater clinched his eighth world title recently, so it's only natural that six-time world champion Layne Beachley will try and follow in his steps in notching up a seventh title at Sunset Beach. The Australian has been in dynamic form this season after returning from a neck injury which saw her sit out the latter part of 2005 and at one stage threatened her career. Now, though, she is back with a vengeance. Despite winning one event this year, Beachley's consistent results have put her in the lead over fellow Australians Melanie Redman-Carr and current world champion Chelsea Georgeson. It's all to play for at Oahu's legendary Sunset Beach, scene of the Roxy Pro, and it'll no doubt help Beachley's cause that she rates Sunset as her favourite break on the tour.

Legions of the Unjazzed

People who don't surf often have trouble comprehending just what is so intoxicating about surfing. To those who've never ridden a board, surfing looks like so much anodyne ephemera, something for juveniles that will be forgotten once the transition to adulthood is complete. So, too, does jazz confuse and alienate non-believers. The classically-trained musician, able to read music perfectly but incapable of improvising to save his life, will hear a Coltrane solo and condemn it as inconsequential blather. But for those who surf, or who love jazz, the great Pipeline pioneer Phil Edwards has just about the best description of non-surfers that I've ever encountered. There's more than a hint of Kerouac, but just like the man who wrote On The Road, when he got it right, he got it perfect.

For Edwards, non-surfers were "the Legions of the Unjazzed."

Help for a surfer from the Hebrides

Mark Maciver, a surfer from the Hebrides, needs help with a dissertation he is writing. This is looking at what motivates surfers to travel to a place such as Mark’s homeland. Getting to the Hebrides is costly, the waves aren’t guaranteed, and the weather is unlikely to put a smile on your face if you’re drawing dead for surf. One answer might be contained in Alf Alderson’s description of surfing in the Hebrides in his book, Surf UK: The definitive guide to surfing in Britain: “The remote nature of the beaches, and the potential size and power of the waves, mean the islands are not really suited to inexperienced surfers.” Mark’s dissertation will shed light on whether those who do visit the Hebrides are seasoned surfers, groms or something in between, and also the “wilderness” appeal of much surf travel. He’s happy to hear from anyone who has a view and can be contacted on this forum or at markmaciveris@hotmail.com.

I must down to the seas again...

John Masefield’s Sea-Fever is a poem that has resonated throughout my life. This has a lot to do with having lived within a stone’s throw of the sea for over 20 years, only to find myself landlocked for too many of my adult years. Work took me inland, but no amount of dreaming of the ocean, or weekend sorties to surf, swim or simply be there, could ever compensate for the sea’s absence. And so, like Masefield – “I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and sky” – there came a point when the ocean’s siren call could no longer be denied. That point has just found its tangible expression in the move my family and I made this week, from the Cotswolds to the far west of Cornwall. At last, we are here, at the water’s edge; indeed, given the Penwith peninsula’s geographical isolation – we’re five minutes’ from Land’s End - we’re at the edge of pretty much everything. How does it feel?

Call me Ishmael: Herman Melville and surfing

In “Loomings,” the first chapter of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, the narrator, Ishmael, reflects on the power exerted in the human imagination by the sea. He posits a number of situations, and, in all of them, a journey to the ocean is inevitable. “Stand any man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be,” says Ishmael, and this is a statement with which surfers can empathise more readily than most. We know, intimately, the compulsion to be by the water’s edge; indeed, to go further and accept what another American writer, Kate Chopin, called the “soft, warm embrace” of the sea. We immerse ourselves in the ocean as often as possible, and find a peace there that is wholly lacking in the principal (human) character in Moby Dick, Captain Ahab. The meaning of Ahab’s search – his mission to kill the great white whale – is ambiguous, not to say downright recondite, and it is little wonder that a novel as playful as anything by Nabokov or Borges remains a critics’ favourite rather than a “must-have” children’s book. Indeed, in a world where PlayStation2 and Gameboy dominate non-sports entertainment I’d given up all hope of ever introducing my two sons, aged 11 and nine, to Moby Dick. Until, that is, I ran into a mesmerising new abridged version with illustrations by Patrick Benson.

Crowded line ups - spongers take the flak

Andy Cox has a novel solution to the problem of crowded line ups

There is nothing quite like the approach of Christmas – supposedly the season of peace and goodwill to all men – to bring out the curmudgeon in me. The annual slide into depression gathered pace when my wife informed me that my presence was required for an all-day shopping expedition to stock up for the festivities. My misery was made complete when Saturday morning, the scheduled date for my day in purgatory, dawned with the first decent surf in weeks. Desperate times call for desperate remedies: was it me that my wife wanted to drag around the shops, or my credit card? A disconcertingly short period of time later, my beloved wheel span her way out of the drive. I scraped the mould off my wettie and headed for the beach.

And two Frenchmen who might be more insane than Mike Parsons

http://www.acro-base.com/fr/imgs/galerie/video/videos/eiger06/eiger-faf-emb.mov

Francois Bon and Antoine Montant call this "speedflying." I call it shredding the North Face of the Eiger. It's unreal, and no one would have thought it possible just a few years back. So, how long before the first made air at Teahupoo? The first 360 on a Mavericks wall? The first floater at Jaws? Impossible? What's impossible? Ask the Frenchmen.