Grey Skies, Green Waves

by Tom Anderson

  Driving back to the city, with the heaters of Marc's car turned to their highest setting, Rich summed it up. 'I love this place. That was my home break back there, boys. Hardly ever breaks. Keeps itself to itself; it's not flashy, like, doesn't try to advertise itself, but just waits for its moment and then blows you away.'

  'Bit like you, Rich,' Marc pointed out.

  'If you say so. It wasn't what I was getting at, like.'

  I laughed. It was Rich's day, for sure. For once, after years of being a guest in our waters, he'd got to welcome us to his own local surf spot.

  'I have to say though, boys… either of you tell anyone where that was,' he added, 'and I'll never speak to you again.'

  'Can we say it's in Cardiff?' I asked, straining my voice to be heard over the heaters.

  'Yeah, but that's it. Otherwise I'll have to start sharing my surfs here with people I don't know, and I'm not up for that one fuckin' bit. Tell the story, by all means. But keep this place a secret – at any cost.'

  'OK. No worries.' We both offered our promises, although it wasn't as if anyone else was ever going to successfully work this place out without Rich's help, anyway.

  'It has to be said, see,' he added. 'I've kept this place to myself for yonks, like. Now you boys have to do the same.'

  'We will, man, for sure,' I repeated.

  Years later, I'm going to have to apologise to you for what I'm leaving out of this story as a result.

  But I don't break promises, see.

  CHAPTER 6

  CHASING BILL: CORNWALL (PART ONE)

  Cornwall has always represented to me a gloomier side of UK surfing. If you grow up outside of the place, aspiring to surf as well as people from there, then a thinly veiled resentment of the Cornish surf scene is in your nature. It's partly down to straightforward wave envy, of course, but some of the more bitter feelings have their roots in a sense of injustice, too.

  Despite having the most consistent waves in the southern half of Britain and lovely blue water most of the year – as opposed to the greys, greens and browns of the rest of the coasts – Newquay will forever be known as the town that really brought the rat race to surfing. It's the hub of the industry and the point at which the polluted river of money pours into the pure ocean of surf stoke. The surf mags are there, the photographers, the contests, the companies, the supermarket-sized clothing emporiums and the groupies. As a result, to a lot of Welsh surfers it often feels like a place that played the bullshit part of the surf game really well. The rumour always went that an upcoming Newquay surfer could get just as much coverage and success as he or she would by winning a contest, by simply having a good 'corporate appearance' (such a thing does exist in surfing) and a mobile full of photographers' numbers.

  And yet, throughout my journeys as a surfer, good friends have always enjoyed going there; one of whom was Rich Grove.

  Some ten years after he took me to his secret backyard reef break, Rich wound up living in Cornwall, just outside Newquay. In the time that had passed he'd spent a couple of years in Australia renting an apartment by Queensland's world famous 'Superbank', had tried Raglan in New Zealand and indeed the snowy hills of Colorado – as well as sojourning in Indonesia at length several times. So why settle in Cornwall? It didn't make sense to me.

  While it wasn't my job to question his decision, it was well within my remit to take advantage of it. So when he returned to Wales for a few months while waiting for a carpentry job to begin back in Falmouth, I suggested we road-trip around Cornwall. He could be my guide and help me understand the face of 'Kernow' that I'd missed by always going straight to Newquay on the busiest weekends of the year in order to get knocked out of contests early.

  'Sweet idea,' he drawled down the phone to me. 'Just what the doctor ordered. There's a sick swell running this weekend as well.'

  He was right. I'd seen it too. We had both been monitoring the same online surf reports – Magic Seaweed, Scripps Institute and the FNMOC models used by the Navy – along with pretty much every other surfer in Britain. In fact, the swell expected over the coming weekend was not just a regular early autumn storm. It was one of the few Atlantic hurricanes to send waves to Britain in years. Hurricane Bill was in the vicinity.

  Rich immediately dubbed the mission 'Chasing Bill'; our own version of the trip I'd taken with Marc along the US East Coast, which was traditionally the hurricane surfing Mecca of the world.

  Bill looked like he had the potential to spin his own way into surfing folklore, too.

  'Cornwall will turn on as good as anywhere when a deep one swings by,' Rich urged. 'Whatever it does, there's gonna be surf somewhere. We'll just crash in the car, or if we need to call on some of my mates then we can do that too. I'm amping just thinking about it.' His enthusiasm and stoke were catching on with me too.

  The next morning I grabbed him from his parents' house in Cardiff and we made for the M5 to the south west, in my case feeling more expectant than ever before about driving in search of surf in Britain.

  It helped that, after a wet summer, we were facing a day of blistering sunshine, which filled the fields and meadows of Somerset and Devon with colour – the product of what had been an August of rains and warm nights. The first frosts of the year were still weeks away and by mid-morning the windows were down as we cruised the three-lane motorway under blue skies. The lively sea temperatures of North Cornwall would feel welcoming after donning dry wetsuits in a sunny car park. It was now a matter of working out where to stop for surf number one of what we were hoping would be a feeding frenzy of waves.

  The only thing going against us was the wind. Although it was moving softly over the shores, there was a more local storm near to the coasts that was threatening to dilute the power of Bill's more long-range swell.

  'We need to surf somewhere that the swell has to bend into,' Rich explained. 'That'll clean it up. Somewhere like Great Western, but not Great Western.' Most surfers loved to hate this beach, one of Newquay's north-facing beaches, for being perhaps too obvious an option in a westerly wind.

  'Yeah, you got that right,' I confirmed. One thing I'd garnered some expertise in (during the research for Chasing Dean) was the acquisition of hurricane surf. If a counter- or cross-swell came in, you needed to find somewhere that the bigger hurricane waves could wrap into, leaving the other stuff behind – otherwise the surf would get messy and you'd end up chasing your tail trying to pick up unpredictable set-waves in odd conditions.

  It was essentially a filter effect. Hitting a headland and turning around a corner in a coastline was something only the most powerful waves would survive. An obstacle like that would intercept most mediocre waves, but a hurricane swell would still make the refraction with its juice intact. With the background slosh from the local swell getting held back, a 'wraparound' spot – if we could find one – would benefit from this natural sieving away of the unrefined surf.

  We settled on Harlyn Bay, which was usually a sheltered beach break on the reverse side of the peninsular of land that was home to the better-known Constantine Bay.

  'Head to Padstow,' he instructed me, our destination being only a few miles from there.

  Normally, Harlyn was not a beach you'd naturally head to for surf – but this was not a normal swell and Rich reckoned we didn't need to see it to know Constantine and anywhere else west-facing would be a mess.

  As I guided my Citroën C3 (a clear sign of age, it was the first car I'd ever owned that was less than ten years old) through the final lanes approaching the shoreline, I realised how few of my numerous Cornish memories actually involved good surf. Most of my experiences of Britain's most wave-rich county were based around gloomy contests under grey skies, where I was doomed to lose and then get stuck in town while waiting for whoever I'd travelled down with to be ready to leave. And of the memories that didn't revolve around competing, most were of pointless visits to try and schmooze within the surf industry: sponsor runs, errands for friends who had scored jobs as sales r
eps or 'working lunches' with media brokers.

  Of course, some of my previous Cornwall trips had been fun: the real UK Student Championships for one. Then there had been the first time I'd ever seen the ASP World Tour on British shores while on a camping trip with Rich's family. But, in well over a decade of coming to Cornwall, I was struggling to think of the times I'd been greeted with surf of real quality.

  That wasn't going to be the case any more.

  Harlyn Bay was firing. Turquoise, A-frame peaks, groomed by a steady and sweetly accurate offshore wind, were folding the length of the beach – peeling off methodically, mechanically and at a dream pace for speedy, playful surfing. Finally I was going to experience the other face of Cornwall, and it felt deserved.

  Here – a rarity to be savoured – was pumping British surf in gorgeous glassy conditions. Who needed Australia, California, France? Today this was as good a place as any to be a surfer.

  After a quick glimpse of the perfection on offer, a row of trees obscured the view, which allowed me to concentrate on parking behind the Harlyn Inn pub.

  'Beers in there later, butt,' Rich grinned, 'to help us nod off in the car ready for a dawnie tomorrow.'

  'Do we have to buy a ticket to park here while we surf?'

  'Dunno. Your problem, that one. I'm in there.'

  Rich grabbed his inside-out wetsuit and began beating out the sand from his last session, before turning it through and reaching for his towel. Another surfer was changing in the car next to me. He leaned over to answer my question:

  'Nah, man. Free parking. You just need to buy a pint later. They're cool about sleeping in cars, too.'

  Not wanting to lag behind my friend, who at times could well be the keenest surfer on earth, I took this to be assurance enough and rummaged for my own suit.

  Getting changed in sunshine, waxing up slowly and then being able to leisurely walk with your wetsuit undone around your waist to a line-up of perfect peaks is a treat anywhere. It gives you time to contemplate the bliss of what's on offer. As we neared the edge of the water, I watched wave after wave crackle along. There seemed hardly any crowd for what were already some of the best surfing conditions I'd seen in this part of the world.

  'Where are they all?' I asked Rich.

  'Getting frustrated trying to surf somewhere else that's picking up the wind swell,' he gloated. 'I didn't have a clue it would be like this here. Just thought it was worth a look. Got to 'fess up now, man. This was just a lucky guess.'

  He winked.

  'Whatever,' I replied. 'Good call, anyway.'

  At the eastern end of the beach, where we began wading in, a half-submerged rock was holding up a consistent series of fast right-handers, with almost no paddle-out needed. The two other surfers seemed mellow enough, considering our arrival in the line-up had effectively doubled the crowd – and I promptly saw why. The surf was far too good to worry about such things.

  The elder of the pair paddled for a shoulder-high wedge just as I arrived out back – a wave so obviously hollow that his moderate surfing ability was ample to get himself slotted into a dry tube. As he passed me with a look of trepidation, the cool lip slapped his sunburnt forehead, throwing him off as the rest of the wave shut down teasingly.

  I waited for him to re-emerge. The delight in his face was immediately apparent, and I hooted over to him. If they kept on getting rides like that all day the locals were likely to be placated and in a good, sharing kind of mood – which would only help our own chances of getting a few.

  Tauntingly, the ocean went into a lull in sets as soon as we arrived in the line-up, so I sat up on my board, feeling the sun, looking down at my feet clearly visible through the crystal water, and waited contentedly for the wave machine to turn back on.

  Soon enough another pulse appeared on the horizon and a head-high peak made straight for me. After a long drive down and feeling a bit agitated by the sight of new shores and an alien beach, I had to really concentrate on holding back my excitement. Calm as I could, I paddled into it, popped up and tried to race high across the face, which was walling surprisingly quickly for a random beach break I'd never heard of. Dropping back down the wave, I aimed for the close-out section and tried to glide over it, part-freefalling into the flats in front. The wave bounced behind me as I landed with speed and turned to punch my way under the white water, popping up in the shallows with churned sand bubbling all around me. The momentum of wave riding was coursing through my veins.

  Immediately behind me I saw Rich slide into one, trying for a quick tube before going into a series of playful turns with that familiar, zippy style of his, which I'd seen so many times in my life – but not enough in recent years.

  'It's on!' he grinned, kicking out and wading towards me.

  The scene was already set for a surf session that would etch itself into my memory. That balance of cool water and warm air, the magnetic pull of waves pitching over the abrupt sandbars and subsequent torrent of spray from offshore winds. Everything felt great – my board, my surfing and our prospects for a few days of back-to-basics road-tripping.

  A few rides later, I realised that the waves also had enough open face on them to really enjoy trying to surf on rail as well; carving and cruising across open expanses of powerful moving water. Usually a fast-breaking beach break would require a lot of reflex surfing, as you tried to reach the next section before it closed out, but here the peaks were solid, sure of themselves and ideal for really ripping.

  For Rich, it was also a chance to show me just how bloody good at surfing he'd become in the last few years. After holding back on his first few to limber up and get a feel for it all, he suddenly caught a smaller inside wave, with a gem of a section on it, and busted loose. I could see his eyes tracking the lip line, taking aim and then, as the wind lifted yet more spray off the breaking wave, he launched cleanly out of the water. His timing was perfect, and he soared through the air, turning gradually to land into a sideways slide across the white water. I was close enough to hear his feet squeaking against the rubber tail pad as he held the board neatly under his feet, using the wind for help.

  I yelled my approval and spun around to catch another one myself. I finished up right next to him and, as we paddled out side by side, he gave me his verdict.

  'This is it, man. Surf's pumpin', sun's out. These waves are good for trying anything.'

  'For you maybe,' I pointed out. 'Since when d'you learn to do two-foot punts?'

  'Dunno. Just tried one day and it worked. You should have a go.'

  If only it were that easy.

  One of the toughest – although highly enviable – decisions to have to make in surfing is the two-stop-one-stop option. When faced with epic waves you have to decide whether to surf once until you drop dead with hunger and fatigue, or to cut the first session off a little earlier, re-fuel, rest and then return for a second go.

  In the rarest of good surfs, you can sometimes try to get away with both – to have your cake and eat it, as it were. And that is what Rich and I attempted to do that day in Harlyn.

  We saw the first session through to the point where we could physically catch no more waves – during which Rich took the opportunity to put on a masterclass in aerial and fins-free surfing. I, meanwhile, stuck below the lip like a mere mortal, made do with enjoying the on-tap speed and flow offered by wave after wave of hurricane energy. With each turn I could feel myself sharpening, absorbing the power and rhythm of the swell into my soul.

  Eventually the real world caught up, leaving me so hungry I could have considered eating Rich, or any other of the few locals in the water with us for that matter, not to mention being sunburnt and feeling devoid of shoulder muscles.

  'Shall we head in?' I suggested.

  'Yeah, man. I'm knackered now,' Rich agreed.

  Taking one last wave in each, we ran aground and virtually crawled our way up the sand to dry off and recover from a marathon session. For a moment, I couldn't have cared if someone had said I'
d never surf again. For a moment.

  This was a swell that demanded our utmost commitment.

  Within twenty minutes of drying off in the still sun-baked car park, we were already entertaining the idea of heading back out.

  'I reckon we drive back to Padstow again,' Rich suggested. 'It'll be like five minutes. Get some nosh from Tesco – as well as some wine for me coz I need it to be able to sleep in a car – and then come back for an evening sesh, crash here, and be on it for the dawnie too.'

  It sounded like a plan to me.

  And so, after already exhausting the one-stop strategy, we set about trying to get another surf before the sun dropped on this first day of Hurricane Bill's payload.