Bellyboarding Retro slide
In the uptight world of aggressive surf comps, the Bellyboarding World Championships is rescuing fun.
More like this...
Sally Parkin, founder of the Original Surfboard Company, is insistent. “It’s not bellyboarding,” she says, blue eyes intense and ablaze, salt water dripping from an all-in-one 1920s woollen navy bathing suit. “It’s surf riding. And it’s just as much fun as stand-up surfing.”
I am not convinced. How can lying prone on a four-foot piece of wooden ply compare to carving on a longboard or slashing on a shortboard, still less slotting into a barrel on whatever kind of surfboard you choose to ride? Sally answers with evangelical conviction. “You wait. You’ll be a convert by the end of the day.”
Sally is at the vanguard of the renaissance of bellyboarding (or, if you will, surf riding). The past few years have seen the Original Surfboard Company grow from emblem of British eccentricity to flourishing business with clients in Australia, France, Spain and South Africa. There are other contemporary bellyboard manufacturers, too, but while their collective drive and energy has undeniably helped bellyboarding’s re-emergence there must be more to the rise of a pursuit that, superficially at least, scores low for cool.
To find out who’s into bellyboarding, and why, I gingerly clasp one of Sally’s boards and enter the World Bellyboarding Championships (WBC) at Chapel Porth beach in north Cornwall. The event is held annually on the first Sunday of September, and was the brainchild of local surfers Chris Ryan, a Chapel Porth car park attendant, and Martin Ward, an RNLI lifeguard supervisor. They set up the event, first held in 2002, in honour of the late Arthur Traveller, a Londoner who had come down to the beach every year with his wooden board.
Fast forward nine years, and the WBC is packed. Apparently, the ply boards from the 2010 event would have measured 240 yards, if laid end to end; this year I fancy it’d make half a mile, thanks to the 300 or so competitors who’ve signed up. I take a look at those who’ll be taking to a messy, onshore Atlantic over the day, and one thing is obvious: this is a surf comp for all-comers. They range from Anne Shipley, sixty-nine, the 2006 Over Sixties Ladies’ World Champion and perennial competitor, to Ed Isaac, who’s four and making his debut. There’s a sixty-five-year-old solicitor called Thurstan, an octogenarian couple who live in a house overlooking Chapel Porth, and a man who’s parked his restored Ford Model A in pride of place just above the beach. But for all the retro, not to say vintage, cool, there’s a younger crowd, too, a surfie-looking crew who aren’t present to please their sponsors. What brings them here?
“What’s not the appeal of bellyboarding?” says twenty-three-year-old James Booth, who works at Newquay’s Revolver surf shop. I’d wager that even within Revolver’s avowedly retro walls, Booth sports a different look to the one-piece, dark blue and white-hooped creation he’s donned for the WBC. He’s all smiles, as he argues that bellyboarding is “the simplest thing in the world. It doesn’t matter how young or old you are, or what shape or size you are, you’re guaranteed to be smiling within seconds”.
Check out HUCK#029 for the full feature.
Subscribe to HUCK for six issues
Only £21 (UK) / £44 (EU) / £59 (Rest of the World).
Bellyboarding (text) by Alex Wade is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Add Your Comment...
Please note: Your comment may be held in moderation for approval by an administrator to prevent spamming. This usually doesn't take long, please be patient.