The solo surf session
One of my favourite spots on the coast is firing: eight foot plus, hollow, thumping, spitting lefts, fanned by a steady offshore. Only problem is there is no-one else awake nearby; it’s dawn on a Sunday and it’s heavy out there and the sea is churning with caa-caaing birds and splashing fish. Frothing, I’m already in my wetsuit, dithering on the empty beach as another sick set burns across my mind…
Surfing was never meant to be solitary. A good session with your mates is a memorable pleasure. Besides, a lot of surfers, like me, usually won’t go surfing alone. Not if it means a boring drive to the surfspot with no one to share the fuel bill with, and not having someone to relive the session with over a pint afterwards. Then, more importantly, there are the odds, as the chances of you being eaten by a shark increases to 100% when surfing in single digits in South Africa. You’ve probably more chance of getting concussed by your board and drowning, and slightly less chance of being mauled by a seal, but that doesn’t make it any less daunting. Plus, how many times have you seen a lurker, as opposed to being warned of one’s presence by someone else?
Surfing alone has always been seen as kind of hippie. The surfing world’s stereotype of the lone surfer is one of a feral living on surfing’s fringes; an enigma, who makes an emphatic departure when even one other surfer appears on the beach, muttering through his crusty beard at the encroaching kook masses.
Personally, the paranoia of surfing by myself has always made me shake like a jellyfish. Though nothing ever happened to me that should make me fear it so much. No board in the head concussion, no shark tales. But it still made me wary. If I were the first at the beach in the morning, I would wait for someone else to show up. If there were only two of us left out at dark, I would forego waiting for a set and catch anything in, just so I wouldn’t be that guy: the last one left out at “feeding time” (actually, sometimes I still do that). Although over the years I did find myself in empty waves a few times, I almost never surfed solo; and the less I did it, the more my reticence grew.
Can you believe I had to literally force myself to surf alone at early season G-land one year? You can imagine how I felt when the three surfers I joined in the water on my first morning disappeared on a boat as I paddled back out after my first wave? They had to leave, as their package had ended. As they chugged away, I looked up and down the vast Grajagan reef and pondered the enormity of the jungle behind it, and of my situation, and I never felt so small before or since. I’m sure every sea creature within a few miles could hear my thumping heart every time a set loomed on the horizon and mowed me down because I was out of position, or I had been locked into a barrel, pitched and rolled above that sharp coral. It was so good, though, that I had to stay out alone, and I spent six hours pulling into some of the best pigdog kegs of my life, but still I would have traded any non-essential body part (you need your nuts out there, so a finger perhaps), for just one surfer to join me. If anything, the experience also made me even more apprehensive about the solo session. To this day I’m still not even sure if I would have paddled out if those guys weren’t already out there.
A guy I knew as a grom was once a conservation officer on a remote island. To surf, he had to paddle for 20 minutes across a shark infested, rough channel to the nearest break on the mainland. I’ve always thought that was so hardcore. As was his answer, when I asked if he was worried about ever not making it back: “When it is your time to go, it is your time to go - no point in stressing about it,” he would say in a slow, guru-esque tone.
Back, on that deserted beach, his words and these thoughts and memories tumble around my brain as another diamond of a set rolls through, its cascading spray illuminated in a rainbow of colour. Phobia or not, what else can I do but paddle out? After a few tentative waves, my nerves begin to dissipate and I stroke in deeper and snag a few pits. Paddling back from a good one, I’m joined by a lone dolphin and chill out completely, loosen up and begin to have fun, as I realise that I haven’t surfed by myself in firing, solid waves for years. In this modern age of Internet forecasting and wave cams, surfing solo at the average spot is pretty much impossible anyway and so I revelled in what, these days, can only be described as a rare and privileged opportunity.
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