"Daylight has barely broken and other cars are quickly populating the roadside at the unlikely surf spot: golden grasses, not sand dunes, billow for ages." Photo: Butler
At 4 p.m. I met up with Patrick and Lonneke and surfed for the first time in booties, gloves, and a hood. The water was insanely clear and the waist-high waves were polished with a rare absence of wind. We didn’t paddle in until the sun set. They told me that in the summertime, you can surf until midnight at these latitudes.
The next morning, as Chris drove his blue beater truck over bumpy farmland and through viscous mud, he grinned and said, “This is why you need a car you don’t care about to surf around here.” He had about two hours to spare sans kids and he did everything with a speedy efficiency. He was fully suited-up in a matter of moments. He credits “years and years of practice” in the freezing cold. He excused himself and charged the water across a barely submerged “reef,” otherwise known as a slab of
unforgiving rock. Chris said the waves were small, but they were overhead and heaving. When he or the single other guy out there would pop up in the impact zone, they were only standing in about three feet of water. Small, sure–and gentle.
When Chris talked of time, of children, of tides, he used the expression, “Blink and you’ll miss it.” When he dropped me off, he was heading down to Fraserburgh to see family, then back out to sea for work, and I probably wouldn’t see him again before leaving Thurso.
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I eventually got to Orkney on Saturday. I bussed across “Mainland” island and wandered the quaint streets of Kirkwall. If not for the bagpipers, Kirkwall would have felt like some foreign, Nordic city. Which, in fact, is kind of true, as Orkney was Norwegian way back in the day. I skipped Skara Brae–Europe’s best-preserved Neolithic village and a UNESCO World Heritage Site that happens to be holder than Stonehenge–for a lack of time; not interest. I was later chastised for this decision by…
everyone.
On my ferry ride back to the actual mainland, I received a text from Mark Boyd. A few months earlier, I found Boydie’s name on the Cold Pro roster and asked if we could meet up while I was in Scotland. He is the vice president of the SSF and sits comfortably, if hungrily, in Scotland’s number three seat. He offered to rent me a room for my week and a half in Thurso, but an impromptu trip to South Africa and a room that was no longer spare put me in the Holborn, the B&B at 1 Janet Street–anywhere but Sandra’s Backpackers, in whose beds people kept strongly advising I do not sleep. I believe this text came within 24 hours of his return to Scotland. It said, “Hey casey its boydie we are going out tonight if youd like to join.” It was followed by, “We are at my house having supper and beers. You should come round here for a bit or meet us at the pub later on.” I said I’d be there in an hour.
Sixty three minutes later, I met Boydie for the first time. The 24-year-old is tall–like, really tall–and blonde, and funny as shit. But you couldn’t pay me to pick a fight with him. He escorted me
into a living room where about eight guys were hanging around a coffee table littered with beer cans and Morgan’s rum. He quickly told me their names and just as quickly, they escaped me. The guys made room on a leather couch and handed me a beer.
“This is our wee international surfing community in Thurso,” Boydie said. It turned out the room was full of Aussies, Englishmen, Scots, and an Indonesian–Yudi Andika. I said I thought I’d met Micah Lester before and someone said, “You probably just recognize him because he’s a pro surfer.” I didn’t admit that I hadn’t heard of him, which was probably wise since he turned out to be on the cover of Wavelength‘s 200th issue, as well as a regular contributor. His face would also show up on Carve’s 129th issue–in a peaty tube: glassy and golden.
It turned out to be unlikely that we’d met, as he’d been living in England for a couple of years, coaching their national team. The world of UK surfing is so bizarrely isolated–even though people from all over the world (like Micah, from the Gold Coast) come to take part. A few minutes later, Boydie asked if I wanted a rum and coke. I uncertainly held up my half-full beer can and he said, “You can have more than one drink at a time; you’re in Scotland now.”
“Alright then. Yes, please.”
And so the evening went.
