THE SECRET SURFER
Iain Gately
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Recovering from a hip replacement operation, and suffering from a mid-life crisis, Iain Gately sets out to catch a tube. This is no London Underground train, but rather that evanescent space, beneath the lip of a breaking wave, that every surfer yearns to visit. In all his years of surfing, Iain Gately has never caught one. He realises it is now or never.
His quest takes him to the Atlantic beaches of England’s West Country, and to the sandbars and reefs of Galicia and the Canary Islands. By turns funny, energetic and inspiring, The Secret Surfer is a tale of self-knowledge achieved through physical endeavour, a beguiling blend of black humour, adventure and soul-searching. Above all, it is a rousing call to all of us not to give up too soon.
Welcome Page
About The Secret Surfer
CHAPTER 1 Staring at the Sea
CHAPTER 2 Waxing Up
CHAPTER 3 White Water
CHAPTER 4 Paddling Out
CHAPTER 5 Our Friends from the West
CHAPTER 6 Taking Off
CHAPTER 7 Green Waves
CHAPTER 8 Virtual Rides
CHAPTER 9 Bottom Turn
CHAPTER 10 Trimming
CHAPTER 11 Rail Riding
CHAPTER 12 Down the Line
CHAPTER 13 Cutback
CHAPTER 14 Offshore
CHAPTER 15 Lava Rock Reefs
CHAPTER 16 Line-Ups
CHAPTER 17 Close-Outs
Glossary
Picture Credits
Acknowledgements
About Iain Gately
Also by Iain Gately
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
We moved to Dorset in November 2014. It was stormy all winter and when some friends visited from London in the new year, we walked to the cliffs at Eype to watch waves crashing onto the shingle beach below.
‘Imagine being out there, at sea,’ Charles said.
‘I’ve been out there,’ I told him.
The invitation to imagine sent my memory whirling: I’d driven sailing boats through Atlantic storms with giant swells collapsing around me into avalanches of foam; I’d paddled out on a surfboard to waves that looked big from the shore and immense when I was among them, lying on my belly and staring at their crests as they turned clear as glass, then shattered and came tumbling down on my head…
‘Yes,’ said Charles, and frowned. Perhaps he thought I hadn’t heard him – or that an act of imagination was beyond me. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, ‘Look at the waves,’ then stabbed a finger at the sea.
I didn’t need to look: I could feel them – feel the ground tremble underfoot as they detonated against the shore, feel the compression in my ears as each blast passed. And it hurt to be standing on a cliff in Dorset, staring at the medium that in turns had made me brave and scared me witless, fielding inane remarks from an old friend who liked his salt water flat, warm, and clear: St Tropez in summer, the Maldives or Barbados in other seasons; who’d dedicated himself to the comforts of life long ago, at the expense of neglecting its challenges.
Like Charles, you can stare at the sea and pretend to be moved, but imagination has its limits. You can’t learn much about it from the shore. Even when you’re being lashed with spray and horizontal squalls of wind and rain on a cliff top, you’re still perched on solid ground, and so insulated from its power and, indeed, vitality. The sea is in constant motion. It flows, rises, spins and judders, and even when its swells are metronomic, as if each were a heartbeat, there are always cross-rhythms that add flickers to its pulse. The glassiest breakers have potholes and bulges on their faces. Tides whirl to and fro beneath flat calms as the oceans follow the pull of the moon. Giant submarine waves, visible only from satellites on clear days, march between the continents in cycles ranging from fourteen days to hundreds of years as the earth spins and bobs around the sun.
Your feelings about the sea change once you’ve been in it and over it and under it. It’s like having a moody and violent lover who teaches you that pain is the price of pleasure, but who’s worth the loving nonetheless, and who arouses you in ways that are unimaginable unless you’ve experienced them.
As we trudged back from Eype towards Sunday lunch, I thought about how I might get back in the sea. Until two years before it had been my playground. Then my left hip started to crumble with osteoarthritis and I lived as a near-cripple for eighteen months. It was bone-on-bone in the socket and when I saw X-rays of the damage, I realized that my body would never heal itself. I had to wait for a hip-resurfacing operation and take the pills in between. That period marked a clear division in my life. I went from being active both in the water and on the land, from surfing, sailing and trekking up mountains, to limping short distances and slumping indoors. I shrank away from physical contact with other people lest they nudged against me accidentally and plunged me into pain.
Defensive behaviour blackened my thoughts: I searched for marks of decay in my friends, to reassure myself that I wasn’t leading the pack towards the grave. I delighted when some filled out, slowed down and embraced middle age, as if they’d been seeking it their whole lives. They bought bigger, softer chairs and followed football teams on television with a passion that was disproportionate to either their interest or involvement in the game when young. They also used their children as proxies, deluding themselves that their faculties were still alive, albeit in other bodies, and would tell me with pride how little Simon or India had won the egg-and-spoon race at school, and expect me to congratulate them for the victory as if it had been their own.
My hip was resurfaced in July 2014. Kindly Mr Latham cut through skin and muscle, severed a few tendons, dislocated my joint, whipped the top off my femur, screwed a titanium hemisphere in its place, ground out the socket in my pelvis, cemented a matching metal cup into the bone, reconnected the joint, and stitched up and stapled back together everything he’d disturbed, all within ninety minutes. The operation itself is one of those overlooked marvels of medical science – like pacemakers – that do so much to prolong life or make it pleasant again. A century ago I’d have been doomed to spend the rest of my years as an invalid.
Recuperation was mental as much as physical: over the first six weeks, as I passed from crutches to a single stick and then learned to walk again, I enjoyed a rare spell of objectivity. I had to acknowledge that I was middle-aged – over the hill – and when the ground starts to fall under your feet all is new again. I hadn’t felt so uncertain since my teens, when I was on the upward slope, the world was full of a dizzying array of promises and it had seemed that I might ascend forever.
I realized I was faced with two options: the first was to continue the defensive behaviour I’d adopted prior to my operation. Since I was falling apart, surely it was best to avoid anything that might hasten the process? Why not give up, grow fat and resort to passive forms of entertainment and vicarious pleasures? I was frightened, however, of the mental damage such a surrender might cause. Would my mind follow my body into decline? Would I – in the sense of the ‘I’ behind my eyes – sink into a make-believe world as the grey matter melted? Fantasizing certainly increases as middle age advances: the older you get, the taller your stories. Perhaps this is a rare example of nature being kind, by softening our minds as age withers our flesh. Everybody deserves a splendid past, whether real or imagined. It becomes the substitute for a glorious future when even the most ardent optimist has to acknowledge that their chances of glory have slipped away.
The second option was to behave as if the past two years of pain had been aberrations, and this was more appealing: I wasn’t ready to follow the examples of my sedentary friends. I didn’t want to put the cork back in the bottle and call it a night. I’d rather act as if I was still on the way up the hill and keep alive some of the dreams I had when I was young, of what I might achieve in life, and perhaps even fulfil them. While many have become impossible, or improbable – I’ve left it too late to open the bowling for England and it’s unlikely that I’ll turn quantum physics on its head, or be called up to fight for my country – there’s plenty of time yet before senescence and plenty left to achieve, hang onto, or let go of with good grace.
*
I walked to Eype again the next morning, this time alone. The wind had died and the waves were clean, as if God had ruled lines onto the sea. Out of habit, I scanned the beach for a peak that could be surfed, and when I saw a ‘V’ of white water with its apex pointing at the horizon and its arms opening out towards the shore, I imagined being out there: waiting for the right wave then dropping down its face, carving turns across it and kicking out at the very last instant as it exploded into spray and spume under my feet. I found that I was twitching as I performed these actions in my memory.
I’d loved surfing although I’d never been as good at it before my operation as I hoped. It had seemed that with just a little more time I’d reach a higher level, but then time had run out. In particular, I’d always wanted to be proficient enough to realize a dream that I’d had since my teens, which was to catch a tube. Tubes occur when deep-water swells slam up against a shallow coast. The base of each wave is deflected and its crest pitches forward to create a temporary tunnel along its face. The aim is to ride inside the tunnel as it closes behind you, but before it rolls you up and spits you out onto whatever it is breaking – a sandbar, a stone ledge, or a coral reef.
Most people in the world have seen a picture of a tube, even if they live in a city a thousand miles distant from any coast. The image of a surfer tucked under the lip of a breaking wave is a twenty-first-century icon, used to sell soft drinks, credit cards, beer, aftershave and toothpaste. It appeals across cultures and creeds. It suggests independence, vigour and hygiene. It also has a hint of mysticism: the surfer might be a saint alone in a deep-blue sky, and the tube their route to Heaven.
Tubes are more difficult to ride than the surfers pictured inside them suggest. You can’t just borrow a board and go and catch one on your first day out – unless one catches you and breaks your bones. They are, moreover, short-lived thrills: the world record for time spent inside a tube is about thirty seconds. Most rides last between two and ten seconds, or about the same as a male orgasm. The experience is said to be spiritual as well as carnal. According to the Hawaiian surfer Gerry Lopez, one of the first generation to ride tubes and to measure his state of mind when inside them, the world falls quiet and seems to slow down. ‘This slow-motion sensation, combined with the silence, had me wondering whether I had entered a different world from the one outside the tube. The most distinct impression I experienced inside the tube was a feeling of complete awe.’
My friends who have caught tubes echo Lopez and say that time inside them is transcendent – time outside time. Some have even talked of experiencing rebirth, as they travelled down a liquid tunnel, pulsing with energy, towards an ‘O’ of light.
So why not try to catch one now? If time really slowed down or stopped inside a tube, then perhaps I could steal a few seconds back from middle age: pause time’s arrow mid-flight, if only for the space of a single heartbeat? It was a dizzying challenge. I sat down on the turf at the top of the cliff and weighed it up in my mind. It would be a quest with a goal but without a timetable, and carried out within the limitations of family life. I didn’t have the money to pay for a dedicated expedition, with expert hands guiding me towards the perfect wave, or the time to skip off to Australia or Bali for a year and live in a hut behind a beach. It would be an affair of cold seas, clammy wetsuits and messy swells rather than the idyllic version of surfing pictured in adverts. And it wouldn’t be easy. Even assuming I regained fitness and balance and pushed my skills to a level I’d never yet reached, I might not find a tube to catch, for they’re both rare and fickle. A surfing break might grind out tubes all day every day for a week, then remain calm for a year. And at that break you might have to be in a single square yard of water, travelling at precisely the right speed, to catch one when it appeared, and this virtual window would be a moving target, which opened for a split second then rolled up and vanished if you arrived too late.
There was also the little matter of heart: I’d have to fall before I flew, and surfing hands out beatings to its aficionados when they err, bruising their bodies, flooding their lungs with seawater, blowing out their eardrums and snapping their spines. The anticipation of pain, or the wish to avoid suffering it, was a real obstacle. I’d learned – by trial and error – how to pick a path around it, how to have fun without tears and how to save heartbeats for pleasure rather than wasting them on fear. I’d have to trust the doctors that my new titanium hip joint would bed in and the bone grow over it like a tree’s roots around a stone. Rather than worrying that the least impact might wreck this delicate arrangement of flesh and artifice, plunge me into agony and send me back to crutches, I’d have to push on and test its limits while the rest of me was sound.
There was much to be won: I wanted to re-experience the elation one feels offshore where the ocean meets the coast and the waves are rolling in. I wanted to enjoy once again the sheer physicality of surfing. The experience is wet, cold, vibrant and loud. It’s like wrestling a shape-shifting giant that wraps itself around you and holds you down, or unrolls itself into an emerald runway that you glide over with foam at your heels, forgetting – for perhaps a millisecond – that you’re a slave to gravity.
I also had unfinished business to settle with my adolescent self. If I could realize one of the ambitions I’d had at an age before my idealism had been tarnished by experience and cynicism, it would add a coherence to my life. Rather than seeing a series of snapshots of other me’s when I looked back, which recorded how I’d aged and changed, I’d prove to myself I was still the same dreamer, who’d once seen pictures of surfers riding tubes and said to himself with all the certainty of youth, ‘I’ll do that one day.’
March 2015
I had two of my old surfboards in a bag on top of the hall cupboard, where they’d been planted when we moved house. They’d spent the prior year – while I was hobbling around and waiting for an operation – stored in a dilapidated garden shed where we’d also kept a lawnmower and bedding for the chickens. When I lifted the board bag down its zip had seized up half open, and withered grass-cuttings and shards of straw rained out.
The boards were stuck to each other inside the bag. I prised them apart to find the wax on their faces had blackened, like the grime on a Spanish ham. They didn’t look like the magic steeds of old that had sped me over waves. In contrast to Don Quixote, who had delighted at the sight of his spavined mount and rusting sword, I felt dispirited rather than inspired. Then a logo on one of my boards – Lost – reminded me of a conversation I’d had in 2003 with a surfer from Seville, in a bar at Cape Trafalgar, who’d owned the same brand of board. In between many beers, and staring at the barmaid who was so breathtakingly beautiful that neither of us had dared to ask her her name, we’d discussed whether a surfboard, if one felt it had to be placed in the Romantic cannon, was the hero’s steed, or his sword? El Cid, the Sevilliano told me, rode Babieca into battle against the Moors, but he slew them with the sword Tizona, and indeed Colada, for the Cid kept a quiver of blades. So, it was the sword.
Whether blades or steeds, when I brushed down my boards, held them in turn and felt their balance through my hands, life seemed to stir in them. Their curves and fins and concaves, shaped to skate over and slice into the faces of breaking waves, reminded me of how they’d felt under my bare feet, how they would twitch and zoom – not always in the direction I’d expected – while carrying me over the surface of the sea. Taking them out of the bag broke a spell. All the while they’d been hidden, their enchantment had been suppressed. Now that they were in plain sight, I couldn’t ignore them when I came through the front door. They were reminders of what I used to be, and wanted to be again – and more. I was thrilled. I felt like I’d finished an official period of mourning: of wearing black and never smiling, of having to live in the shadows and envy people who could move without pain. My quest had begun.
My head was in place, my heart was eager but my body wasn’t yet ready to start surfing again. My lungs weren’t too bad: I’d given up smoking after thirty years in pursuit of La Diva Nicotina and, though I missed the pleasure, it was a change to be woken up by sunlight rather than a coughing fit. The occasional blackouts that had accompanied the first cigarette of the day, when I’d have to sit down and regulate my breathing, also became memories. Perversely, I missed them too. Biologists have found that the emotions of wanting and liking are controlled by different circuits in our brains. Apparently, we want more than we like, and desire many things but love few. Hence, we can want things we don’t like – like smoking – and the wanting becomes obsessive: it’s never satisfied, because it has to start all over again the moment it has won its prize and realized that it hates it. Every climax is a setback.
Although my wind was sound, I’d lost the core fitness I’d had more or less continuously since the age of sixteen. This takes a long time to wane, but once it’s gone, it’s hard to regain – mentally, as much as physically. It hurts to get fit and my mind was wary – and weary – of pain. But there was no way out: if I wished to surf I’d have to do things to myself and engage in activities that I neither wanted nor liked. To prepare for the sea, it wouldn’t be enough to go to exercise classes every week and wave kettle bells about or pedal stationary bicycles. Although such activities may challenge and please their devotees, they’re not sufficient to propel you out to a surf break or give you the steel that you need when you’re being spun underwater and bounced between rocks.
I started my rehabilitation slowly and began with my legs. These had wasted while I waited for my refit and my bottom had vanished. This was a serious problem, as I needed power down there to take off on a wave. So, cliff walks with an ageing and crippled dog formed the first part of my rehabilitation. My companion was Roobarb the lurcher, who broke his left forepaw chasing a deer a few years back. Now that he was eleven – and lurchers don’t last – he would start to limp a mile or so into our walks. In his prime he could cross a hundred-acre field uphill at forty miles per hour and pull down a stag; now, a baby rabbit was beyond him.
The coast at Eype where we walked together is up and down but the switchback path along the cliffs was easier going than the shingle on the strand, which grated my joints – real and synthetic – at every step. The path follows a barbed-wire fence, with pasture on one side and overhangs and vertical drops to a no-man’s land of mud and rock on the other. Chunks fall off the cliffs each year, forming haphazard terraces and bowls behind the beach. Some of these hold pools fringed with rushes, and waist-high waterfalls caused by streams jetting out of strata in the cliffs, others thigh-deep black mud. I left the path and scrambled down to one to search for fossils, and found a perfect clam shell with a fan of ribs on a slice of shale. It had died a hundred and fifty million years ago, but might have been carved there yesterday. It was curious to be walking on a seabed high above the tide.
When Roobarb and I descended from the terrace to the beach, two plump little boys ran over and shouted, ‘Look at the old grey dog!’ to one another. They were similar enough to be brothers and a year or so apart in age – I guessed at eight and nine. Their cheeks were flushed crimson from their sprint and they stared up at me, mouths open, waiting to be congratulated on their perception.
In the past, I’d admired the usefulness of dogs as an educational tool. Their lifespans are so much briefer than our own that they expose the children of their owners to both decrepitude and death at accelerated rates. This accustoms them to the inevitable, and the passing of a beloved pet is their first lesson in evanescence. It also, I realized, might breed contempt and encourage bad habits, such as mockery of old age. Roobarb and I turned our backs on them and headed for the footpath home.
I supplemented walking with turns on a wobble board. Despite the promise of its name, a wobble board is a mobility aid that is as popular amongst pensioners as surfers preparing for tubes. Mine – an advanced model – is a 16" pea-green plastic disc moulded onto a hemisphere, which is unstable unless part of its rim is touching the floor. You stand astride it and attempt squats and spins without grounding it or falling off. Wobble boards are best ridden without stimulants. I pulled mine out at a dinner party just after I’d bought it to cries of admiration and a queue formed of people wanting a go. James said everyone should own one so we could play adult Subbuteo, then fell off and gashed his temple the instant after mounting it. He’d made the elementary error of standing upright once he was aboard rather than bending his knees, and did me the favour of reminding me of a golden rule of surfing: ‘stand tall and fall, stay low and go’.
My cliff walks and wobble board gave me back my bottom.
*
The next challenge on the road to fitness was agility. When you take off on a wave, you need to be able to spring from a prone position onto your feet in a single movement. This fundamental manoeuvre is called a ‘pop up’ and must be performed fluently and without any hesitation. Like so many aspects of surfing, it’s composed of a deceptively simple sequence of actions that need to work more or less perfectly every time if you want to catch waves. If you pop up too vigorously you’ll leapfrog over the nose of your board and get pounded, and if you’re too cautious you’ll fall off its tail, get sucked up the wave backwards, then be thrown down and held under. You can practise pop ups on the floor: lie down flat on your stomach, arch your back so that your head and chest are clear of the ground, pretend to paddle by scrabbling with alternate arms, then set your hands a palm’s width apart under your armpits, press up with enough force to project your body off the floor, bring your legs forwards through the air, and stand up with bent knees as your feet touch down, the back foot leading by milliseconds, so that you hear two sounds as you land: ta-tum!
My first attempts were disappointing. Although I had vivid memories of being nimble, and could still picture myself performing the cartwheels and handsprings that I’d found so easy when I was sixteen, when I lay down on the bedroom floor and made an experimental spring my body juddered rather than flowed. It was as if not just my hip but also every other joint in my skeleton had been replaced with cogs and gears. I moved in clicks, and these were real as well as imagined: I’d spent two years stooped and limping and my back took its time to straighten up. Every week or so there’d be an audible clunk and I’d feel taller and lighter, as if some ratchet at the base of my spine had been released a notch.
In time, as my agility increased, I could manage slow-motion pop ups and creak to my feet. Once I’d achieved this minor triumph, I looked for guidance as to how to improve the manoeuvre. I found it on the internet – which seemed a miracle of progress: when I started surfing in earnest in 2000, YouTube was still five years in the future, and the notion that you could find videos of people of all ages and both sexes teaching you how to pop up at the click of a mouse would have been deemed insane by all but the prophets of Web 1.1. In 2015, I found hundreds of experts, ranging from pubescent Brazilians to a septuagenarian yoga instructress in California, all eager to show me how to get to my feet on a surfboard. The best was Michael John Frampton, an Australian surf and movement coach who taught with a camera at floor level in a small room with a beige carpet. He’d come over to the lens, lie on his side, prop his head on one hand, and explain the lesson before acting it out. It was intimate, if claustrophobic, and when Michael became a little too intense I’d admire his double-jointed elbows. His method worked as soon as I could do thirty press-ups without coughing and snap my back into an arch like a cat struck by lightning.
I supplemented bottom-building and agility training with swimming. Apart from the month after my operation, I’d never given up swimming. It kept me in touch with water and gave me a freedom of movement that I lacked on land. I had, however, to adopt a new regime, which I cobbled together from the online recommendations of a number of surf fitness authorities, and which was far more demanding than my existing workouts: no more languid single miles but rather miles of sprints. The aim was to get the lactic acid flowing in my muscles and then thrash through the water until they cramped up. Once I was really out of breath and shaking like a jelly I could try a few lengths underwater, which would accustom me to tolerate bursting lungs and blackouts without breathing in. Next up were drills – swimming with only one arm in case you dislocated a shoulder, or fanning yourself along with just your palms in case you broke your back. My gurus all counselled visitors to their pages that, however keen they might be to train, however hard they went for the burn, the pool would not prepare them for the ocean. It was like practising for the hard-knock world in the safety of the womb.
*
I got back into the sea at Church Ope Cove on Portland in May 2015. Ope Cove is accessed by a steep path that passes through the fragments of a Saxon church, a tilted graveyard with skulls and crossbones carved on its headstones, and a ruined Norman castle. There’s a tumble of black huts on its white shingle beach, which has ledges showing where recent tides have peaked. Ness, my partner, bought one of the huts in December 2013. It was washed off its foundations a month later during a once-every-sixty-two-years storm and squashed into its neighbours. The huts were winched apart and set back on their foundations but have been tilted slightly off the vertical ever since, like the houses in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Ope Cove has a microclimate. Portland is a tied island connected to the mainland by a shingle spit off Chesil Beach. It points almost due south into the English Channel and the skies seem to part over it, before reforming and emptying themselves of their rain onto Dorset. It can be ten degrees warmer than at Dorchester, a few miles inland. There were wall lizards living under the floor of the hut, which flicked out into the sunshine and froze on the flat white stones under its window, thermo-regulating. There were also bloody-nosed beetles – which resemble black scarabs and drool out a toxic droplet of scarlet fluid when threatened – wandering around the rock garden in front of it. Rosy, our six-year-old daughter, adopted one as a pet on her first visit, and we had to find her a fresh ‘Beetroot’ and pretend it was the same insect, every time we came back.
The water in the cove is often as clear and blue as the Mediterranean, albeit frigid. It was flat calm when I waded in, dressed in an old, worn and sagging wetsuit I’d dug up in the hut. I took a diving mask and, once I was a few strokes from shore, found myself hanging over a giant, submarine rock pool, with weeds streaming up from the boulders on the seabed and anemones, mussels and winkles in their crevices. The colours were greens and purples, with the odd silver flash from a fish that had turned onto its flanks. As I swam further out, the lateral horizon underwater contracted to a green-grey wall in every direction, with shadows beyond.
I scanned them for movement. The films Blue Water, White Death (1971) and Jaws (1975) traumatized my generation. I’ve met people who haven’t put a toe in the sea for forty years because they know a great white shark is out there waiting for them. My friend Paul told me that his Uncle Kevin stopped going to his local swimming pool in Suffolk, a dozen miles inland, lest one materialize and bite him in half. And Nikki, my sister-in-law, spoke of a fictional cousin – I think she was talking about herself – who had been so affected by a fear of sharks in her teens that she thought one might get her while she was on the loo – exploding out of the U-bend, savaging her buttocks with its serrated teeth and dragging her down…
Sharks do appear off Portland. I once saw one just south of its Bill when sailing back from the Azores, which was seven or eight feet long and very definitely a flesheater. It was most likely a porbeagle, a cousin of the great white, which had a dent in it amidships, shaped like the cross section of the bulb on the keel of a racing yacht. Its movements were erratic, with a degree of lateral wobble. The wind was light and, as we ghosted by, I peered under the spinnaker and caught a glimpse of its left eye, projecting a curse – or so it seemed – at sailing vessels in general and me in particular. Porbeagles live for thirty years or more. Marine biologists are in two minds as to whether sharks can remember or not and silent on whether they forget – or forgive – grudges. More recently a local woman, Jeanette Longley, rescued a ‘man-sized’ blue shark that beached itself in West Bay, only a few miles away. ‘I have saved hedgehogs and things like that before but nothing like a shark,’ she told the Daily Mail.
I made it back ashore alive.
Church Ope Cove was a test of progress. When I’d first limped down there, through the graves around the ruined church on the path to the beach, and stopped to explain the memento mori on one to Rosy, my operation was still six months in the future. I told her that under the headstones lay Barbary pirates who’d come to England to steal children like her to sell as slaves in Africa. Thereafter, we’d played hide and seek from the pirates on the way to and from the beach, which bought me time to compose myself and hide my pain. Now, with the operation ten months in the past, and wild garlic shooting up along the path and pagoda-shaped blossoms unfurling on the horse chestnut trees overhead, I could carry her up and down to the hut on my shoulders and take her scrambling over the rocks around the point. If there were waves we’d stand together knee-deep in the sea and I’d lift her over them as they broke. She told me that she wanted a pink surfboard – when she was a big girl – and then we would ride side by side all the way to Africa and rescue the children that the pirates had taken away.
*
If the board is the sword, then a wetsuit is the armour. My old one had cracked and crumbled while it lay in a locker in the hut, and it leaked at the neck, ankles, armpits and groin when I swam around Ope Cove. Unless you skip off to the tropics, you’ll be partially or almost totally encased in neoprene, the tighter the better, most times you surf. The water temperature around the British coast seldom rises beyond eighteen degrees Celsius and in winter, when the swells are best, often struggles to reach double figures. Wetsuits work by admitting a layer of water between your skin and their inner surface. Once your body warms the water up, it serves as insulation – the equivalent of a few extra millimetres of fat. They’re beautiful because they let you go to places you couldn’t otherwise visit, and horrible because they’re prisons: when you stretch, or kick out in them they pull you back and sap your energy. They’re great if you wipe out and tumble on a reef as their buoyancy returns you to the surface and their skin saves yours from laceration; they’re hell to get into and out of – especially if you’re hopping around in a crowded car park, with one leg in and one leg out, and are naked underneath.
I went to Newquay to find my armourer. The town is the soul centre of English surfing and its grimy Victorian and Edwardian streets house emporia of surf supplies. My last wetsuit had been made by Rip Curl, so I went to their shop on Bank Street, which sits between branches of the Yorkshire Building Society and Subway and was like a temple in a slum – a shrine to beautiful waves amidst monuments to mammon. Its roof had been raised above its neighbours’ and was curved like an eyebrow. Half the height of the façade beneath was decorated with the corporate logo, which represents a cresting wave. The shop front itself was a wall of tall glass panels, showing wetsuits, boards and semi life-sized posters of surfers crouched in tubes.
Its staff functioned as oracles as well as sales girls and boys. Surfers will perform any work with a smile, however degrading, if it lets them paddle out every day that there’s swell. I was given a couple of wetsuits to try on by Mick, whose hair was still damp from a pre-work session. It had been mellow rather than pumping, he told me, big, slow, waves that were jade-green and super-clean.
The wetsuits were zipless, skin-tight, with coloured panels on their sleeves and resembled costumes from Star Trek. You had to follow a strict procedure to get into and out of them. I became distracted, bodged the job, and needed to ask for help. Meanwhile, my pores were sprinkling out sweat and my blubber wobbling. I caught sight of myself in the mirror in the cubicle, trapped and helpless like a fly in a web, and gasped in horror. Was it a magnifying mirror? Where had all that fat come from? I accepted that beer was fattening but I hadn’t expected it to fatten me. Mick gave me a considerate smile – the sort used by visitors and medical staff in hospital wards to hide stronger feelings of sorrow, pity and sometimes revulsion – then explained how to untangle myself.
‘When you start again,’ he said, ‘check out the instructions on the label. Follow them and you can’t go wrong.’
The instructions were too small to read without glasses – indicative of Rip Curl’s target age group – but there were pictures as well as words. My new armour was tighter round the neck than any other wetsuit I’d owned and squeezed a little roll of my new fat out its top beneath my chin. It heated up rapidly as it filled with sweat. This was a good sign: the less comfortable the better. When I paid for it Mick gave me a block of wax from a stack beside the desk, which turned out to be a truly prescient act.
Unless you’re Kelly Slater, eleven times World Champion, whom I once saw in a video riding a wave on an inverted kitchen table, you’ll need wax to go surfing. I learnt this truth the hard way. When I first bought a surfboard in 2000, I ran straight down to the beach at Tarifa where I lived and tried to jump on, but it shot from my grasp as if it was covered in grease. After a number of failed clutches – like a lover trying to seize his other in a dream – a local strolled over and told me I should try some wax. Fibreglass resin is slippery when wet so you need to rub wax on the top of your surfboard so that you can hold it and ride it without sliding off.
It’s easy to become paranoid about wax. You could spend days travelling to a wave and find, when you arrive, that your board is bare and there’s none to be had for a hundred miles. Interestingly, instead of exploiting wax-neurosis to promote their wares, the minds of its manufacturers seem trapped in eternal adolescence and prefer to use innuendo: Sex Wax, Far-King Wax and Mrs Palmer and Her Five Daughters Cold Water Surf Wax are common brands offering traction for your ‘stick’. Mick gave me Sex Wax. Two hours later I was drawing circles with it on my board.
June 2015
Ness and I had a rare weekend away together – just the two of us, with children and dogs parcelled out for care amongst various relatives. We planned a spot of antiquarianism, followed by a trial surf in Perranporth, and a pleasant night of gentle excess in St Ives. As soon as I’d bought my wetsuit we took a back road out of Newquay in search of the Lost Chapel, said to mark the place where Piran, the patron saint of Cornwall, made landfall in the seventh century.
Our pilgrimage to the chapel had been inspired by a conversation with Jane, a friend of Ness’s, an otherwise intelligent and entertaining woman, who believed in geomancy.
‘It’s full of special energy,’ she told us, and spread her hands towards us, as if she was giving us a present. ‘You’ll feel recharged just by looking at it. Some people say Piran was the real Merlin. It’s best in spring of course, and Cornwall isn’t really Cornwall anymore, but you’ll love it: go, go, go!’
I googled the saint before our trip. Piran had been a healer in his native Ireland but worked one miracle too many when he revived the slain on a battlefield, thus enraging its participants who would now have to fight the same battle all over again. They laid down their weapons, tied Piran to a millstone and tossed him off a cliff into the Atlantic while a gale was raging. But God calmed the tempest and sped his favourite over the waves to England.
If the legend is to be believed, Piran was the first surfer – the first named individual to have travelled over the surface of the sea on a man-made object without using sails, oars or any other artificial means of propulsion. Upon arrival in Cornwall, he stepped off his millstone and started preaching. He made instant converts of the only creatures within earshot: ‘a fox, a badger and a boar’. These, presumably, spread the word and the Cornish flocked to hear the holy man living in the dunes. They credited him with many miracles and considered him to be the inventor, or discoverer, of how to smelt tin. One night, when praying on his knees beside his fire, Piran saw liquid tin bubble out of its hearthstone and form a shining cross. The next morning, after it had cooled and solidified, he displayed his new metal artefact to the faithful and told them how it had been made. His discovery is celebrated in the Cornish flag – a white cross on a black background, representing the molten tin on the saint’s hearth. Piran is also claimed to have been a convivial divine. Tin miners adopted him as their patron and celebrated his fabled bonhomie with a binge over Perrantide – the week leading up to his saint’s day on 5 March. The phrase ‘as drunk as a Perraner’ is still in circulation in Cornwall. Piran passed away in his 206th year when he fell down a well. His bones were recovered and venerated. Exeter Cathedral and Waltham Abbey each secured an arm during the Middle Ages, when the cult of magic relics was in full swing and every acquisition – like a new ride in a fairground park – drew more pilgrims.
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