Sam Hammer. "Get Lost!" Photo: Jeff Flindt
This trouble, according to the CST, is that surfing is illegal on Crete. “If you have heard that you don’t mess with Cretans, imagine messing with the Cretan police. Sure, they don’t go looking for us, but when a hotel owner or a business calls them, then it starts.”
When asked to explain just what “starts” means, the CST spokesperson never clarified, offering only; “[Surfing] is enforced heavily during the summer months.”
Ioannis Sliman, the President of the Heraklion Windsurfing Club—a 48-member strong “and growing” wind- and kitesurfing club based in Ammoudara, on the northeast coast of Crete—has never heard of the CST, despite windsurfing for years in relatively the same area in what is supposedly “Tribe Territory”. Sliman also says surfing, of any kind, in Crete is not illegal. Per se. Seems it’s just misunderstood.
“The law says that we have to windsurf 200 meters away from any swimmer,” Sliman says. “Since some businesses and hotels are located at windsurfing spots, swimmers get afraid and make complaints to the owners, who then call the police.”
When asked about how hard the police come down on the surfers, Sliman says: “Nothing happens; [the police] just make some recommendations for safety and then they leave.”
So it would seem, then, that what’s happening on Crete is a classic case of growing pains—SUPs and all. In reality, Crete’s “200 meter” law is no different from any blackball situation on U.S. beaches during the summer months. And in fact, the rules on the northeast U.S. coast seem even more extreme, where whole blocks of city beaches are completely off-limits to wave-, wind- and kitesurfers from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., May through September. Sure, it’s a reality that incites more than a few growls from East Coast surfers each summer—but a reality that’s been accepted.
But when you have a small island far off the surfing radar, whose long-time local surfers are all of a sudden being faced with a groundswell of new surfers paddling out with little knowledge of surf etiquette, you can almost hear Vince and da boys coming in for a pounding, legality be damned. Indeed, a look through the photo gallery on George Papandreou’s website (surfingreece.piczo.com) shows photos of line-ups of 30+ surfers strong, yet these are line-ups on the mainland region of Parga.
Perhaps these line-up photos are an ominous reminder of what could happen to Crete. Perhaps, even, they are a reminder that our once boundless surfing world has shrunk to a point where it may be able to shrink no more. And when that happens, threatened local surfers do the only thing their idols have ever taught them—they bark and bark, and yearn to bite.
It is in the emergence of groups like the CST in the most unlikely of surf destinations that we encounter further evidence of the fallout that we, as surfers, have been witnessing in our sport for a few years now. Surf culture, it seems, has grown so large that its once singular message of aloha has fissured under the weight of shear numbers, and now closely reflects the state of the societies that our tribe once shunned, from Washington to Athens.
And then, at the end of the “Freedom or Death” opus, there is this: “Internally, adapting to all of the individual opinions, differences, and personal life directions each of the members had, created unforeseen challenges for the crew to stay unified.”
So perhaps those “40 members” where just in spirit after all, and that the localism experiment has nearly died—survived by only a few salty dogs.
Then again, maybe it hasn’t: I mean, do you really want go surfing on Crete now?
Dane Zaun, Sam Hammer, and Nat Young taking in Crete and the Greek surf scene. Photo: Jeff Flindt
