I find myself pondering a variety of surfing-related themes this morning, not least because an acquaintance I bumped into yesterday opined that "nothing really happens in surfing - you just ride waves and that's it, isn't it?".
Well, no. Mick Fanning might just win the ASP World Title at the forthcoming Hang Loose Santa Caterina Pro in Brazil, while in the far north of Scotland the pick of British pros are doing battle for the British Triple Crown. Greg Martin, the new editor of Pit Pilot, sends this update:
The swell has arrived! Yesterday was due to be the first day of competition,
but it was a little too small at Thurso. But, as the
charts predicted, just before the sun went down the waves appeared from
nowhere and kept building. Today is meant to be bigger again, so we should be
in for some good waves and good surfing. The standard is extremely high
among all the competitors and it was pretty amazing to watch the pack free
surfing the bigger waves at Brims last night. Stokesy, as always, got wave
of the session - and it'll no doubt appear here, there and everywhere in the coming months - but in the meantime, here's someone picking off one of the sets at
sunset.
Meanwhile, good old British Airways have banned the transportation of surfboards. I was thinking about BA's deeply unpopular decision this morning as I read Dr Tony Butt's excellent "How cool is global warming?" article in The Surfer's Path. Was BA's apparent hostility to surfers actually motivated by a concern for the environment, I wondered? Was there someone on high within BA who had concluded that surfers needed a short, sharp shock? That this was the only way to kick them out of their zeal for global surf travel with its huge, attendant and undeniable carbon footprint? For as Butt, the co-author of Surf Science: An Introduction to Waves for Surfing, says: "If we're not so lucky [in managing/surviving the consequences of global warming], and don't quite manage to reduce our carbon emissions and deforestation, any kind of surf travel could be out of the question."
Somehow I doubt that BA's ban on surfboards was a product of some kind of corporate benevolent dictatorship, but that we, as surfers, have questions to ask of our delight in exploring surf breaks around the world is inescapable. Alex Dick-Read, the editor of The Surfer's Path, confronts the issue in characteristically head-on style in the editorial in the current issue of the magazine. ADR posits a scenario of eco-conscious surfing - complete with boards made of 50% plant-based foam, surfboard resin that's 97% vegetable oil, glass-in bamboo fins and non-toxic surfboard wax - that is, in fact, possible. As he says, arguing for surfers to commit fully to the clean, green surfing experience: "Best of all, you don't have to be a throwback hippy hair-shirted lentil-eating acid-headed eco-pyscho to do any of this. You can be whoever the hell you want to be. You can go about your life exactly as you are now without noticing the slightest decline in freedoms or choices, or even too much of a dent on your bank account. You'll just be one of the slightly lower-impact, and therefore a little bit less damaging, human beings on the planet."
Two more surf-related topics. ADR makes the point that we can all be who we choose to be, and one man who certainly seems to have done just that is Rowan Chernin - the man behind the superb Chairman of the Board CD. I posted a while ago on this and have now discovered a little more about Rowan. He first surfed on The Gower in 1988. Thereafter, in his own words:
"I immersed myself in surf culture and discovered the VHS bootleg world of the
vintage surf movie – and have been hooked ever since! I spent years looking for the
original sountracks to these films. Some were never released while others were
more expensive, because of their limited edition release, than a weekend break in
Spain. I approached Harmless Records in 2004, they listened to my
CD of ropey recordings taken directly from the films and said they loved it.
Heard nothing for two years. Then someone called me back, said they found it in
the bottom of a cupboard that was being cleared-out and wanted it released for
summer 2007."
Then came a meeting with Death in Vegas...
"In a nut-shell this was a live music and film event that I
directed and co-produced in conjunction with The Barbican. I wanted to combine
three classic surf films - Innermost Limits of Pure Fun, Liquid
Time and Morning Of The Earth into one 90 minute epic. The aim was to capture
the essence of surfing rather than the industry of surfing. It was a
self-indulgent art project on the scale of ‘everybody has a book inside them’, I
just happened to have three films, a modern-day soundtrack and an idealistic
vision of the surf film as a cognitive, transcendental window to drop-out
through my spare time. (Maybe I watched too many Mr Ben’s...) It was edited and
mixed live by the magic hands of visual artists Flat-e with an original score
performed live by Death In Vegas.
I'm still amazed that I convinced The Barbican to pay for
all this. Also got the chance to programme a day of surf films which included
Land Of Saints (a Cornish surf movie), Riding Giants – the definitive history of
big wave surfing - and Dogtown and Z-Boys, which documented the infamous skaters who
took their attitude from the beach and revolutionised skating."
Somehow, at the same time as he was obsessing over Chairman of the Board, Rowan was also one of the founding editors of Loaded. As he says: "I was Music and Clubs editor during the heady days of Brit-pop and superclub culture. I had the time of my life - and I'm still recovering. Assignments used as a foil to get
to the beach – what a job..."
Which brings me to the last of the things I've been mulling over. I learn from The Surfer's Path that Kelly Slater's endeavours in Israel actually resulted in his incarceration. The eight-time World Champion arrived to promote peace but ended up in jail after a scuffle with paparrazi who were trying to take shots of him and supermodel Bar Rafaeli (pictured, but not on the cover of Loaded). No doubt a storm in a teacup, and Slater was released after questioning.
Who says nothing really happens in surfing?