Tough Love is Choosing Your Own Adventure by Robin Canniford

by Robin Canniford, Kurungabaa, Volume 1, Issue 2, July 2008

We all know the feeling: you’re a long way from home, there’s heaving rain clouds bellowing through the sky, and everywhere is blown-out. It would be better to be in front of the fire with the dog. Or maybe you should have gone somewhere hot. It’s easy to get despondent on a trip. Often there’s nothing for it but to drive around and check out a few places on the map. When that comes to nothing, it’s straight into a bar. But every now and then you come up with a better possibility, one that’s not in the guidebooks.

You’re driving down a road, down and down, winding deeper into the countryside to the only stretch of coast that looks like it could have any shelter. The road gets narrower, the sky gets darker and you’re about to turn back when the sea appears. It’s calm here, and the water betrays nothing of the 40-knot northerly, or the swell that’s riding underneath it and smashing into the islands a few miles out to sea. You’ve found an old fishing harbour, cut by harder hands than yours into a shore lined by pewter boulders that stretch up a point and into the distance.

It’s good to wander around these places for a while, savouring the atmosphere and thinking about something to eat. But then those heavy cobbles betray what perhaps they should keep quiet about as a set of waves peels evenly down their number for two hundred yards. It’s got to be too small to ride, but next comes the full disclosure: two surfers appear and pick their way up the point. With not a little excitement, you get changed and follow them at a distance, through loose shingle, over slippery rock shelves, around craggy headlands. All the time the sets seem to be hitting with increasing size and force as you round up a mile, then two, up into the remote grey distance.

Finally you see it: a wave feels the point, unbroken and straight as a rule. You fall still as it stands upright, morphs into a dark, round peak and menacingly scrapes down the rocks. You’d lost the figures that you were following. But now you see a small black outline stroking frantically into the next wave. This one’s bigger and as he takes off, he drops down out of sight before he emerges deep in a churning face, cutting a high line along a long black wall. You start to run.

There’s no obvious place to paddle out. Boulders and rock stacks separate you from the figure as he races through an intimidating end section. He kicks out in front of you seconds before the wave collides with the shore. A billion tiny white stars rocket skywards and spin into a flurry that hangs above you for an eternity before it all splatters back to earth, showering you with apprehension. Like the crabs, you scamper this way and that, narrowly avoiding being swept off the rocks, before picking your spot and throwing yourself into a seething pool.

Minutes later, you’re alone on the peak, late, and manage only a few strokes under the shadow of the instant where you think you can still make it. On an osprey’s wings you drop vertically, steady yourself with a hand and pivot into a trim line. A figure rising up the shoulder hoots as you climb high. Then he’s gone and it’s another head-down, heart-in-the-mouth-drop into a section requiring equal measures of momentum and timing. Cobbles groan their eternal complaints, bumping and rolling only yards away from you. Each moment blurs into the next and the rest of the earth is in darkness. You’re outside your body for an instant and you imagine you can hear the bellowing crack of the end section as you escape its death-grip.

Paddling laps with the few others who have made it out here you’ve had so many waves you loose track, unable to piece them together. Like dreams, the more you try to catch this story for your memory, the more it evades your grasp. When the light fails, you go in. Others watch your stumbling path back over the rocks; beaten, a few holes in your board, smiling. Around the dim light of an open car boot you chat and they treat you as one of their own. You’ve shared the day; it only gets like this a few times a year. But then they turn serious: ‘so are you going to keep your mouth shut?’ What will you do? A word to a friend is a word to two of his friends, which equals a word to a few of their friends in turn. It’s only natural; your instinct is to share. What the hell do they mean anyway? These guys have no better claim over this remote place than anybody else. No one owns the waves right?

Right. But the stark fact is this: there are a few places left that do not get surfed regularly, they are not strictly ‘localised’, you will not receive verbal threats or face serial drop-ins by a surfer who likes his girlfriend to call him ‘the enforcer’. Moreover, these waves have been prepared for you by solid devotees: characters that stopped following the crowd and gave up other opportunities to seek out such rare jewels. Hours, days passed hunting, missing swells at the regular spots; heavy beatings establishing where to get in and out. For sure, they don’t own the place, but equally neither do you. And that means it’s nobody’s to give away.

Imagine if you were to leave this jewel where it is. Maybe next year you’ll come back and enjoy it again with your new friends. As for your existing buddies, do you want them to feel the special glow you got here, or will you just tell the lot of them, make it too easy, and see the place accelerate towards the overcrowding suffered at Wannasurf’s other secret spots? A rule of thumb is this: Would you drive a minibus load in? Probably not. If you are going to tell anyone then ask yourself how many people would you show up with if you wanted to stay buddies with those guys you met. That’s the collective number for your group. Tops.

It used to be that if you wanted to find something you had to look. That was a good way. There was pleasure in it. There was pleasure in finding stuff too, and being the next initiate to appreciate the experience all the more. So don’t give up gifts too lightly. Watch the few jewels we have left sparkle for just a while longer.

Photo: J Lawton