Early November 2021, during the surf segment of a sabbatical, I sat in a chi-chi cafe on my own in in the sun in Guayaquil in Ecuador.
Guayaquil is a coastal city, the gateway to the Galapagos Islands, and Ecuador’s economic center. It felt odd being back surrounded by concrete, I was just off the short flight from San Cristobal.
And moments from the week in the water kept coming into my head. It had been a week of surfing that I’ll never ever forget.
And on the back of a boarding pass, I started trying to write out a guess as to how many thousands of hours I’ve spent surfing, the sum of all the hours that sit behind being able to have those moments.
I think the moments of dropping into waves are be among the most visceral memories I’ll ever have. Right up there with a few rugby tackles, perhaps the most similar moments of all-out force and physical chaos…(but, yes, vastly different!).
A few times that week last month in The Galapagos, I kept pulling out my pen and jotting notes after sessions, just trying to put into words some sense for the feelings going on when you catch a wave.
And, in particular, the moment, the split-second of a moment, that you “drop in”…
It’s a finger snap of momentary chaos, a vortex where the experience of time shifts from very slow to very fast.
And it’s a second in which years and years of repetition and muscle memory take over and define what happens next.
You might have looked out at surfers on the water and thought how they sit there, not doing much? ‘Lazy sport’ might have come to mind, even. I have friends – let’s say a little analytical – who question whether surfing gives a good ‘return on time’? No, it doesn’t. But neither does painting or drawing, or trying to write, or practicing music.
Because yes, before a surfer can have each of those cherished split-seconds, there are thousands and thousands of hours at work in the water to get there. Hours that we mostly love, simply for being out there in the ocean. We crawl across the water out there using just our hands, and people who give it a try realize just how hard this is in their first hour!
The sitting-around on your board is mostly recovering, hunched over trying to let the lactic acid in your arms dissolve, and to get your heart rate back to normal. Sometimes you’ll start chatting with a friend, and get lost following some wildlife. And lose the tempo of the waves coming in.
Because these are moments of continuous analyzing and plotting, scanning a horizon that is like a long pencil line across our visual field.
Our eyes are alert to any bump or bulge that might be a first clue as to a new line of swell. And there’s a half-eye on what the surfers around you are doing, what they might see, where they might be paddling.
The time can feel so slow.
It’s meditative often, the way mind and body soften to the three dimensions of nature swilling around you. And, these are productive moments too.
Back home at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, a flock of pelicans can swoop low and close gliding across the swell lines. So close that sometimes you can see one of their eyes angle to look at you, in a moment of kinship with the natural world. You can see the moment they’re going through, the hang and glide and flow of long wings creating lift, just inches from the heaviness of water.
On lucky days, we’ll see the arc of a dolphin or two or three in a pod breaking the surface just outside where surfers are sitting. Or a slew of seabirds arriving and landing on the surface pecking and feeding at a shoal below. I wonder what’s going through their minds, what moments they’re dwelling on, and if they have these split seconds of appreciation, within the wrangle of their day chasing, hunting, eating…
But our minds always have one eye on that horizon.
And on bigger days, when there is more swell coming through, our heads are a twitching dial of anxiety through the whole session, and at times in your stomach. Sometimes it’s hardly there, sometimes it’s swilling you in non-stop mild fear.
On those days, just looking at it from the beach before you paddle will remind me of the whistle going at the start of a rugby game, when your opposite man is a good bit bigger than you, and you have eighty minutes ahead of somehow physically dealing with that.
And, I think there’s something healthy in that.
Gazing at the horizon, the first big twitch will come when we think we see the pencil line of the horizon shift up the canvas. Not a lot, because it’s so far away, but the whole horizon line shifts up a slither.
Heart rate jumps, your stomach composition changes, all in a tingle of building nerves. Our heads will switch to being an alert computer of positional judgment…scouring for clues as to where the wave’s peak will arrive. Is it a wave, for sure?…we’ll be asking…
And checking the surfers around us, the other game going on, as tactical chess moves start between surfers assessing who might be in the best position to take the wave.
Sometimes I’ll start to count, on bigger days, to give a metronome of composure to the fear building.
I’ve worked out it’s usually 45 – 60 seconds for a swell line on the horizon to turn into a wave mounting in your face.
And sometimes the wash on an ‘indicator’ rock or cliff face to one side will give you a nearer read in the countdown.
As soon as we are sure it’s a wave building, we’re calculating whether to paddle straight out to it (giving best control over the timing of catching it). Or do we carve a wide paddle to a safer-seeming outside shoulder, if the peak is just too daunting?
With each paddle, then, the triceps in our arms and the lats of our backs are tensing into an engine room of work. Paddle strokes tighten with intention…and it’s a battle to keep your breathing as measured as you can.
The relaxed – let’s call it first gear – paddling will shift into second, a positioning mode where we’re assertively moving to a wave. And then the gas fires up in third gear, pulling to the right zone to be able to catch a wave.
We’re tuned to the tiny signals in body language of other surfers, too. It’s the end-game in the positional chess, where the body language in your paddle can be what makes others back off. Or, it can be the “tell” that you’re not really seriously committed to catch that train – like a rugby player making a late shift in weight and angle when charging into a tackle.
Within seconds the wave can feel like a small hill arriving, and then a wall, but a wall that is throwing the horizon over its shoulder dismissively.
And then…we’re into an instinct game, needing quick decisions founded on confidence and fear. Subconscious understanding of the way the water is changing. Adjustments coming from years and years of experience and tens of thousands of repetitions. And the paddling shifts to a pedal-to-the-metal fourth gear.
Fourth gear is an all-out sprint, trying to move the board at a speed that matches the speed of the wave arriving…We might only have eight to ten all-out strokes before the arms flail in lactic acid, and lose to the speed of the wave. So, the timing of pushing up to fourth is critical. Sheer instinct and the ‘feel’ of the physics going on all around you that is taking over, all the whilst your arms are getting heavier and heavier.
And, in a ‘pop’, the moment unfolds…
It’s like a switch flicks, a sequence of split seconds. Of individual ‘freeze-frames’ sewn together, in the explosion of jumping to the board, like the instant that the ball connects with a golf club and starts its trajectory, or a tennis ball squashes into the strings and starts its rebound.
Suddenly, the pain of the paddle marries with the feeling of the force and flow of the wave’s energy, and the board starts to plane under its own energy.
And then, in the fractional moment you start to drop, gravity pulls in to help, our prone body shifting to legs swooping underneath the torso. It’s all subconscious instinct that has feet planting blindly on a board that can be dropping at more than a forty five degree angle beneath you. On bigger waves, there is way too much going for your mind to immediately feel where each foot has landed on the board, that relief comes a millisecond later.
Time accelerates in an explosion of instinct and chaos, and the wave pitches you down what can feel like huge a playground slide, gleefully fun or terrifyingly steep.
Depending on how you landed, the physics going on under our feet now means we’re either held in perfect safety, driving along the face…Or, we’re in a critical and chaotic situation, trying to regain control…a juddering plank of fiberglass wobbling beneath grasping toes, perhaps a heel trying to anchor some kind of stability. When that’s going on, we only get a split second to recover this situation and avoid being thrown in a turbulent mess of pounding water and a flying plank of fibreglass.
And on windy days, there’ll be a spray driving up the face of the wave that leaves your eyes closed in this critical split second, and it becomes all ‘feel’…
And the thing with surfing is that the moment of imperceptibly fast action is also that moment of peak risk, where everything is really out of your conscious control and in the hands of synapses and instincts.
The reward or disappointment of seeing and feeling the shape of the wave, of responding to how it’s changing underneath you and opening up ahead.
It’s an addictively slim moment of consciousness and tension.
But after catching a wave we’re rewarded with the movie screen opening in front of us. Blues and greens and browns in the wall of water ahead of us, sometimes sand in the face of the wave telling you about the bottom, or the play of sunlight glimmering across the face, and very occasionally some flicker of marine life.
Seeing other surfers make the drop when we’re out there, you see faces that are a picture of raw concentration. Occasionally you see the corner of a relieved smile in the split second after that, the surfer fresh in the awareness that it’s all alright, and feeling ‘I made it, how this is fun’.
There is a rhythm to the ocean in our sessions, a rhythm in how we’re paddling with it, a rhythm too in that split second of explosive movement and being in tune with the chaos.
Just like in all sports, and just like inspiration for artists, some days it comes more easily than others. But that rhythm is everything to the experience of that hour or two in the ocean in a surf session.
There was a day on this trip that I’ll never forget, day three in The Galapagos Islands, on Tongo Reef on San Cristobal island.
I was with the charming and brilliant Eddie Salazar, somewhat of a ‘surf mayor’ of The Galapagos, taking me out for the day.
And I had a wave that brought so much exhilaration, and fear and beauty. And a giant tortoise in the final shoulder of the wave as I rode it out.
As I paddled back out I was weirdly gently shaking my head, a disbelief in this light emotion of utter appreciation for the last minute or so of my life. And, after the years and years and years of hauling myself through the ocean on a board, a momentary thought came to mind. A release of our endless anxiety to want to surf more, to be better, to have more of the moments.
It was a thought to myself I could hardly believe:
“…you know, if I never surf again, I’m finally content”.
That evening, I asked Eddie how he would describe the moment you drop into a wave.
He paused for a few moments, in front of the giant slab of fresh grouper fish we’d started to work through. Eddie was a thoughtful guy, having been Ecuadorian national champion in his teens and built his life around being in the ocean since.
And Eddie said:
“There’s three words for it. Anxiety, fear, happiness.”
That surprised me. And I asked:
“Anxiety and fear, still?”.
Eddie has surfed for 31 years…
“Yes”.
I thought back to the conversation on a day of really small waves a few weeks later in Peru, as I pulled into a wave.
And I thought again how Eddie is right, no matter what the size of the wave.
There’s a split second every time where stability and control and understanding is being pulled from underneath you, where time goes from very slow to very fast, and where it’s all the instinct of years of repetition that runs the show, the show as to what happens next.
There’s so much going on in the brain, and in every nerve ending we have, that – no matter what happens in that split second – it’s an addictive exhilaration that has us coming back for more.
And you’ll have those split seconds replaying in your head on the pillow that night, with a tiny smile in the corner of your lips.
Maybe that’s why they say, “a surfer never retires.”
With thanks to Eddie Salazar, Pedro Costa, Adam Cotterill, Daniel Husserl, Simon Longbottom and Pete Brennan for comments and thoughts.
