Go ahead. Mind surf away. Photo: Kevin Roche
Fantasies. You gotta love them. Without them, we are indistinguishable from robots.
A week ago, I wrote an article about first love. That article was written from the perspective of a girl who hadn’t been in the sea for six months. This piece, meanwhile, is written by a girl who is currently unable to move after straining something in her back from excessive paddling. Although not a complete revision of my previous opinions, I do need to make some minor adjustments.
In my last post, I said that it was whilst watching the Rip Curl Pro that I remembered my love of surfing. As it turns out, the Rip Curl Pro is about as far from my own experience of surfing as eating noodles is from guinea pigs – although both can be equally messy. Yes, I can absolutely surf like Kelly Slater! In my head. Ah, my sweet fantasy surf life full of uncrowded breaks and pulling perfect airs. Where my arms never tire and my wetsuit boots smell of lilies. Actually, I’ve never had to take them out of the box because the sea is like a warm open air bath with dolphins.
I had attempted to calibrate my fantasies to my dim memories of surfing back in the autumn of 2012 – but they wouldn’t appear quite as effectively as planned.
And so I set off for the coast in the pale light of morning and sensibly got my stoke on playing my snowboarding soundtrack. I was excited. I can neither confirm nor deny whether I thought for a moment that I was actually going snowboarding. But anyone can make a mistake – even whilst driving past a very green and sunny Stonehenge rather than the snow covered Alps.
Saunton Sands in North Devon looked a lot like Bells Beach as I rounded the cliff top. A lot like Bells Beach on a really flat day under a sepia-toned lens. The surf did eventually pick up but after enthusiastically paddling out, I was quickly reminded of the constant need to reposition, the wait between the sets and the etiquette of not dropping in on someone even when you are itching to catch a wave. In addition, it seemed that five months in the mountains had done nothing for my upper body strength. This meant I was catching few waves and still suffering from a back as rigid as a barn door three days in. I also appeared not to be able to surf like Kelly Slater which was both strange and disappointing. The sea did not seem like an untameable ancient beast, but more like a lazy, slightly frustrating slug. Surrounded by the bank holiday throng, I found no respite from the human world as all my inadequacies were laid bare before wide-eyed shouting surf schools on giant foam marshmallows.
Even when I later found a sheltered and sandy cove, with aforementioned uncrowded waters, and dolphins, I was still struggling on the wrong board and wondering what it was all about. I found myself missing waves whilst daydreaming about snowboarding like an unfaithful lover. “I want the one I can’t have, and it’s driving me mad,” said The Smiths in 1985, and I knew then how they felt.
Fantasies are great for willing away dark evenings, boring meetings and enduring traffic jams so long as we don’t muddle them with reality or let them inform our expectations. Surfing, in particular, is a sport that can suffer from the excess of our fantasies. The shining images in magazines, mind-blowing footage of competitive surfers and our own fallible memories can be a sharp contrast to the variable conditions we have to face and the brutal reminders of our own limitations out there.
It was with effort that I made the drive to the coast again on Tuesday knowing that a cross-shore wind had picked up and rain was forecast. But in that dirty brown and empty sea of blown out waves, I found what I was looking for – a meditation, peace, perspective, a grueling physical battering and just enough long, sweet rides to lure my heart back to where it belongs.
