Chris Nelson interview
HUCK talks to the author of new surf book, Cold Water Souls.
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Cold water surfers are a rare, hardy but growing breed that deviate from everything that surfing represents to the mainstream. There's definitely not much sunshine, golden sand and tanned-flesh in their world. Well, if you’re lucky you’ll catch a fleeting glimmer of sun, but the sand is often shrouded in frost or snow and a bikini would be nigh on suicidal!
British surf writer Chris Nelson is one such soul who grew up on a strict diet of glacial breaks in the North Sea. Over the past three years, he has embarked on a soul-searching adventure to find like-minded waveriders across the world. His curiousity took him around the world including the volcanic cliffs of Hokkaido, the brutal breaks of Iceland and the terrifying beauty of Nova Scotia. These travels have now been immortalised in his latest book, Cold Water Souls.
HUCK caught up with Chris to talk about this fascination with frigid waters.
HUCK: What made you decide to write Cold Water Souls?
Chris Nelson: The inspiration for it actually came from a trip I did for the first issue of HUCK. I went to Vancouver Island and I met a guy there called Wayne Vliet. We were looking for people to interview and Wayne stood out because he was this amazing character, probably in his fifties with this great ZZ Top beard. He was one of the first generation local surfers and his tales of endurance, of shaping his own boards and of teaching himself to surf wearing an old navy ice suit that leaked were really inspiring. I thought, ‘there must be people like this across the globe in all these cold destinations, who – against the conditions – have got hooked on the surfing spirit’. So, I thought that it would be really interesting to go out there to find these people and hear their stories and that it would make a great book. Surfing’s always focussed on the warm places and there’s this whole other surf culture out there in these unexpected places.
In writing the book did your own love for surfing change?
I was quite surprised by just how far back surfing went in these cold places. The pioneers in Nova Scotia were surfing in 1962. It would be a -20°C wind chill, water temperature would be pretty much zero and these guys would be going out there, walking out over ice covered boulders and surfing in these really leaky old dive suits. They were just stoked on surfing. They’d live in these wooden shacks and they’d have put the water on before they went out and they’d come back and sit in the bath to defrost. I was inspired by their love of waveriding: the endurance, the things that they went through to be out there and to enjoy these great waves. It wasn’t that surf culture had sprung up with the advent of new wetsuit technology; it had been there all along beneath the surfing radar.
Did you find that there was a sense of a global cold water surfing community?
I think that one of the things that’s so nice about these destinations is that there is a bit of a common bond between cold water surfers. You can go to the tropics or to Costa Rica and all these ex-pats have marked out their little plains; they’ve gone there to find their paradise and they don’t really want to share it. Whereas a lot of cold water surfing communities are really stoked when other people come along. If you’re from a cold water place yourself, they know that you’ve gone through similar experiences, that you’ve endured the cold for the love of waveriding and they seem to be much less competitive places.
Did you hit any snags that made it seem the book might not happen?
With about two weeks to go to the print deadline, I looked at it and thought, ‘this book’s never going to get finished!’ The story of cold water surfing around the world is so huge and there are so many places that I just thought I would never get this into just one book. There were places along the way where there were obstacles to overcome. It wasn’t always easy. In Nova Scotia, you have some very good surf spots next to a very big city and the people who surf the point break are very protective. It’s a kind of old school localism that I don’t think you find any more in a lot of places. So a lot of negotiation took place and I had to reassure people that the idea behind the book is that it’s about the people who live there and their personal stories, [as opposed to being a surf guide]. Then in places in Japan, like Hokkaido, obviously the language is a bit of a barrier, but also the culture. People like to get to know you a little bit more before they open up and start to tell you their stories. It took three to four days of getting to know people, then just basically hanging out with us, talking to us, finding out where we were coming from. By doing that we managed to find the very first surfers in Hokkaido, the very first guy who picked up a board and took to the water.
Was there anywhere along the way that made a particular impression?
For me, Iceland was such an exciting place to go because the surf community is so small and it’s still in that embryonic phase where all the surfers know one another. You could probably – on a good day – get the surfers that surf all year round into two cars. They’re in a place where they’re so excited about surfing and people coming to visit. Yet you could go somewhere else, like the north east of the USA or Nova Scotia, where they’re much further down the line and maybe they’ve got that edge where they’re not as welcoming. There are a lot more surfers and they know about the pressures of crowds: they can turn up at their local break near Halifax and there might be 50 people in the water. They’re kind of in their third generation there. So, when you find somewhere like Iceland where it’s still in that embryonic phase, it’s quite an exciting and special place to be.
Wayne Vliet, Vancouver Island pioneer and inspiration for Cold Water Souls.
You talk in the introduction to the book about ‘chasing the perfect wave’. Have you ever come close to finding it?
If you’ve grown up surfing and the waves have been quite crowded then you go somewhere and you’re surfing a world class point break and there’s just two or three people out, you can think, ‘this is the perfect place to be a surfer.’ I think wherever you go there are always drawbacks. One of things that I used to be frustrated by with some of the surf magazine articles was that they drop in for a week, on the best swell and they score these amazing waves, they go with pro surfers, they take photographs that look absolutely stunning, then they jet off again. They don’t tell you the story of what it’s like to be a surfer there year round, on the days that it’s on-shore, and it’s snowing and howling. I think some of these places on their day can be the perfect wave. Wherever you go, you have to bear in mind that there are those days where it is freezing cold and icy and they do still go in and they they’re still stoked on surfing.
If you were surfing and you realised that you were riding the best wave of your life, what would that mean to you?
I think you have to savour those moments. When I look back I can still remember individual waves from 1992 or 1995 or 2001, but I think that the amazing thing about surfing is that no two waves are ever the same. No matter how many times you go back to a surf spot that you love where you score incredible waves, the next time you go the swell may be bigger or smaller, it might be from a slightly different swell direction, it might be glassy, it might be offshore; it’s always a different experience. It also changes with the people you go with; if you’re with a group of good friends, it’s a different experience to when you’re surfing on your own. I think that’s part of the beauty of surfing. I don’t think that you ever have the perfect surf experience, because every time’s different and every wave’s different.
What inspires you to keep going and who do you admire?
Surfing is one of the most addictive things that I think you could ever do. People often say it’s like crack or heroin and I think that’s true – especially if you have an addictive personality. It’s quite easy to go surfing once and for it to change your life. The people that I admire in surfing I guess are people who went out there and just pushed the boundaries. A lot of people talk about adventure travel these days, but I think that they forget about the people that got out there first and went to places like Indonesia. [Those who] got on a moped, drove through the jungle and just kept going past the next headland, and the next looking for waves. That was the true spirit of adventure travel. For me, I look back and you’ve just got to admire what they did. They took a tent, didn’t worry about malaria or anything like that, just what they could carry. That’s pretty inspiring stuff.
Where’s your favourite surf spot?
I think it would probably be here in the UK; the north shore of Scotland, because there are some waves there that are truly world class. It’s been a place that I’ve been going back to since the late 1980s: the people there are amazing, the waves are world class and it’s an amazing experience. You can just travel up to the Highlands, through the mountains and drop down to the coast and you can surf world-class reef breaks on perfect beaches. Although it’s getting more popular now, you can still get waves pretty much to yourself and a couple of friends. That’s always going to have a strong pull.
Finally, what’s next for you?
I kind of thought that it would be nice to do something warm, but I guess I’m hooked on the beauty of cold places and the people who surf there. So, the next one is going to be based around winter in the UK and people in the UK surf community. It’s all about what winter means to them and about being a surfer in the UK in the winter. There’s going to be a book and an exhibition in the end of it, which involves people like Tim Nunn and people all around the UK.
Noboru Tagawa, first surfer on Hokkaido with his first board.
Check out more on Cold Water Souls in HUCK#024, out now.
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Chris Nelson interview (text) by Liz Seabrook is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.Comments (4)
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I found I was on your magazine.
Is it possible to buy that issue?
Yeah, for sure. Check out our online shop. I believe it is HUCK#022
http://shop.huckmagazine.com/
Cheers,
Ed
Let me know how to get sold out magazine please.
http://www.huckmagazine.com/di.....ue-022/