Surf or Climb, or both?
Features — By OAGmag on December 13, 2010 at 6:15 pmSomewhere the two vastly different pursuits of climbing and surfing intersect. The place where it happens is not obvious, but it exists. You just have to delve deep
The following article was originally printed in The Outdoor Adventure Guide issue 86.
Words: Michael Fordham. Illustrations: Ash Kaye.
Every surfer has experienced it. After every session you’re left with frozen moments that are locked into your consciousness – instantaneous images that crystallise in your mind with a vague yet powerful tangibility. They evoke the same sort of immediate nostalgia as Polaroid prints. You lean into your bottom turn and see the wall of the wave reeling up ahead of you. Click. You hold a stylish body position while attempting to cutback to the power source from out on the wave’s slackening shoulder. Click.
The sensorial cacophony that accompanies the union of man, ocean and earth is particularly evocative of these moments and results easily in the mystic leap between brain chemistry and muscle memory. Out there on the crag, though a hundred miles from the coast, climbers experience these moments too.
Increasing the intensity
There is an ache and a fear and a pounding of your heart and an increased intensity of perception. When your body and your mind are stretched to extremes hard-won physical knowledge takes over. The climber’s world is distilled to the square centimetres that surround that finger hold. The universe becomes the angle and camber and extension of that crux move.
But it’s not just the physical mechanics of surfing and climbing that differ wildly. At first sight it might seem difficult to draw parallels between rock climbers and surfers as individuals, too. Hard-core rock monkeys, rangy limbed and wiry framed denizens of the inland hills and stony escarpments of these British Islands are jangling for most of their leisure time with a full rack of gear, swathed in wind stopper fleece and capilene. These cats don’t necessarily dig all that is fluid and wax-encrusted.
Tow-headed, jargon- droppers
And surfers meanwhile – surely surfers are tow-headed, jargon- droppers, to a man intensely focussed on the wave’s fleeting form who avoid being away too long from the whiff of coastal ozone. Something as tangible as fifty-metre high wall of limestone would surely give them the horrors. They must be an entirely separate genus of Homo Outdoorsicus.
But no. Between these twin poles of subcultural cliche? exists a whole constituency of surfers who climb and climbers who surf. The geography and meteorology of these islands has something to do with it. We in Britain are blessed after all with a coastline that includes an incredible variety of rideable reefs, points and beaches – and many are lined with cliffs.
But take the plethora of high quality coastal rock routes out of the equation for a moment. You are in Britain, so the oft-shared saying goes, never more than sixty miles away from the sea.
Climb till lunchtime, then surf into the twilight
At the height of summer at Stanage Edge deep in the heart of the English Peak District, it is thus still eminently possible to climb until lunchtime, then stack the car with a quiver of surfboards, wind down westerly over the Welsh border, and score the clemently peeling boulder pointbreaks of South Pembrokeshire in the late evening light.
If the swell has dropped by next morning (and if it’s the summertime, then it probably will have) then you can break out the ropes and the rack again and enjoy some of the most spectacular cliff climbing in the four nations.
“That’s the thing about being a surfer in Britain.” Dan Massey tells me. “You have to be adaptable.” Dan is a Bristol-based graphic designer who along with partner Millie climbs passionately and surfs whenever the conditions are right.
“I was a climber before I was a surfer”, he tells me over a between-problem coffee at Bristol’s Undercover Rock climbing centre.
“It was initially that lonely challenge, that isolation in the environment, either on your own or with a really close buddy – that appealed to me. You experience that sort of challenging, existential loneliness in surfing as well.”
Every UK based climber or surfer knows that it’s the variability of wind, swell, sun and precipitation that makes Britain the ideal place to practice vastly different disciplines as climbing and wave riding. Embrace both as passions and you turn Britain’s notoriously unpredictable weather into a positive. Dan continues, “Actual wave conditions are often perfect in the winter, when the big low pressure systems develop out in the North Atlantic and send big, ‘long period’ swells toward the UK’s continental shelf. But it’s often too cold to surf for more than an hour or so per day, especially in the depths of January or February. On the other hand, in the summer, the waves are rarely up to much and the crowds are horrendous. That’s when our little crew often head to the hills to get some climbing in.”
Bristol is not only a great place to base yourself to access the hills of Wales – but is brilliantly located for accessing at least five different surfing coastlines, four of which are also prime sea cliff climbing locations.
“We can boulder all through the week at St Werbergs,” Millie chips in, “and at the weekends we can make a call on whether we’ll head to the South or North Coast of Devon and Cornwall, or over to Pembrokeshire or the Gower for a surf. The climbing gear always goes with us, of course, because if the forecasts get it wrong, there’s always the option of ticking off some routes.”
But it’s not just the lucky geographical situation of the British Isles that produces the abstract but tangible affinity between these two sports. There’s something deep in the psychophysical experience of surfing and climbing that are related, no matter where on the planet you might find yourself.
“What I liked about climbing was the eccentric characters involved.” Photographer Rick Smee is an accomplished climber who was sponsored and pushed some of the boundaries back in the semi- professional sport in the eighties and nineties. He’s also relocated to Portugal to be closer to his newer passion, surfing. “By the time of my involvement climbing was undergoing many schisms; there was trad climbing movement led by the legend Ron Fawcett and that self- proclaimed stone monkey Johnny Dawes. There were also the ‘sport- climbers’ like Ben Moon and Jerry Moffat and a hardcore bouldering scene as well as the nutty winter climbers hanging out in Fort William for the right conditions.
Moody locals that sneer at anyone they haven’t known since birth
“Like climbing, surfing has its own cast of off- the-wall individuals characters,” Rick goes on, “as well as enough schisms to rival the Christian church – there’s longboarders and the shortboarders of course, but also the u?ber cool retro-progressives, the full on foamy-riding newbies and the moody locals that sneer at anyone they haven’t known since birth. The thing is that they both have an allure of danger and of individuality.”
“But it’s the physical relationship between the two sports that is fascinating,” he says. “I remember one moment when I was climbing at Llanberis Pass when it became clear. My heart was beating so fast and so loudly. My mind was racing, playing tricks with me and the internal dialogue wasn’t helping particularly. I’m 200 foot up in a really exposed position and not feeling good. I was an hour from the nearest town, and still another 100 foot from safety. All these things were cluttering my mind and I could feel a rising panic, stuck there at the start of a really difficult move that was the maker or the breaker. Then all of a sudden I became away of a smaller, much more rational voice inside me telling me what to do. I took a deep breath and focussed on my heartbeat, trying to slow it down. For the briefest moment I forgot my situation and then it happened – I started to move onward and upward. I was acting purely on instinct and I can remember those moments as if they happened to me yesterday.”
Flow state
In sports psychology, this sort of thing is referred to variously as ‘beginner’s mind’ or ‘flow state’. “Insofar as I understand it, that defines for me my dedication to both surfing and climbing. It’s the moment when you seem to step outside yourself and your body appears to act instinctively, your movements seeming to flow without any premeditation.”
It is at the point where this fundamental truth resides that the intersection of climbing and surfing exists. An individual, when faced with an explosion of physical phenomena, reacts purely instinctively. This instinctive has to be developed, nurtured and practiced to the point where it happens automatically. Getting to this sought-after reality is what motivates climbers, as well as their surfing cousins.
And if you think about it, could it not be that there is something even more fundamental about the two ways of life that relates them? A wave is deeply ephemeral. It never truly exists in space and time, but is simply a manifestation of accumulated energy given form in liquid by the interaction of the sea floor and the energy itself.
A rock face is an accumulation of energy too, but a formation of energy over geological time, warped and cracked and effected by environmental conditions that stretch over aeons rather than the moments that form a ridden wave.
It might be overstating it that surfers and climbers do one and the same thing. But is it too great a leap of the imagination to acknowledge that they are both outriders of the human race’s deep instinct to dance with the elements, to play in the beauty and menace of the planet?
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