Surf Nation

Brims still looking good... but Russell Winter out

Good and bad news from the O'Neill Highland Open. The bad news is that last year's winner, Russell Winter, was knocked out yesterday. The good news is that conditions continue to hold up. Former WCT competitor Shea Lopez was among those who maximised the clean 4ft surf, with other standouts being ASP World Junior Champion Jordy Smith and Asher Nolan. It looks as if the organizers might blast through all of the last heat of round 5, the quarters, semis and final today.

The connection between Brian's Barrels, the Scottish Highlands and a Swede called Jenny

A while ago an excellent Swedish woman called Jenny helped me out with a few contacts in Scotland for Surf Nation. This might already sound a bit left field, but Jenny works for Visit Scotland and is also a surfer. I'm not sure if there's any surf in Sweden, though I know that there is in Norway (thank you, the current issue of Wavelength), but anyway, Jenny lives in Scotland and has some of the best waves in the UK on her doorstep. She is a fine person, of that I'm sure, but she also drives a hard bargain. In return for her help in my quest for surf in the land of Robbie Burns and Berwick Rangers (shurely shome mishtake? Ed), Jenny made me promise to enter some kind of crazy Scottish competition. Apparently it involves kayaking over an absurd distance, mountain biking up a few vertical inclines and ascending a gentle Scottish mountain backwards. Needless to say I said "Yes! Count me in!" on the basis that Jenny would forget all about our chat, but lo and behold she has got in touch and called in the favour. So, dear readers, shortly after I return from France, where I'm interviewing a little known surfer called Laird next week (for Huck), I depart for certain torture in the Scottish Highlands. Wish me well. Meanwhile, to try and convince you that she is a nice person really, Jenny sends this footage. Which isn't at all bad...

Brims fires at O'Neill Highland Open

Brims never lets you down. Good to see it firing on Day Two of the O'Neill Highland Open, also to learn that Sam Lamiroy made it through a tricky heat to Round 2. Here are a couple of shots to set the scene.

Will Britain have a Team at the World Junior Surfing Games?

My sources at the O'Neill Highland Open are currently unobtainable, which suggests either (a) they're all at the coast, probably Brims, watching the contest which has, despite yesterday's lay day, now kicked off, or (b) there's still no swell and they're all down the pub. Either way, the fact that the Highland Open is being held in Thurso and its nearby breaks is a good thing, and makes for an interesting juxtaposition with the plight of the British Junior Surf Team. On the eve of the World Junior Surfing Games at Costa da Caparica in Portugal, the British Surfing Association (BSA) is having to hold an emergency auction to raise funds just to get the team to the land that spawned Nobel prize winner Jose Saramago, a lot of excellent surfers and, er, the current Chelsea manager. Newquay's Headland Hotel has generously stepped in with a contribution of £1,000, but there remains a substantial shortfall. Hence, this coming Sunday at The Chy Bar in Newquay the BSA is auctioning surfboards, wetsuits and clothing donated by a number of surfcos including Animal, Hurley, Etnies, Gotcha and Santa Cruz.

Last year was big for British surfing. Russell Winter won the inaugural O'Neill Highland Open and we took a silver medal (thanks to Ben Skinner) at the World Surfing Games. We also produced a European Junior Champion and two world champion kneeboarders. Despite this and the efforts of the BSA - which has approached a number of the major players to ask for support for the country's junior surfing talent - no one has stepped into the breach to help fund the Junior Team.

Sometimes it seems to me that the surfing boom doesn't accommodate the grass roots. I've written before of the "I'm alright Jack" philosophy that animates surfing, both individually and collectivelly. It's a syndrome that means that disadvantaged kids who live near the coast never get to the beach, still less ride a wave, and it's a syndrome that prevents forward-thinking investment in our surfing future. Here's to the Headland Hotel for breaking the mould - and if you want to help (and maybe score some good gear into the bargain), the auction at the Chy Bar starts at 8pm this Sunday.

Photos of Porthleven's Jake Boex courtesy of The BSA's website. 

Five poets who would have been surfers

My digressive tendencies got the better of me last night following a good session in waist to chest high surf. I had a great time on Sam Bleakley's old mini-mal, and the consequence of surf stoke is always to induce an amiable, philanthropic world view. I found myself thinking of some lines from Marina Tsvetayeva, who wrote somewhere of "a wave like a kiss, wiping away memory," and then this got me thinking: who are the world's top surfing poets? The answer is, obviously, none of them, or, at least, none from the so-called canon because, unless I am wrong, poets have not habitually surfed (though I have been told that archive footage exists of John Betjeman riding a wave; on what, I do not know. Equally I should point out that Sam's father, Alan, is a fine poet and accomplished surfer). However, some poets strike me as being natural born surfers, albeit that they were born in the wrong era or country. Here are five poets who would, I am sure, have ridden waves - or, at least, written about those who do.

1. Pablo Neruda. The Chilean's biographer, Alistair Reid, says that Neruda is the most widely read poet since Shakespeare. How he knows this is beyond me but one thing is certain: Neruda loved the sea and wrote beautifully of its many moods. He also wrote an exquisite poem of lost love, the opening lines of which are:

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

Anyone who can write like that would have ridden a longboard with the utmost style and grace.

2. Fernando Pessoa. The high priest of modernism may, to the casual observer, have a little too much of the Kafkaesque clerk about him for surfing. He wrote The Book of Disquiet which is, I admit, surf-free. But Pessoa was a man who combined passion with understatement, whose influence extends to the likes of Jose Saramago and Antonio Tabucchi and beyond. Another longboard style master.

3. Marina Tsvetayeva. Her disturbed childhood contributed to extraordinary poems of intense brilliance which she correctly predicted would be "savoured as are rarest wines/when they are old." Unfortunately Tsvetayeva hailed from Russia, and although Moscow has its fair share of the surfing corporates the land of Tolstoy & Co has yet to be associated with performance (or, indeed, any) surfing. This is a shame. Tsvetayeva would have ripped on a shortboard.

4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A propensity for opium reveals a willingness to experience the highs and lows of life, though perhaps confines the formidable Romantic to an observatory, post-slumber role on the beach.

5. John Masefield. Not for nothing does Sea Fever appear on Beach Bum's home page:

"I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gul's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife..."

Clearly a man who wouldn't have cared what board he was riding so long as he was in the ocean. And that, folks, is what matters.

See Killer Dana for info on Paper Shredders, an anthology of surf poetry that may, or may not, contain work by the five hotshots above.

The Radical Rodents - ripping again

Check out the reeling right-handers in this footage. Some fine surfing too...

The long and the short of it

There's a first time for everything, and yesterday I lost my longboard virginity. I took out a board just past the 9ft mark thanks to the Surftech demo centre at Chapel Idne in Sennen Cove. And guess what happened? Yes, you're right: I quadrupled my wave count. Not every wave was perfect - I confess to lying fractionally in the wrong place on one occasion and pearling straight after take off - but instead of paddling frantically in small surf on a smaller board and getting two waves per hour, I found myself up and riding with shocking frequency. As it happens the swell built and would have been surfable on a smaller board, but the experience has made me wonder. In fact it makes me think, what with my advancing years and all, that a longboard could just be The Future... (Well, my future). Meanwhile my 11-year-old son, whose former adoration of his Dad turns increasingly to merciless mickey-taking, has taken to my old 6'8, super-narrow, slick and flexible thruster with aplomb. As we walked back up the beach he summed up my best ride thus: "Yeah Dad, I saw you on that wave, but you only caught it because you were on an old man board." Kids, you gotta love 'em.

The O'Neill Highland Open: It's back

Just a couple of days to go and then what is arguably the premier surfing contest to be held in Britain in 2007 kicks off. The O'Neill Highland Open made its inaugural appearance last April. Europe's most successful surfer to date, Russell Winter, won the event, which was blessed by pumping swell almost every day at Thurso and Brims Ness on Scotland's North Shore. On Tuesday what is now a 6-star WQS contest - in which 192 of the world's top surfers will do battle - gets underway. Hawaii's 14-year-old ripper Jon Jon Florence - the youngest competitor ever in the Triple Crown - has a wildcard, while British hopes again lie with Russell Winter along with Sam Lamiroy, Nathan Phillips, Oli Adams, Chris Noble and Alan Stokes. The forecast is for good swell from midweek, so it might just be that O'Neill score again with a world-class - if rather cold - contest on British shores. I'm unable to make it owing to yet more work on the book (the proofs have to be finalised by Friday this week), but I have fond memories of a cracking event last year (not least, the post-surf poker games). I'll post word of how it's going, but meanwhile, spare a thought for the lifeguards. I've been training a lot with one of them recently, St Ives-based former pro skater Stef Harkon. Many years ago, Stef skated with Jay Adams and the Dogtown crew and his ability to pull into Brims barrels is as good as anyone's. One image I retain from last year is of Stef swimming out into the Pentland Firth - a stretch of water as treacherous as that around Land's End - to retrieve a surfboard that had become two, thanks to the combination of reef and wave at Brims. This and other acts of impressive competence in the water he undertook in a quiet and modest manner, never once drawing attention to himself and constantly monitoring the sea conditions and progress of the competitors to ensure that all was well. History records that all was, indeed, well, but without the likes of Stef events such as the O'Neill Highland Open couldn't be held. So here's hoping for another top contest - with due appreciation for the lifeguards.

Photo of Stef Harkon deep in a Brims beauty (C) Ian Smith. For more info on the O'Neill Highland Open see the O'Neill website and the July archive on this blog, in which appears 'Force Nine Gaels,' my write up of last year's contest.

First basking shark of the season?

The lack of swell continues but today, at Porthcurno, there was an interesting sight in the water. No, I don't mean any of the (seemingly exclusively male) nudists who flock to the golden sand of Pednvounder just around the corner from the main beach. Nor do I mean the seals that pop up just about every day, and nor even the hardy souls out swimming in nothing more than a pair of trunks. No, something much more intriguing was scything around a little out to sea. It was, ladies and gentlemen, a basking shark. Very few of the tourists flocking to the Minack Theatre, high on the cliffs overlooking Porthcurno, seemed to notice it, but it was there alright. What's fascinating about this is that basking sharks usually appear here in late spring and June. I couldn't get a photo, because the shark was too far out to capture with my digital camera, so you'll have to take my word for it, but I think this is the first basker of the season. Anyone for global warming?

Photo of one the unthreatening little fellows by Cornwall-based photographer Will Postlethwaite. See Seven Seas Images for more info.

Memories of Skewjack

While researching Surf Nation I discovered Britain's one and only surf village. The Skewjack Surf Village was set up in 1971 by Chris Tyler, an ex-architect, ex-trawler-man and surfer. Its location was just up the road from my home, about a mile outside Sennen Cove in the far west of Cornwall. It closed in 1986 but attracted both custom and notoriety in its heyday, being dubbed by locals as "Screwjack" (thanks, in part at least, to an advertising campaign that promised "two girls for every boy") and being christened by The Times in the year of its birth as "Surf City." I referred to Skewjack in a recent newspaper article, which prompted East Anglian surfer and journalist Neil Watson to drop me a line. Here's what he had to say (and, thanks to Neil - pictured on Porthcurno beach with his family - here are some images of Skewjack from back in the day).