by Tom Anderson
Don't get too excited here – I can't tell you where this is on pain of death and several other fates that are probably even worse. It's the rules when you talk about secret spots, and no matter what is dangled in front of me there are certain surf spots in the UK that it would be virtually criminal to give away the vitals for. What I can tell you about, though, are the waves that I surfed one late winter's day in the city of Cardiff. You may blurt out at this point that there are no surf spots in Cardiff – and you'd be right. Almost.
A friend of mine claims to relish seeing the surprise on people's faces when he tells them Cardiff has a beach. But it does have one – albeit a sickly one filled with industrial pollution – and to throw you yet further off the scent, the surf spot I'm speaking of is nowhere near it. I'm talking about a second, even lesser-known one.
I've only surfed the wave, which I'll dub 'The House', once, but it remains one of the most memorable sessions I've ever had, due in most part to the circumstances in which the surfing took place.
It was when I was nineteen and I had just returned home from a long-haul trip somewhere tropical. A lot of my friends were in similar circumstances; spending their days either surfing or preparing for another trip by looking for work at a relaxed pace. For most of us it was about as good as we could imagine life to be, as long as there was the promise of another trip on the cards.
The day began as an exceptionally windy one. Despite the south-westerly gales, however, there wasn't quite enough swell to surf at some of Porthcawl's more sheltered spots. A wave that broke off the harbour wall, known as 'The Wedge' and effectively my home break as it was near to the street I grew up in, wasn't going to work – which meant that on this particular day the only real chance of surfing anything decent was to get out of town.
Another mate, who was saving to go away, had the afternoon off from his temporary job at the local day-care centre, and had turned up with a car and a full tank of petrol. The chap in question will go by the name of 'Marc' for the purpose of this story, as that was the name he later took when he became the central character in my book Chasing Dean, in which we followed hurricane surf across the US Eastern Seaboard.
That morning he had made a call to a mutual friend of ours, Rich Grove, who lived in Cardiff – which was about thirty miles up the coast in the wrong direction if you wanted to be a surfer. We'd got to know Rich as kids because he was always in the water in Porthcawl – so much so that he ended up being better than most of the locals our age. In the early days his mother, Val, used to come down and wait patiently for hours on end while he surfed – whatever the weather or time of day. After a little while Rich started staying at my house, and before long he was effectively an honorary Porthcawl boy. In return for their letting him stay at my house, Val would then save my parents the job of driving me to Cornish surf contests, before we all grew old enough to get around ourselves and started going slightly further afield together – Sri Lanka, California and Mexico for a start.
On this particular morning, however, Wales would have to do – and the wind swell that was on offer had us stumped for where to surf. Marc's first plan had been to try Llantwit Major, a short hop east, until he'd got a different idea from his phone call to Rich.
'Grovey reckons he knows a secret spot in Cardiff that's gonna break today,' Marc grinned as I opened the door to him. 'What d'you reckon? I dunno if I'm that keen to go on a wild goose chase. Llantwit could be all right in a bit. But he did seem pretty wound up about it.'
Looking back, I suppose it was a mark of our enthusiasm that we were so keen to try it out. To most Porthcawlies a day when there's nowhere to surf locally is taken as a day not to surf at all, especially when that day was perhaps the coldest in the January of what had already been a long, dark winter. Llantwit being 'all right' wasn't exactly the most tempting offer of surf ever laid down for someone, but that wasn't the way we did things then. Frozen wetsuits were folded into bin bags and stuffed in the back of Marc's mother's car, in preparation to go and find wherever along our coast would provide us with a rideable wave that day.
'I dunno though, man,' I said to him as we drove over the hill out of Porthcawl. 'I've been on a lot of surf trips with Richie Grove and I can't see any reason why he'd make something up.' Rich had mentioned this spot in Cardiff to me before a few times and I'd wanted to see it for myself. From the first occasion of my ever having stood up on a board, the idea of riding a wave some place new had always been one of the most exciting things I could think of.
'Oh well, let's go and take a look at Llantwat and then decide,' Marc asserted. 'Grovey says he's gonna be in till twelve anyway, and kind of needs us for a lift to the beach. His folks are at work.' I love the selfishness of surfers – the thought of picking Rich up before checking Llantwit, so that he could join us if we decided to go in there instead, didn't occur to us for a second. He'd only come into the equation if it suited us. But that was always the deal when all any of us really cared about was our own wave-count.
Regardless, we ended up in his company not long later. After three-quarters of an hour's driving, only to spend ten minutes looking at a lacklustre and wind-ravaged point break, we decided to play this wild card. Llantwit's waves weren't any better than Porthcawl – and we had run out of options for sure.
Rich was delighted to see us: 'I could have told you drongos that Llantwit would be shit hours ago!' he grinned, opening his parents' front door to us and loading his stuff out of the porch and into the car. Only twenty-plus miles from home and this was now, for two of us, previously unsurfed territory.
'Right. Let's go, boys!' he cheered. 'This is gonna be sick; I can feel it. I'll show you the way.'
Here again I must be careful to omit the exact details regarding the whereabouts of where we headed next. Let's just say we left Rich's house on the outskirts of Cardiff, sneaking Marc's mother's car through a series of increasingly thinner lanes, until a couple of miles of farmland abruptly turned straight back into another of Cardiff's coastal suburbs.
Rich pointed out an unmarked lane again, which immediately plunged us into tunnels of trees, blocking the already weak winter light. Dead and rotten leaves lined the roadsides – nobody had swept them away since autumn – before a low railway bridge appeared like a gateway to another world. The forest around us thickened, turning the city centre, still only quarter of an hour behind, into a hazy memory.
A few big buildings appeared on our left, one with a 'Flat to Rent, Low Price' sign outside it, before a sharp drop-off indicated that there was ocean below. Marc parked the car onto a lip of turf and mud, and we waded through more dead leaves to peer through a layer of barren trees and an elevated view of rocky coastline. We tiptoed closer to the edge of a sharp drop until a reef set-up came into view, just as snowflakes began to fall. A near-vertical slope of forest lay between us and the water below, trees and foliage precariously clinging to land that looked as if it was ready to fall into the sea at any moment. To our left I could see from the movement of the sea surface that there was some kind of beach, hidden from view by more dense growth. There was no surf at all, but this seemed inconsequential to our guide in chief.
'Yep,' he confirmed, shaking with excitement. 'It's gonna be on.'
'You fuckin' what?' spat Marc.
'It's gonna pump boys. I'm so amped. Come on, let's suit up.'
'Hang on,' Marc interrupted, putting his hand on the boot firmly and dismissively just as Rich went to lift it and get his suit. 'There's no surf at all. Like no surf – not small, not even tiny. It's F-L-A-T, flat!'
'So?'
'He's right, Rich,' I added.
'It don't matter, boys,' came the reply. 'I promise you this spot is gonna fire any minute now.'
Despite our sceptical faces, Rich pressed on by explaining to us the unique nature of the spot we were dealing with. Apparently it pulled swell in through the Bristol Channel on a big tide, provided the wind was blowing behind it at exactly the right angle. It needed a big south-w
esterly, whereupon the swell size would hardly matter. The important factor was the wind fetch, and whether a sustained breeze could line itself up in precisely the same direction as the tide. According to Rich, the sea would soon surge around the little headland and in front of a rocky outcrop that had broken off to form a small island. When that happened it would be bringing with it an hour of stored wind swell, pouring over the soon-to-be-submerged reef. Today, apparently, had just that combination of conditions, and if we didn't get changed now the surf spot would certainly start breaking without us, from nothing. As if that wasn't hard enough to believe, Rich also reckoned it would return to being flat by high tide – meaning hardly anyone else who mattered had ever seen the place breaking.
Like I say, our big dilemma was whether to believe him. Surely this had to be a big wind-up designed to make us look like a pair of tools. Rich had been surfing Llantwit a bit more lately and a friendly yet significant turf war existed between there and Porthcawl, so to me it wasn't that far-fetched that he'd been cajoled into some kind of naughty prank. Maybe the Llantwit crew had told him to stitch us up in return for being welcomed in their line ups. Perhaps 'Vaughanie', their self-proclaimed ringleader, was waiting below with a camera to snap pics of the Porthcawl boys in their winter wetsuits, waiting for swell on a flat beach in the middle of Cardiff.
I tried to dismiss such paranoid ideas. This was a good friend of mine, who I knew we could trust… or could we?
'I want to see you halfway into your suit before I start,' Marc demanded.
'Fine,' Rich grinned back. 'See me get shacked out of my fuckin' mind before you bell-ends are even in the water!' If this was a joke, he was doing a good job of concealing it.
Marc remained sceptical, but this was enough for me. I'd seen enough to know Rich meant business here, and it seemed a worthwhile risk.
Knowing what was in store, and having a dry, warm and accommodating wetsuit due to living away from the beach, Rich wasted no time at all in readying himself and starting to scale the narrow, mossy path down to the water's edge. A derelict-looking concrete gateway led on to a trail that Rich started to deftly negotiate, half sliding, half skipping through frozen mud, smooth, foot-worn stone and rotting trees. Once he got to the beach he started jogging on the spot and stretching, just waiting for what still looked like nothing.
Sleet was thickening to snow and starting to stick as I pulled my neoprene gloves and hat on, blowing thick steam in front of me with every breath. A frozen lump of wax jarred noisily with my board as I tried to rub a little extra traction on. Marc locked the car up and together we started to make our own way down to the cola coloured Cardiff sea. Although in the lee of Wales's biggest city, the place felt completely deserted, except for a few caravans tucked into the hill, boarded up and hibernating.
At the bottom of the trail we stepped out onto a narrow, gravel bay. Invisible from the car was the final piece of backdrop from which we gave the spot its name: a grand, deserted and crumbling house slowly sinking back into the headland, behind which it had once found refuge from the angry winter seas. Noble and longstanding, the house peered over the patch of rock we were about to surf, its probable ghosts able to watch us from the windows.
'Maybe we have got an audience,' I noted to Marc, pointing up at the structure. 'Albeit a supernatural one.'
By the time we were at the shoreline the tide had made its leap over the reef, just as Rich had predicted, encouraging him to paddle out ahead of us. It still looked odd, watching him sitting in a dormant ocean. Even the spirits would struggle to make sense of this, although they'd probably seen him do it before, alone, many times.
He bobbed for a few minutes, a black dot of neoprene waiting, calm and serene. Then, as if a switch in the ocean had been flicked, a rapid rip appeared out of nowhere, visibly pushing water around the headland – and with it a row of waves was released from the turbulent ocean behind, making their way to the shore.
Adept and experienced in this rarest of surf spots, Rich knew exactly where to sit and was on the first wave, which began bowling around the reef as good as anywhere in Porthcawl, peeling to the right at perfect pace. With a snappy, quick-footed style, he made a lurching drop and drove a sharp downwards turn mid-face, narrowly missing a gurgling tube. He emerged back on the open wall and smacked in three explosive turns, before pulling off into the flats behind with a hoot and a thumbs-up in our direction. Out of nowhere, incredible surf had instantly materialised.
My and Marc's reluctance disappeared immediately; we couldn't paddle out quickly enough. In this little nook in the coastline, the wind was minimal, sheltered by a headland to our west, and the frigid brown water was making the hollow waves appear dark but cosy. We were still only halfway out when Rich stroked in to another one, this time getting the take-off just right and slipping into a tight tube, which he expertly threaded to escape yards in front of us. Using his momentum he floated, still standing, way out into the channel, through yet more thin snowflakes falling softly out of a watery grey sky. Despite the poor daylight, the silhouette of the house remained distinctly visible in the background.
'Now d'you believe me, boys?' he bellowed. 'NOW D'YOU BELIEVE ME?'
The swell on offer was uneven and inconsistent across the rest of the coast that day, but here the waves were stacking up enticingly with hardly any time to wait between sets – which was ideal as it made it easier to keep warm by staying busy. When I arrived in the line-up, although I had to wait for Rich to take his turn as thanks for bringing us here, it wasn't long before I was on one myself: a left-hander off an A-frame peak that had also offered Marc a right.
I'm hopeless at pulling in to the tube when grabbing rail (holding on to your outside edge while dropping your back knee onto the deck). Known as 'pig-dogging', this is what you usually need to do in order to have any chance of barrel riding with your back to the wave, as it enables you to fit the shape of a tube without being face-on. But, unless you know how to do it properly, pig-dogging severely limits your balance, which is why it's a lot harder than getting tubed on your 'front side'. As a result I barely have any memories at all of decent tubes when riding to my left, or 'back side'.
But this was one of them.
As I paddled for the wave it had looked innocuous, but once I went over the ledge the bottom dropped straight out. Without really knowing it, I promptly found myself slouching in a cavern of dense, freezing water. In fact, with hindsight I think it was actually due to reading the wave wrongly that I was able to get into this position. If I'd known how quickly this spot made the lip lurch forward at take-off, I'd probably have ridden it more cautiously, but being blissfully unaware of the danger had allowed me to misjudge my way into a brilliant bit of tube riding.
It felt great for that instant – until everything went alarmingly wrong. The wave took another turn, just as I was harbouring fantasies of actually making it out of the tube, and I was flicked forward into the lip, which promptly smashed me downwards for a face-first embrace with the reef.
Layers of winter wetsuit can pad you against this kind of thing though, and, as reefs come, this was a soft one – flat patches of slippery stone, with none of the sharp edges that lined the reef breaks at home. So it was with an invigorated soul that I resurfaced, yelling with delight at the view I'd just had, before powering my way back to the line-up, itching to catch another.
'See what I mean?' Rich was grinning. 'This is an awesome wave, boys, and no fucker knows about it. No one!' He was granted a short break between sets to repeat various combinations of this comment, before another wave bent its way in towards us and he pushed himself over the ledge and into another white-knuckle ride. Behind it, of course, were more identical, warping walls of water – too many waves for only three friends to share.
More snow began to fall as we continued swapping waves, each cheering or hooting the others when a good one came through. Tucked neatly in the lee of a headland, the wind was diverted away from us, adding to our little bubble
of perfection. I looked around, at the house with its sheets of settling snow, to the trees above that were swaying in a breeze that everyone but us could feel. Only a few hundred yards from the shoreline, the real world continued to be bombarded by the gales blowing their way across South Wales, while we were surfing glassy A-frames.
The oddness of this rare surf was added to by the weather and timescale. It remains the only time I've ever seen it snow during such strong sea breezes, and all along we knew with every wave that, as Rich had promised, the spot could suddenly be about to stop, leaving this moment behind us for good. This awareness can sharpen the clarity of wave riding and its memories, and the sight of that lip pitching over me, obscuring the whitening headland and its lonely house from view, will remain seared in my mind.
It was a sight I would get a good chance to memorise during the hour or so that remained of our session, during which all three of us were completely absorbed by the process of poaching waves and trying to thread tube after tube of Cardiff sea water. And that was indeed what it felt like. Poaching. Taking something that wasn't supposed to be there for us. We needed to act fast, to fill our boots, until the opportunity vanished.
When it inevitably did just that, none of us complained. Impervious to the freezing, late afternoon, we giggled and yelled our way back to the car. It was utterly surreal for me to see a surf spot appear and disappear in the manner that 'The House' did that day, and in the end it served to remind me just how unfathomable the ocean was in its ways.
