See the whole film @ the Aquarium, San Sebastian, 5th June, 20:30

Graphic by NOAA.

MARINE MINERALS LIMITED CARRY OUT UNLAWFUL SAMPLING FOR DREDGING PLANS

We can reveal that Marine Minerals Limited (MML) has unlawfully undertaken the first significant works associated with their dredging proposal. Considering St Ives Bay is one of only 3 sites Marine Minerals Limited is applying to dredge, they are either incompetent or negligent in failing to apply for the necessary permission to carry out their sampling under the Coastal Protection Act 1949.

SAS has serious concerns about the project and how Marine Minerals Limited is operating. Marine Minerals Limited is simultaneously making very limited information available whilst they and their PR agency are promoting unsubstantiated claims. Marine Minerals Limited is yet to announce the method of dredging they will use to remove tens of millions of tonnes of sediment from the North Cornish coast, or how they have arrived at the number of jobs they believe their proposed activity will create. Without this information SAS and other stakeholders cannot identify the level of environmental impact that will be felt at the coast or the true number of established jobs that could be threatened or new employment that might be generated within the county.

St. Ives area’s Godrevy Beach, where mining samples have been taken. Photo by surfhog.com

Marine Minerals Limited has no excuse for not securing the appropriate licences before undertaking the seabed sampling work within St Ives Bay. SAS not only referenced the Coastal Protection Act 1949 but also even named the licencing authority in their response to Marine Minerals Limited’s scoping opinion. The Marine Management Organisation also clearly stated in relation to every license they grant that they “…would further advise you that the issue of this licence does not absolve you from seeking any other consents or approvals which may be required before you embark upon the work to which it refers.” It’s clear that the responsibility to ensure all licences and permissions falls with the applicant, Marine Minerals Limited.

Surfers Against Sewage’s Campaign Director Andy Cummins says: “Carrying out these works without the relevant permissions, as Marine Minerals Limited has, are not the actions of a responsible developer. Showing such blatant disregard for the environment and the licencing authorities demonstrates why SAS is right to have serious concerns about this proposal. The North Cornish coast is too valuable to allow irresponsible and unprofessional operators to carry out potentially devastating works.”

A spokesperson from the North Coast Protection Association said: “North Coast Protection Association (NCPA) are disappointed, but not surprised to learn of this development. Already we are aware of the countless contradictions made by Marine Minerals Ltd (MML) in their public relations and application documents which can only be seen as disingenous at best. We continue to have serious concerns that this company does not act in a professional way and the potential loss of jobs, and damage to the environment are simply too great to allow the project to go ahead”.

Cornwall Seal Group co-ordinator says: “I am sad to say that this description fits with our experience of Marine Minerals Limited. Marine Minerals Limited forced Cornwall Seal Group to work to extremely short deadlines of a few days because Marine Minerals Limited had booked a sampling boat before having obtained their original MMO sampling license.”

SAS are pleased that Cornwall Council is in the process of writing to both the MMO and Marine Minerals Limited setting out that it fully expects to that should Marine Minerals Limited wish to conduct either further sampling runs, or a larger scale extraction of materials from the sea bed, it is to first to get permission from Cornwall Council for this extraction as the licensing authority under the 2002 Order. However, SAS are extremely disappointed that a prosecution is not being sought.

The UK’s coastline and surfing waves need better protection from inappropriate developments like this and pollution. Join SAS in calling for legislation to Protect Our Waves by signing the petition at www.protectourwaves.org.uk

[This article first appeared in The Surfer's Path in 1999. We thought, with a 928mb low about to turn the North Atlantic into a maelstrom of memorable proportions, this aint a bad time to brush up on our explosive cyclogenesis, and some of the biggest storms in North Atlantic history]

The weather forecast is showing a huge low just west of Ireland. Its about to deepen even further, and swing east over the UK. Its
 isobars are so close they’re almost touching. The centre looks like
a solid black mass. The weather manis warning of impending doom.
 Lives will be endangered, there’ll be heavy financial repercussions,
 insurance claims and a strong chance that many people’s worlds will 
fall disastrously apart.
 Meanwhile, you’re stoked. The storm is out there, and the swell is 
inevitable. It’s like you just won the lottery and all you have to 
do is wait for the money to come in. You start planning with glee -
what board, which spots, which days and times will be best….
To many surfers this is a big part of surfing. If you’ve been doing 
it for a number of years, the biggest, meanest storms that appear on 
the weather chart will end up sticking in your memory. Some of them
 may never have produced rideable surf for you, but nonetheless, 
they’re a source of fascination.
 This article is about some of the deepest lows that have existed in
the North Atlantic, and some of the most disastrous storms that have
 ravaged the UK, from where I write. These storms are well documented 
in the meteorological literature, and they have often been given
 names (like hurricanes), just to add to that air of human-like
 unpredictability.

The Fastnet Storm, August 13th 1979

A flotilla of yachts set sail from Cowes, Isle of
 Wight. They were supposed to race to Fastnet Rock, and then back to
 Plymouth. Of the 303 that set out, only 85 made it. Fifteen lives
 were lost and 136 people had to be rescued by helicopter. This
 well-known disaster, the Fastnet Storm, was caused by winds of over
80mph, whipped up by an unexpected low pressure system which
 developed over Ireland. It wasn’t actually that deep, (about 980mb),
but the fact that all those boats got caught out, makes it a real 
tragedy.
 One interesting thing about the Fastnet Storm is that with all those 
boats stuck right in the middle of a large mid-latitude depression,
 each one carrying a barometer and an anemometer, a very
 comprehensive study of what goes on inside one of these lows was
 able to be made. Also, the reports of some of the surviving crews
 were valuable to meteorologists, like descriptions from the crew of ‘The Gremalkin’, talking of waves “like blocks of flats…”

The stricken boat Gremalkin after a night of 30-60ft seas in the Fastnet Race, January, 1979

The Great Storm of 15-16 October 1987

This was 
the one where Michael Fish, the weatherman got ripped to shreds by
the media for not predicting it the day before. The Sun newspaper 
even called for the resignation of Professor J. T. Houghton,
 Director-General of the Met. Office. Personally I don’t know what
 the fuss was about. I clearly remember the weatherman saying “…it
 will be very breezy in the Channel…”
This storm didn’t produce much in the way of surf because it
 deepened to about 956mb when it was already over the land. However,
 it did cause considerable damage to the heavily populated south of 
England. With gusts of over 115mph, eighteen people lost their 
lives, and an estimated 25 million people (and 15 million trees)
were affected in one way or another.
 There is an endless list of incidents connected with this storm. For 
example, at Porthleven, three people had to be rescued when their 
own rescue helicopter ditched into the sea, and at Harwich a prison 
ship containing 50 inmates broke free from its moorings and drifted 
around for two hours. And minutes before a tree smashed down his 
house, Dr. H. Lawes of Noble Denton Weather Services reports, “…I
 telephoned the forecast office… the synoptic situation sounded
 interesting from an academic point of view, but following another
 loud crash I put the telephone down rather hurriedly”.
Again, the Burns Day Storm of 25 January, 1990 got to its deepest 
after it had settled over Northern England, but it did generate 
enormous swell earlier on, as it deepened just west of Ireland. Most 
recognised breaks north of Southern Portugal were out of control,
 although spots south of there were going off. On the land, it was a
 similar story to the Great Storm of ‘87. Millions of trees got blown
 down, 47 people lost their lives, and hundreds of millions of pounds 
worth of damage was caused.

Brear Storm 1993 was predicted to drop to 909mb but in the end it only reach 914mb. Only.

The Lowest Lows

Sometimes, all the factors to do with the jet stream, the sea
surface temperature, the polar ice, the butterfly flapping its wings
10000 miles away etc., all coincide to produce a depression which 
gets incredibly low. Usually these lows suddenly deepen, as if they
 were always ready to be triggered off. In the world of meteorology, 
if a low deepens more than 24mb in 24 hours it’s called “explosive 
cyclogenesis”.
The two lowest barometric readings recorded in this part of the 
Atlantic have occurred in the eighties and nineties. The first was
 the Atlantic Cyclone of 15 December 1986, which got down to 916mb,
and the other one was the Braer Storm of 10 January 1993. The Braer Storm has been much better documented. It took its name from the
 final destruction of the Braer, a large, loaded oil tanker which had 
become stranded on rocks off the Shetland Islands by another storm a
 week earlier. Dipping to 914mb, it has been acknowledged to be the 
deepest Atlantic mid-latitude depression ever recorded. The experts 
thought it was going to deepen even more. I can remember vividly
 listening to the Shipping Forecast from a crackling old radio whilst 
huddled in the back of a van at Mundaka: “Rapidly deepening Atlantic 
low, expected just west of Bailey, 909mb”, and the wind for Bailey
 was “… Force twelve or more…” which is also quite rare. Needless 
to say we were expecting some surf.

What Sort of Surf do These Storms Bring?

Not necessarily that good. It depends on so many other factors, like 
the fetch length, how long the storm stayed in one place, the
 direction of the fetch, etc. The Braer Storm produced some great
 surf, but not really as big as many had expected. The low didn’t
 persist long enough, despite a very tight, intense centre similar to
(but not the same as) a hurricane.
 On the other hand, the Cyclone of ‘86 probably produced some
 all-time surf throughout the whole Atlantic. I was in Morocco at the 
time, and I remember some local rolling up with a newspaper on a
 rickety old bike; “Hey meester, beeg waves for joo, no feeshing for
us”. Even he could see there was something unusual about today’s 
weather chart. It took six days for that swell to arrive, but when 
it did, it was 10ft and super-clean.
 Anyway, the general consensus is, these storms definitely produce 
big waves, and the more of them there are, the more often we’ll get
 big surf in the Atlantic.

Hmm … Morocco. Not a bad place to be in the next few days. Photo: Ricardo Borghi

So Is the North Atlantic Getting Stormier?

Well, yes, so it seems. And not only that, but the thing that 
affects us directly, namely wave heights, have been shown to
 increase significantly over the last few decades. Measurements from
 wave buoys and weather ships have shown that, in 1960, the maximum 
wave height in the Atlantic was about 12m. There has been a
 systematic increase, and now, in the late nineties, the average
 maximum height is around 18m. Long-term trends in wave heights are
 intimately linked with how stormy the ocean is, so we can safely say 
that the Atlantic has got quite a bit stormier since the early 
’60s. Whether this trend will continue is anybody’s guess. It’s 
probably just the upward side of a much longer-term oscillatory
 pattern (like El Nino, but over many decades). We haven’t got good 
enough meteorological records for that – we don’t really know.
For people like myself, who strive to try and
 predict these types of things, it’s tough, even as our forecast models get better and better. On one hand we have 
to fool ourselves, and those who pay us, that one day we might be able to
 predict everything (otherwise we’d give up altogether). On the other
 hand, we must keep in mind that forecasting is inexact. The fundamental laws of quantum mechanics forbid us from 
making perfect predictions of anything, let alone the weather.
Which 
is a really good thing, because otherwise both surfing and science
 would be forever predictable, and not worth a whistle in the wind.
Tony Butt is author of The Surfer’s Guide to Waves, Coasts and Climates, published by Alison Hodge. If you want a copy, you can get one free right now by joining Surfers Against Sewage, here.

This article first appeared in The Surfer’s Path way back in 1999.

When the Prestige went down 10 years ago, the whole Bay of Biscay felt the effects.

So after a decade-long inquiry, what’s been done to prevent it happening again?

Photo by Willy Uribe

At 15:15hrs on Wednesday 13th November 2002 a distress call was issued from a ship called the Prestige lying approximately 30nm from Muxía on the northwest coast of Spain. From this moment on, the biggest man-made environmental catastrophe in the history of Spain, and probably Europe, was about to unfold.
The Prestige oil spill contaminated 786 beaches and made surfing impossible from Northern Portugal, around the entire Atlantic coast of Spain, up into southwest France and beyond, for at least four months. Entire beaches were covered up to a metre thick in a highly poisonous black gunge that sticks to you like glue and emits a toxic gas. For a while there, the Biscay coast was like a vision from Hell.
Nowadays not many people talk about the Prestige, even though the rocks still bear evidence in the form of black stains. The hundreds of thousands of birds and mammals, including at least one man, that were poisoned to death as a direct result of the Prestige, seem to have been forgotten. But if you surf or enjoy spending time at the coast oil spills are one of your biggest enemies. An oil spill is local contamination at its worst – it will affect you even if you don’t give a damn about bigger issues such as global warming and biodiversity. So I think we should remember the Prestige, and see if anything is being done to stop it happening again.

Nowadays not many people talk about the Prestige, even though the rocks still bear evidence in the form of black stains. The hundreds of thousands of birds and mammals, including at least one man, that were poisoned to death as a direct result of the Prestige, seem to have been forgotten.

For those of you who don’t remember the disaster, here is some very brief background information:
Muxía is on Galicia’s Costa da Morte, previously one of the most unspoilt coastlines in Europe, with empty white-sand beaches, crystal-clear water and a number of high-class, super-consistent surf spots. It is still off the beaten track for most surfers; most of the time. Apart from during mid-summer, around here you’ll be looking for someone to surf with.
The Prestige was a single-hulled supertanker, built in 1975. At the time it sank it was carrying 77,000 tonnes of low-grade heavy fuel oil. The ship was in poor condition: inspections more than three years before had already detected structural fatigue, but it was still declared seaworthy in the Bahamas, under whose flag of convenience it was sailing.
The cargo that the Prestige was carrying was nastier than normal ‘crude oil’. Heavy fuel oil is used for large industrial engines; it is highly volatile but also extremely sticky. Short-term effects of exposure include skin and eye irritation, respiratory problems, nausea, splitting headaches and insomnia. Long-term consequences include genetic mutations, leukaemia and direct effects on the immune, reproductive and nervous systems.
The distress call was sent out because the ship had started leaking oil. Over the next few days, the vessel was towed around in circles while steadily deteriorating. The captain requested for it to be brought into a sheltered cove in order to contain the oil, but the Spanish authorities denied the request and ordered the Prestige out of Spanish waters and as far away from the coast as possible.
To describe what happened next as the ‘worst-case scenario’ would be an understatement. At 09:00 on 19th November 2002 the Prestige broke in half and sank, spewing out its contents into the ocean. At least 50,000 tonnes of oil hit the coast in several waves, or ‘black tides’, gradually making its way south towards Portugal and east into the Bay of Biscay. Less than a month later the oil had spread all along the north coast of Spain and up into the French Biscay coast. For the rest of the winter, surfing was out of the question along that entire coast, which contains many of the best reef, beach and pointbreaks in Europe. Then, the following summer, holidaymakers had to either avoid the beaches or contend with oil-stained feet, towels and children, and large floating patches of oil in the water. The following winter (2003-2004) most people were surfing again, but sporadic patches of stinking oil would regularly stick to your board, wetsuit, hands and face.
Over the next few years the oil gradually disappeared and was forgotten about, either dissipating in the ocean or drying like paint on the rocks, and we gradually returned to business as usual. A lot of scientific studies were done on the loss of biodiversity and the toxic effects of the fuel, including numerous economic analyses related to the fishing industry. A lot of debating was done about how to stop it happening again, and some new rules were actually put into place, albeit half-heartedly, such as those concerning single- and double-hulled tankers.
But the issue of what to do if a spill does actually happen, and the development of a foolproof worst-case scenario protocol, seems to have mostly been avoided. In fact, one very important question which has been pondered over and over again is why the hell the boat was towed to a spot more than 100 miles from the coast instead of being brought into a harbour, as requested by the captain. Knowing that a major spill was imminent, bringing it into a port would have contained the oil inside an area thousands of times smaller, and the environmental costs would have been infinitely less.
The decision to order the boat away from the coast was made by civil servants working for the regional Galician and national Spanish governments. It seems that there was no consultation with any scientists or with anybody else who remotely knew what was going on. In fact, less than three months after the event a letter was published in the prestigious journal Science, signed by 423 marine and atmospheric scientists from 32 universities and six research institutions, to draw attention to the fact that the decision to tow the vessel offshore was a result of extremely poor (or non-existent) communication between the governing powers and the scientific community: “We demand that the Spanish authorities improve the mechanisms and logistics for scientific and technical consultation and refrain from making vague public statements that are seriously, and unfairly, damaging the image of Spanish marine and atmospheric sciences”. (Science vol. 299, no. 5606, p. 511).

On 16th October 2012, almost exactly 10 years later, a court case got underway, supposedly to find out who is to blame for the Prestige disaster, and to punish them accordingly. Whether the right people are being accused of the right crimes, is another matter. In fact, you might be forgiven for thinking that accusers and the accused are the wrong way round.
So who was responsible? If the Russian oligarchs or whoever it was who owned the oil in the first place hadn’t used such a crappy vessel to transport it, it wouldn’t have happened. But as far as I can see, they aren’t being put on trial; apparently nobody even knows who they are. Perhaps the Bahaman authorities are the culprits for giving the ship a clean bill of health, or whoever is responsible for the international shipping law that still allows Flags of Convenience. Those people are not on trial either.
The defendants are just four people: Captain Apostolos Mangouras, his first officer, his chief engineer and the former head of the Spanish merchant marine department, José Luis Lopez-Sors. Apart from Lopez-Sors, the other people responsible for refusing Captain Mangouras permission to bring his ship into a port are miraculously missing from the defendants’ list. The people ultimately responsible for that were the politicians in charge at the time, now back in power again after a break of eight years. They aren’t going to put themselves on trial, are they?
Apart from bickering about who is responsible and who isn’t, there are more fundamental issues which are also not being considered, and probably never will be. The plaintiffs are claiming money to compensate for the environmental damage caused by the disaster. But Nature is not for sale. If you were a surfer in the Bay of Biscay in November 2002, you might understand. Just as no amount of money could bring back the dead fish, birds and mammals, or Manfred Gnadinger who sadly died as a result of the Prestige, no amount of money could bring back a winter of surfing at Mundaka, Meñakoz or Guethary.

Words: Nik Zanella
Photos: Surfwise/Magnolia Pictures

“I went into the water literally ready to pull my brains out, and I came back out of the water a warrior.” Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz

August 21st 2007, Erez, Israel. The Mediterranean’s most contentious beachbreak lies only a few miles west from the Erez Crossing Terminal. Inside the frontier’s fortress a palpable sense of fear is amplified by the 40°C heat of the southern Mediterranean summer. Qassam rocket bombings become the daily norm in this area since the victory of Hamas in the June ’07 elections forced authorities to shut the frontier between Israel and the Gaza Strip. But not to “Doc”!

Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz is now 86. He is one of the oldest surfers still catching waves at the point in San Onofre in California and he’s been doing it for decades. He left the Gaza Strip 33 years ago when the Suez crisis between Egypt and Israel forced him to move his surf school and his family from Tel Aviv back to California. His facial skin is wrinkled from six decades of saltwater and offshore winds, but under his white-haired chest pulses the heart of a young lion – a lion determined to leap over that fence, or at least to help the 14 boards he brought reach the Palestinian locals waiting on the other side.

The sparks that set off this unusual adventure in surf diplomacy were a couple of pictures that appeared in the Los Angeles Times in July 2007. They showed two surfers on the beach of Al Deira, together with their only battered board. The article explained how some Palestinians try to escape the poverty and violence of the area by riding the waves, with any board or floating device they can get hands on.
Doc was struck by this story. He was the first surfer to ride the waves along the Gaza Strip in the mid-1950s, looking for surf with a Hobie pintail under his arm, chased by army officials confusing his longboard for a rocket launcher. He spent months roaming these clean beachbreaks nearly alone, studying the Pentateuch and working towards the socialist utopia on Kibbutz farms. The surf school he opened in Tel Aviv in that same year triggered the birth of the Israeli surf community, the first to bloom in the enclosed basin of the Mediterranean. They still consider him a prophet down there and for good reason: thanks to his enthusiasm, surfing is today a hugely popular pastime along Israel’s shores with thousands of devotees, many of whom also serve as soldiers along those same troubled shores.

“So I told myself, we’ll go to Israel and get those Palestinians some boards,” remembers Doc in an interview given to the New York Times after his return to the US. His first step was to contact Mr Rashkova, the Israel representative of Surfers 4 Peace, an NGO founded by the Paskowitz family and Kelly Slater to help Palestinians and Israelis share waves on the basic philosophy that “people who surf together, can live together.”

The project required help from both sides of the Erez fence but it wasn’t long before,
bare-chested in exploration-style kaki shorts, Dorian faced the Israeli guards at Erez with two surfboards under his arms, asking them to authorize the meeting. The first answer was, a harsh, “Lo” (that’s ‘no’ in Ivrit), but the words he proffered afterwards made the miracle happen: “I came 12,500 miles from Hawaii to give away these boards. The guys who need them are standing 50 meters from here, and you’re trying to stop me? How can you do that to a fellow Jew?” He then hugged the guards and begged them … and the gates of Zion were opened.

Doc Paskowitz’s flirt with the Gaza Strip is only one chapter of Paskowitzs’ extravagant surf saga which is summed up in Doug Pray’s documentary, Surfwise. Pray specializes in making films about American subcultures (Hype! and Scratch) and Surfwise tells Doc’s story using interviews with him, his immediate family of eight sons, one daughter and two wives, using plenty of original super-8 family footage.

In the ‘50s Doc was a successful Jewish-Californian physician, regularly surfing in Hawaii and totally integrated in the America’s post war economic dream. But Doc was looking for something more than money and a career. Attracted by the newly-born promised land of Israel he quit his first wife and the safety of his job to “embark upon an odyssey” as he often says. Suffering from anxiety and in dire need of a spiritual rebirth he moved to Tel Aviv in ‘56 where he linked back to his Jewish background and a growing an obsession with maintaining the human body for optimimum performance (in 1998 he published a book titled Surfing and Health). He developed a strict kosher diet of no pork, sugar, fat, alcohol or drugs of any sort – a diet he rigorously imposed on his whole family.

When he went back to the US in the ‘70s, the social conventions dictated by American capitalism had lost any meaning to him. He married Juliette Paez (a stunning Mexican beauty 40 years younger), customized a 24ft camper van and started to live “like a family of gorillas in the forest,” as he says, governing his drove with the authority of a monarch. He home-schooled his nine kids, moving up and down and across the American continent from Northern California to Costa Rica to New York, giving medical consultations for a living, honoring Shabbat every Friday and catching a lot of waves in the process.
Surfing has played a crucial role in Doc’s didactics and discipline. “Most parents say ‘Go to school. Don’t go swimming with sharks, that’s dangerous,” recalls Salvador, the seventh Paskowitz son in a touching interview recorded for the movie. “Our parents said, ‘you can go swimming with sharks, but you’re not fuckin’ going to school—that shit’s dangerous!’”

Critics of this lifestyle at the fringe of society came from inside and outside the family. His daughter Navah (born in ’69) was the only girl in the crammed van. Her memories of those days show a love-hate relation with that outcast life: “We were just like puppies,” she remembers. “There’d be three or four people in that little lower bed thing, a couple of guys on the side couch bed, there would be at least two or three on the floor, mum and dad would be up above and I was on this weird board-thing that we made at their feet – which certainly disturbed me sexually, because mum and dad were doing it every night!”

The world famous Paskowitz Surf Camp, is what perpetrates the family creed nowadays. In 1998, Dorian gave his fourth-born son, Israel, ownership of the famous school. Izzy and Danielle have three children, including Isaiah, who is autistic and is shown in Surfwise at home with his father. Inspired by the positive results of tandem surfing with Isaiah, Izzy and Danielle founded Surfers Healing, a successful nonprofit organization that offers free surfing day camps to autistic children and their families in Southern California, New York, and Hawaii (www.surfershealing.com). It is supported by the wider family – who all now live in real houses – and by numerous pro surfers who volunteer their time.
Meantime, Doc Paskowitz has his hands full again, this time trying to bring some of his radical positive philosophy to bear upon a conflict that deseperately needs some aloha.

You can check out more on the Surfwise and the Paskowitz story on these websites:
www.surfwisefilm.com/

Surfer’s Healing on:
www.surfershealing.org/

Paskowitz Surf Camp on:
www.paskowitz.com/

BIO:
Nik Zanella is editor of Italy’s foremost surf magazine Surf News. A fluent Mandarin speaker and avid explorer, he probably knows more waves in the Mediterranean and China than anyone on Earth. Nik lives, writes and surfs in Ravenna on the Italian NE coast.

Art and surfing, music and surfing, innovative design and surfing – in the history of our sport, land-based creative expressions have been a constant bed-fellow of our own aquatic addiction. Despite the enormous growth in the popularity of the sport, not to mention the popularity of surfing’s image worldwide, there remains a creative mystique that goes with the art of riding waves – one that’s hard to define and never seems to wane.
This is probably part of the reason environmental organisations like Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) and the Surfrider Foundation are able to secure the support of some of the world’s best known, yet elusive artists and musicians to promote their campaigns.
This year, the UK environmental campaign group SAS has worked with an illustrious cast of world-famous, well-established and up-and-coming artists for a key campaign fundraiser: Drawing Boards – Cutting Edge Surfboard Art for Surfers Against Sewage. Fourteen artists from assorted fields have designed unique works of art – on some of the most environmentally friendly surfboards currently available – in aid of SAS’ clean water initiatives.
So, wherever you are, if you’re interested in the latest ‘urban art’, a graphic design junkie, a Beatles fan looking for an original, signed Sir Paul McCartney board, a collector the original Young British Artists’ work, or owner of a quiver of collectible boards, you should check out this incredible surfboard auction.

The artwork applied to these boards – mostly direct onto the shaped foam, though in some cases applied like a decal under the glass – offers a fascinating insight into how our passion presses the buttons of bigshots in these fields. Some of this artwork is beautiful, some is shocking, some hilarious – but all of it is original and reflects something of where the contemporary art is at this moment in time, and how surfing somehow slots into that.
The last few years have seen the rapid expansion of the urban art scene and this collection includes examples from some of the very best of today’s ‘street or graffiti-based artists, from Beejoir to Nick Walker. Perhaps more than any of the other contributors to this money-raising quiver, the support of urban artists can be explained by the enduring synergy between art and board sports, whether skateboarding or surfing – the kindred spirits of riders and artists who feel they’re continually pushing against the system, finding their own vent to release the pressures of the mundane reality of modern life.
Contributors Tracey Emin and Gavin Turk are some of the best known artists to emerge from the UK in recent years. Their works have been collected by leading international galleries for well over a decade and command some of the highest prices in the contemporary art field worldwide. As with all the surfboards, their pieces are original and unique, and should whet the appetites of collectors and art aficionados everywhere.
These unique artworks will be auctioned as part of Bonhams of London world-renowned Vision 21 event on 22nd October 2008. The Vision 21 Day will be held at Bonhams’ Knightsbridge salerooms in central-London and consist of a select collection of contemporary art and design, including SAS’s 14 eco-surfboard artworks. Partnering with such a prestigious auction house will help raise the level of interest in the boards themselves but, more importantly, the award-winning campaigns SAS undertakes.

Drawing Boards uses the latest in eco-surfboard technology in an attempt to highlight sustainable materials and hopefully influence surfers around the world into making greener choices when it comes to surfing equipment. Remember, these days you can not only buy greener boards, but also eco-wetsuits, recycled leashes, organic surf wax and much more. Consumption of unsustainable, un-recyclable products is a dead end that often stops in the ocean. Millions of tonnes of plastics and other waste materials make their way into our seas each year and SAS is campaigning hard to make sure that the companies responsible for this marine litter take additional steps to ensure this damaging pollution of our oceans is a dying trend.

SAS Drawing Boards
Artist Bios:

Beejoir
Beejoir is the most celebrated street artists to come out of the London Urban art scene. His work often focuses on world events, history, philosophy and politics and this trademark social commentary has been applied to walls all over the world. Beejoir regularly uses montage, juxtaposing two very different images to question the world around us, including subjects like the motivation for war and society’s rampant consumerism.
www.beejoir.co.uk

David Carson
Newsweek said of Carson: “He changed the public face of graphic design”, London-based Creative Review dubbed Carson “Art Director of the Era.”
Carson has designed for The Surfer’s Path, Transworld Skateboarding, Transworld Snowboarding, Surfer, Beach Culture, and Ray Gun magazines. His work on Beach Culture magazine won “Best Overall Design” and “Cover of the Year” from the Society of Publication Designers in New York. Carson lectures extensively throughout the world, and in the past few years, he has branched out into film and television, directing commercials and videos.
www.davidcarsondesign.com

Eine
Eine is a prolific street artist based in London, UK and is famous for his alphabet lettering on shop shutters in London’s East End. Eine’s work has been shown at various art fairs including the 20/21 British Art Fair and the London Art Fair. He was featured in an article in Time Out as one of the six best new street artists working in the capital.
www.einesigns.co.uk

Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin is one of the UK’s most celebrated and notorious artists to emerge from the so-called “Young British Artists” scene. Renowned for her readiness to share details of her personal life in her work, Emin’s perhaps most controversial and well-know piece, My Bed, was shown at the Turner Prize exhibition in 1999.

Pure Evil

In 1990 artist Pure Evil left the Poll Tax Riots of London behind and went to live in California where he spent 10 years ingesting weapons-grade psychedelics, thinking about stuff, making electronic music and printing t-shirts.
Inspired by skate culture and the west-coast character graffiti of Twist, he returned to London and inexplicably picked up a spray can and started painting weird, fanged vampire bunnies everywhere.
www.pureevilclothing.com

Kurt Jackson
Kurt Jackson is one of the leading British artists. His work embraces an extensive range of materials and techniques including mixed media, large canvases, and relief work. Jackson’s paintings are fluent, dynamic and exciting, resulting from a working method that is both challenging and intense. He is undoubtedly most famous for his plein air paintings of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. However his painting continues to take him further afield. He has worked with a number of charities, raising money and awareness about their work, including: Survival International, Greenpeace, Oxfam, VSO, Water Aid, Cornwall Wildlife Trust and the Woodland Trust.
www.kurtjackson.co.uk

Annie Kevans
“My work reflects my interests in power, manipulation and the role of the individual in inherited belief systems. I hope that my images will raise questions about how and why a person, or group of persons, behaves in a certain way. As Foucault explained, a person’s identity is not preset – rather, it is determined by the interactions of a person with another and is, therefore, a shifting temporary construction. My work looks at ideas of personal responsibility within structures determined by time and place and the role of those who create those structures.” Annie Kevans
www.anniekevans.com

Mau Mau
Mau Mau has spray painted his way around the world, his artwork appearing on everything from shipwrecks to surfboards to billboards to city walls. Part of the Souled Out Studios collective, his art meshes social and environmental commentary – bitterly topical with a tongue-in-cheek sweetener. Before making the transition to canvas Mau Mau gained a cult following through designs for Greenpeace, Surfers Against Sewage and clothing labels Sewerside and THTC. Roots planted in the surf and country vibes of the North Devon coast, Mau Mau has caught his fair share of dirty waves over the years…
www.mau-mau.co.uk

Sir Paul McCartney
Member of The Beatles, international superstar … need we say any more.
www.paulmccartney.com

Polly Morgan
Polly Morgan is British and lives and works in London. She was born in 1980 and began working as an artist in October 2005. A love of animals and a desire to preserve them led her to learn taxidermy, under the tutelage of taxidermist George Jamieson. Since then she has gravitated towards making still lives with animals as subjects.
Her intention has never been to mimic the natural habitats of animals, as they are traditionally displayed, but to place them in less expected scenery. The scale and settings are often unnatural, but the animals are never anthropomorphised. Seeing them out of place encourages us to look at them as if for the first time: a rat sheds its association with horror and disease and can be rightly viewed as a beautiful animal.
All taxidermied animals used by Polly Morgan are either road casualties or have been donated to the artist by pet owners and vets after natural or unpreventable deaths.
www.pollymorgan.co.uk

Conrad Shawcross
Often using subjects which lie on the border of science and philosophy, Conrad Shawcross’s structural and often mechanical sculptures question empirical, ontological and philosophical systems ubiquitious within our lives. While at first appearing rational and functional, his often complex mechanized systems in the end deny all rational function and so the viewer is forced down philosophical and metaphysical avenues to deduce a raison d’etre. From early works such as The Nervous System, 2002 – a monumental spinning machine that endlessly weaves a length of coloured rope into the form of a double helix, the shape of DNA – to his recent giant spiral work Continuum, 2004, the artist has attempted to visualise, among other things, the incomprehensible of human concerns, time.
www.victoria-miro.com

Gavin Turk
Gavin Turk came to prominence in the 1990s as one of Britain’s infamous “Young British Artists” and was included in 1997’s hugely popular Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy alongside Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the Chapman brothers. Much of his work focuses on the cult of personality and the construction of artistic myth.
www.whitecube.com/artists/turk/

Nick Walker
In 1992 Nick Walker began to combine stencils with his freehand work which allowed him to contrast almost photographic imagery with the rawness which evolved from conventional graffiti styles. Stencils introduce an impact element to his work. The appeal of stencils is that they allow him to take an image from anywhere – dissect any part of life – and recreate it on any surface.
Nick adds an element of humour or irony to some paintings to add a little light relief to the walls.
web.mac.com/nickwalkerz

Jonathan Yeo
One of Britain’s best portrait painters Yeo is, extraordinarily, almost entirely self-taught. A period of serious illness whilst he was studying for a degree in literature and film encouraged him to follow his natural love of painting. He taught himself the old-fashioned way by studying and imitating the styles and methods of any artist that interested him. In this way he progressed through the 20th century, rendering everything from still lives, landscapes and nudes in a variety of styles, from cubist to surrealist. Living beside the Tate Britain gallery in London helped, and Yeo would often start his days looking at works that grabbed his attention.
www.jonathanyeo.com

To see the full auction catalogue and for further information on the artists please visit: www.sasdrawingboards.co.uk

A special thanks to Global Ocean, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the conservation of marine life that share much common ground with SAS campaigns. Global Ocean aims to raise awareness of marine conservation and help protect endangered marine species.

By Sean Davey

Second Homecoming

I’ve been flying back to this rustic little island for 16 or 17 years now, so it is almost a second home for me. I’ll typically fly in and bunk up with my long-time buddy, Wire, who’s a bit of legend round these parts.

In early March, Wire called me about some epic swell forecast to hit Martha, my favorite wave on the island. A bunch of low-pressure systems seemed to be forming south of Tasmania, throwing huge bands of wave energy towards the island, so I booked flights right away. Our late season in Hawaii had been so good this year that I hadn’t even got any surfers organized, but, what the heck, I was going anyway. Besides, before I left, Wire called again to say that Kelly had been in touch. Apparently he was planning a King Island R&R mission around the time of the Bells contest in Victoria.

King Island is about the size as Oahu, my real home, although any similarities end right there. For a start, on any given day Oahu has round about a million residents and another half-million visitors. When you drive away from the airport on King Island, you’ll see a sign announcing a population of 2,000. In truth, it’s more like 1,400 due to some decline in recent decades.

Over the years I have come to know so many people here that I’m a kind of de facto local. I always drop in to see Shannon at the Nautilus Cafe for a coffee. Then there’s the iconic King Island Bakery across the road. Every visitor will eventually eat a couple of their epic meat pies – we’re talking lobster pies, Camembert pies, sometimes even wallaby pies. It’s hard to walk past the place on a cold morning with an empty stomach.

This place is just what I need after several months of every Tom, Dick and Harry in the surfing world on my doorstep in Hawaii.

Martha Calls

I’d only been there half a day, and we were already making our way up north to the fabled banks of Martha. It is a unique location, quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen. Imagine a beach that faces north but gets most of its swell from the south. “How so?” you’re thinking. Well, the island is kind of elongated in a north to south direction allowing for south swells to sweep up both sides and refract back onto its north coast, where Martha happens to lie.

It takes a big pulse to make Martha bear fruit. Typically, you need a massive south to southwest swell to pound the west coast of the island, but even then, over the years I’ve seen plenty of good swells fail to produce results.

I was lucky enough to sample Martha’s wares just once on my first two-week visit, and after that I saw that the weather always seemed worked in two-week cycles, and the good days were always just before or just after my stay. After missing too many primo Martha swells, I began extending my visits to three weeks in an attempt to beat the cycle.

But it’s never that simple. Martha swells also have a bad habit of coinciding with inconvenient tides. It doesn’t like a high tide; the swell bounces back off the beach and creates weird backwash, so you’re aiming for low. Of course, big swells and low tides often seem to occur super early in the morning or last thing in the day, so usually we’re either hauling ass up to Martha in the dark, long before sunrise, to catch the back end of low tide or reluctantly driving away from epic barrels after sunset. Eighty-five percent of all my Martha sessions over the years have fallen into this torturous time frame.

This day was somehow different. We arrived around 9am to a barely believable sight. Golden sunshine bathed perfect glassy 4-5ft A-frames, with only a couple of surfers out. Meanwhile, the far end of the beach was shrouded in an odd, low-lying and very dark cloud – really strange lighting, but spectacularly beautiful to photograph.

Kelper Ryan

Because I didn’t have any pro surfers with me (yet), I was content to shoot lineups and waves, but I did notice one local getting some great waves, so I shot a few images of him as well. Turned out he was a ‘kelper’ named Ryan. He’d moved here a couple of years ago with his young family looking for a more relaxed way of life. I met him on the dunes after his surf and immediately struck up a conversation with him. The lucky bastard owns a house just a 10-minute drive from Martha, so he gets to surf here pretty much every time it happens. Apparently, on a big swell a couple of weeks before, Martha was the best it had been in years, and everyone was saying that because of the huge swell, the banks were now rooted. I gotta say, though – they looked pretty damn fine to me!

As is the routine around these parts, we stopped in and had a cup of tea with Ryan at his house before heading back to Currie. He and his wife have a young daughter and another kid on the way. So, I wondered, what exactly does he do to pay the bills? A kelper, he explained, is a guy who trolls the craggy shorelines looking for prime strands of freshly washed up bull kelp. They haul it onto their trucks, then take it down to a production facility in Currie, where it’s hung out to dry on racks. Once dried, it’s taken down and crushed into a fine mix, which is shipped around the world for use in various applications, mainly in food and medicine. King Island has a reputation for producing some of the finest kelp in the world.

I asked Ryan if he could pen a few words about “that beachbreak” near his house. This is what he wrote:

This spot is a unique wave. The local surfers who live here put up with weeks of onshore stormy weather relying on the right angle, swell size, wind, tide, and banks to do their thing all at once. It makes it even more of a special session when all the elements come together.

We’re probably lucky it’s so fickle – it makes it a bit of a gamble for outsiders, not to mention the cost of flights and accommodation, cars, etc. You easily could do a couple of weeks in Indo or NZ for less.

I love the raw, haunted look of the sand dunes melting back into the half-burnt-out scrub, to the feeling that if I don’t make this drop I may break my back or my board.

Negotiating the super-sucky drop to stand upright in the barrel and get spat out onto the shoulder – or sometimes if the swell has the right angle, you might be able to backdoor another two sections till you hit the sand – gives me many mixed emotions.

Some days there’s no one up here, and there are five or six perfect peaks from the beach to the point. Walking down the beach, seeing the sun playing tricks on the water and sand dunes, it can feel surreal and dream-like, making you feel pretty stoked on life.

Wallaby Road

The roads of King Island testify to the island’s large wallaby population; numerous road-kills litter the way. But there’s one area, about 10 miles north of Currie, where we spotted over a dozen of them within a mile. The numbers have become quite a problem. A large percentage of car accidents here involve wallabies. Accidents involving two or more vehicles are rare, due to the relatively small amount of traffic (if you can even call it that), but the wallaby problem has become so bad that the government is now looking into culling the population back to more manageable numbers. I actually met a guy at Martha who spends his nights counting wallabies under a spotlight. He gets paid something like $37 an hour to do it, and he’s free to spend his days chasing waves. Sounds like a pretty killer job, though of course it isn’t a permanent gig. They have him counting wallabies so they can get a grip on what sort of numbers they’ll need to shoot.

Atmospherics

We had two nights of incredible storm activity, with torrential rain, lightning and massive thunder claps. I even managed a couple of frames out of Wire’s front window of an actual super cell passing right over the main street of Currie. It was amazing to witness the power of that storm! The speed at which that cloud raced over town was phenomenal. Very cool to see, throwing bolts everywhere as it passed over.

It got me thinking about this island in general, and it dawned on me that it really is all about the atmospherics here. Just about all the best photo sessions I’ve had here over the years have been during phenomenal lighting and weather situations. Living on the North Shore, I get to see a lot of cool atmospheric moments, too, but this is one place that I put ahead of Hawaii for amazing light. The air here has a super-clarity unlike anywhere else on earth, and nature here is so raw … no signs of man on most of the coastline … just you and the sea … the rocks and the plants … the clouds.

Of course, after the super-cell event, the weather got even more out of hand. We were checking a series of big storms passing through the Great Southern Ocean directly towards us here on the west edge of Bass Strait. One storm in particular attracted a lot of attention. The isobar charts pegged it as low as 920 millibars, which is extremely low. Hurricane-force winds were forecast for only the second time ever in these waters.

Later, Slater … Welcome to Paradisis

Kelly had missed the first A-frame session, but he was still amping for a visit to the island. King Island is a relatively short flight from the Bells Beach area, so it was a totally do-able scenario, if we could just get the conditions to co-operate. Wire told me that Kelly’s initial plan was to go out and win his first round heat at Bells, then spend a couple of days on the island before resuming his 2009 campaign. We had him on standby for somewhere around the 25th or 26th, but right at the last minute, the winds turned bad again, so he called it off.

Not to worry, though. He went on to win at Bells, so we were stoked for him anyway.

We needed to kick Plan B into action, so I called my Tassy mate, Marti Paradisis. Marti has become quite well known lately for his heavy-wave charging at Shipsterns Bluff in Tasmania and a few newer spots, as well. He’s managed to net several magazine covers and spreads and was nominated for a Billabong XXL award last year. He’s the real deal, and, on top of his big-wave act, he’s also a talented small-wave surfer with a hefty bag of aerial tricks.

Marti managed to make it just before the next big swell, although his boards didn’t follow until a day later, which happens more often than not here. We were expecting another good swell the following morning, so the plan was to pick up the boards and make a beeline straight up to Martha.

The plane was a little late getting in, so we didn’t make it up there till well after 10am. By then the tide was a little higher than ideal, but it didn’t faze Marti at all. The swell was only in the 2-4ft range, but it still proved to be just the right tonic. He was just stoked to even be there, quite aside from the cobalt tubes.

Finless Hynd

Derek Hynd would also have been present for this session except that he saw a larger swell on the chart and thus elected to come a little later. For those who don’t know about Derek, he pretty much ushered in the whole retro-surfboard thing when he picked up a crappy old twin-fin in an Op shop in Daytona Beach, Florida well over a decade ago. Tom Curren then “borrowed” the board from him and used it in 12-15ft waves in Indonesia, showing the world that big waves don’t really need big boards. In fact, when asked why he was taking the board out in such big waves, he simply replied: “I’ve seen Mike Stewart haul himself over the edge of big waves on a 4’ piece of foam, so why can’t I?” Of course, the rest is history.

Derek carried on his love affair with the fish for a long time, till one day when Wire showed him a video he’d shot of Jamie O’Brien riding a finless surfboard into 6ft pits at Backdoor. Always open-minded about such possibilities, Derek immediately pulled the fins out of his beloved “Cat-fish” and hasn’t ridden a finned board since. It’s been more than two years now, and he really does have this finless thing down now.

To watch, it looks kind of like a crossover between surfing and snowboarding, yet it’s different still. It makes you think back to the days when windsurfers first came out and how strange it seemed to surfers. Of course, windsurfing got huge and has since spawned the newer sport of kite-surfing. I view Derek’s fascination with finless surfing in a similar way. Finless surfing is still very much in its infancy, but to watch Derek on one of these boards, you just know that he’s really onto something here.

After knowing him all these years, I’m pretty confident in telling you that Derek is happiest when he’s breaking the mold – that is to say, pushing the limits of what we know as surfing. I don’t think Derek expects the world to follow him and, frankly, I suspect he’d be bummed if it did. Derek seems to thrive on his own trip, just being a complete and utter individual. So often in the past, I’d see him with some absolute relic of a board, but he’s just totally psyched to get it wet and see what he can milk out of it. Eventually, of course, one understands his genius, but not necessarily straightaway. Sometimes, it takes time … like a good wine.

When I attended his Musica Surfica finless event last year, I was a little perplexed at how it really connected to surfing in any comparable way, but with time, I’ve learned to view it as a radical spin-off of surfing as we know it. It was interesting to see how much he had progressed in the intervening year.


North Swell Goose Chase

I woke up to the sound of hurricane-force winds beating the absolute hell out of the side of Wire’s house. I’m lying there in bed, thinking to myself, “Okay, any second now I’ll be watching all my shit flying down the main street of town … me, too, probably.”

Yet another huge storm was churning its way towards us and looking more and more serious as the days passed and it got closer. Marti had already flown in from Hobart a few days before it arrived, but, frankly, I wasn’t really counting on Derek making it because flying conditions looked horrendous. The wind was gusting to almost 90km per hour, but in Melbourne and Tasmania, it hit 180km per hour.

We’d heard a couple of reports about a rare north swell doing its thing on the east coast of the island, which is an area that doesn’t get a lot of swell (thanks to Australia sitting just to its north), so we made a beeline over there to suss it out. There was indeed a swell hitting – but just a few feet, and pounded by a gale-force north wind. It was a matter of searching out areas protected from the wind. One spot, known as ‘the Blowhole’, offered nice protection, but the swell was just too small. Marti got his surf down in Narracoopa, but man, the wind-chill factor must have been off the hook that afternoon. I know that it was cold outside of the car, despite the wind coming from the north.

Peak Moments

We’d all woken early with high expectations for an epic session at Martha, but the size of the waves was anyone’s guess. You never really know till you get there. It may be 15ft and out of control at Currie and only a few feet but offshore at Martha. We were all expecting pretty damn good size, though, because the charts were off the hook, indicating a 20ft-plus swell. With just the right tides and currents this could equate to 6 or 8ft Martha.

We picked Derek up at the airport and raced north.

Arrival at Martha revealed a pretty exciting scene with waves coming from both the west and east, forming A-frame wedges up and down the beach. The wind was a little too strong, but it was predominantly offshore, so no one was complaining. Ryan and a couple of his buddies were already on it.

Marti had been eager to sample Martha’s wares for a long time, so he wasted no time in getting into it. Derek, on the other hand, took his time. His first surf was on a new board that I’d never seen before. It had all kinds of weird curved channels in the bottom, complemented by a complex asymmetrical tail. He told me it was made for long, fast righthanders – no surprise since anyone who knows Derek will testify to his love of long righthand points. He scored a few decent waves on that first surf, but it was clear that the board wasn’t too great in hollow waves. It tended to dig a bit on his bottom turns, sometimes sending him over the falls.

Derek took out one of his older boards for a second surf and found that it way more suited to the A-frames. He was on a mission. He had added up all his costs for the trip and determined he would need to ride at least 60 waves today, at a cost of about $10 a wave. By the end of the day, Derek had happily met his quota.

By 5pm, all manner of locals started showing up. Most of ‘em actually have 9 to 5 jobs and will still make the hour drive north just to catch a half hour before-dark sesh, such is the quality of the surf at Martha. There were guys there from the cheese factory, some builders, a couple of guys from the local abattoir and, of course, Ryan the kelper and his buddy, the wallaby counter.

Soon after the sun had dipped below the horizon and everyone had sampled some excellent Martha’s barrels, we had a big old King Island steak at the King Island Club for a bargain price of less than $20, washed that down with a coupla beers before heading home for lights-out nice and early – such is the case on any surf trip when it pumps all day.

Derek had to fly back out again the following morning, and Marti decided to follow suit and get back to Hobart, so suddenly I was surferless again, but not too concerned. I was happy just to hang out and search the lineups with Wire. Still plenty of swell prevailed, and we actually caught a couple of locations that I’d never seen before, despite this being my umpteenth trip to the island.
Whenever Wire takes me to one of his “new” spots, I always rib him about not showing me earlier, and he always comes back with, “I can’t show you everything mate, I’ve gotta keep a few secrets up my sleeve.”

Our plan for next year is a cracker, but that’s a whole other story, still waiting to happen.

Originally from Australia, Sean Davey is a veteran surf photography and a long-time resident of Oahu’s North Shore.

If you were a student in the early 1980s, you probably played that fabulous precursor to computer games and play stations, Dungeons and Dragons, a game of strategy and foresight. There was an element of chance, of course, with the roll of the dice determining how successful any particular endeavour would be. But experience, knowledge, skill and planning weighed heavier than the hand of fate.

I couldn’t get the game out of my mind when I was chatting to Grant Spooner, the water safety coordinator of the Red Bull Big Wave Africa (BWA). His business is pretty varied, ranging from tourist charters to providing boats, filming platforms and safety services for the film industry, but BWA is possibly the highlight of his year.

BWA is held every August at Dungeons, near Hout Bay in South Africa’s beautiful city of Cape Town. During the competition, and the practice sessions leading up to it, local and international surfers ride some of the biggest waves in the world. Huge swells come sweeping in from the Antarctic and, when they meet the underwater topography that makes Dungeons the formidable break it is, they rear up into immense dragon-shaped monsters capable of devouring a human with one bite. And – speaking of bites – other huge, sleek, grey monsters lurk in the depths of the channel between the break and Seal Island. So planning and orchestrating the safety of the event is much like a game of Dungeons and Dragons.

The logistics are astounding. First you have to set out the board. (Okay, BWA is not a board game, but let’s stretch the metaphor a little.) Spooner has a plan diagram of the Dungeons area, outlining what goes where – and there’s lots of traffic out there on the day.

The first line of defence is a buoy line beyond which no public boats may go. Between there and the break are other designated zones. The biggest boat out there on the day is the Nauticat, a 22-metre steel catamaran charter boat carrying the competition judges and some of the press, and also serves as a base for the surfers between heats. Then there are two police boats, which are used mainly to enforce the no-go zone for the public. A South African National Parks boat is on hand to keep an eye on things, as the competition is held in a marine protected area. Press photographers float in three eight-metre rigid inflatable boats just outside the impact zone, each in a dedicated area of operation to prevent collision if they all need to take evasive action at once. A jet ski is dedicated to an in-water videographer.

Three National Sea Rescue Institute boats are on hand for emergencies, but are only one small part of the rescue setup. Two medical boats, each with a doctor, a paramedic and comprehensive first response equipment, are moored in safe places close to the action. And a doctor, paramedic and ambulance are on standby on shore. That makes three doctors and three paramedics.

Four jet skis form the heart of the rescue team right in the surf zone. Each tows a rescue sled with straps and handles so it can be used to ferry surfers to and fro, or to transport an unconscious person. Three of the jet skis carry fully outfitted rescue swimmers, who ride pillion behind the pilot, and are ready to jump into the water the moment there is an emergency. It seems glamorous – and it must be a blast zipping around on those enormous waves – but the job requires some serious training, and each crew member is a big-wave surfer in his own right.

The make-up of the water-safety team has changed little over the years, and they are as much a part of the brotherhood of big-wave surfers as of the competitors. That may sound a tad sexist, but all the jet ski pilots and rescue swimmers are men – although they were trained by a woman. Shawn Alladio, one of the most accomplished water safety specialists in the world, trained the rescue team and helped set up the safety system in 2000. It’s evolved since then, and she is on record as saying that BWA is now the “most formalised surfing event in the world in terms of marine safety”.

So the groundwork has been laid, the plan is in place, and the waiting begins. The skippers know exactly where and how to operate. The doctors and paramedics are on standby. The press photographers are champing at the bit, and the surfers are psyching themselves up for the big, big waves. Some years the wait has seemed interminable, and some years it was – with the reef just not producing waves big enough to hold the competition. But 2008 was a good year.

On the second day of the window period, big swells swept in from the Southern Ocean. Each wave different – some big, some not so big, some very big, some just enormous. And as the dragons reared up and charged in towards the Sentinel, the players made their moves. Surfers chose to paddle into a wave, or to take the safer route over the back, press boat skippers moved in to give their passengers the perfect shot, and the sleek, grey, cold-eyed dragons patrolled the murky, eponymous, kelp-filled dungeons below the thundering breakers.

The water safety crew were there, ferrying the surfers to and from the Nauticat, zipping to a vantage spot to watch the wave break, see who rode it and be there to pick up the pieces. Hopefully just two pieces – one surfer and one board. They worked hard, and the inevitable incidents included one concussion, one burst eardrum and one dislocated shoulder, which could all have had very serious repercussions if the crew had not been there to get the victims out of the danger zone. In the dark, cold, lonely dungeons the kelp wraps itself around your legs and the heaving Atlantic pummels you into the reef. And the sleek, grey dragons patrol …

Spooner was working at full revs, fuelled by an almost constant feed of adrenaline. Each wave was a roll of the dice, and he had no way of predicting which way it would fall. A wipeout, a dragon-bite (surfers never, ever say the word sh**k), a near-drowning? He’s got a plan for all of them. About the only thing he hasn’t got one for is axe-throwing dwarves. Gee, Dorothy, I don’t think we’re in the 1980s any more.

Images courtesy of: Red Bull Photofiles

After spending 2007 sailing across the majority of the vast Pacific Ocean, from Mexico to New Zealand, the OceanGybe Expedition team of Hugh Patterson, Ryan and Bryson Robertson, left New Zealand in April this year. The OceanGybe Expedition is a global sailing expedition to explore the remote coastlines of the world, in search of garbage, adventure and ocean waves. The goal of the OceanGybe Expedition is to bring awareness to the vast tracts of undocumented ocean pollution that afflicts our global coastlines and affects the peoples who depend on them for survival.

Check out their blogs on the Surfer’s Path here!

Upon weighing anchoring and leaving New Zealand, the group headed for Vanuatu. Vanuatu is a small island nation tucked between Fiji and New Caledonia and is vastly forgotten by tourists and industry alike. Famous for cannibalism, black magic and incredible natural beauty; the island chain did not disappoint. “Vanuatu is definitely the most unforgettable place I have ever visited,” said Hugh Patterson, “both the untouched raw natural beauty and the incredible generosity of the people.” Local islanders frequently invited the team to shore for traditional ceremonies, which included dancing, singing and local cuisine. The memories of wizen old men sharing tales of sorcery and black magic, over the embers of a coconut husk fire, will stay with the team members forever.

The Ni- Vanuatu (the people of Vanuatu) live in a completely subsistence manner; they grow all their own food, they drink water from the innumerous mountain waterfalls and springs, and everything is shared amongst the people in the village. They live for free, without the need for daily monetary transactions, and bartering is the norm. The crew of Khulula distributed clothing and some basic medical supplies as they explored the isles in search of garbage.

“Vanuatu was incredibly interesting to study, garbage-wise, because the beaches were as polluted as every other location we have visited; despite the local population consuming basically zero goods contained or wrapped in plastic. The horrifying plastic garbage build-up on these empty islands must have come from the ocean” claims Ryan Robertson. One basic study, completed with the help of the local school children, uncovered approximately 500 pieces of garbage on a deserted beach. In the Rowa Islands, the team found syringes, bleach bottles, soccer balls, lighters and all sorts of flotsam, despite the fact the islands are completely uninhabited. “This garbage undoubtedly has been deposited into the ocean at some other location, easily Fiji or Tahiti, but it is possible that it could have originated as far away as the Galapagos or the west coast of South America. This is just one example how connected we all are in the oceanic realm. Someone throwing a syringe in the ocean in Tahiti probably never thought it would end up in Vanuatu and affect the fishing the locals depend on for survival.” states Bryson Robertson.

The Expedition left Vanuatu in early May bound for Indonesia. The month long trip took them along the southern coasts of Papua New Guinea, around northern Australia, behind East Timor before hitting land again on the island of Roti, in Eastern Indonesia.

In Indonesia, Bryson has been focusing his doctoral thesis work, which involves the interaction between seafloor bathymetry and incoming wave spectra breaking characteristics. “Indonesia is an incredible location to study wave dynamics due to its geographic location. Southern Ocean storms create huge wild ocean waves, which travel unimpeded for thousands of miles slowly organizing themselves before hitting the Sunda Trench and Indonesian Islands. As a result the incoming wave trains are extremely predictable and their long periods allow for better measurements than are available elsewhere”, claims Bryson, “some of the locations have just boggled my mind. The refraction, the wave breaking shape and shape constancy are incredible …. I just never thought it was possible.“

Gamut Productions, based in Victoria, Canada, continues to work with the hundreds of hours of footage from the OceanGybe Expedition and are working with numerous parties trying to finalize details of a documentary series to be broadcast via on-line webisodes. Stay tuned!

The OceanGybe Expedition will be in Indonesia until the end of September before heading west across the Indian Ocean bound for South Africa. This crossing will take them approximately 40 days, all of which will be out of the sight of land.

OceanGybe is a global sailing expedition to explore the remote coastlines of the world, in search of garbage, adventure and ocean waves. We aspire to bring awareness to the vast tracts of undocumented ocean pollution that afflicts these coastlines and affects the peoples who depend on them for survival. It is an expedition to promote change. Change in both the direction of this great planet, towards a more sustainable and aware future, but also in ourselves.

Words by: Hugh Patterson, Ryan and Bryson Robertson

Check out their blogs on the Surfer’s Path here!