Indie Spotlight: Gone Feral
HUCK explores the tiny surf shop in Watergate Bay near Newquay in Cornwall that started out in a car park.
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Watergate Bay is one of the more chilled beaches on the north coast of Cornwall. While kooks get under the rails of kings two miles down the county in Fistral, the surfers, bathers, sun-tanners and dog-walkers of Watergate all co-exist pretty harmoniously. And at the heart of this Tregurrian-based community is a little surf shop called Gone Feral.
Set back from the gaudy pinwheels and windbreakers of the onshore traders, Gone Feral sits at the edge of the Watergate Bay car park, snuggled up against the Phoenix pub, which is exactly where its roots took shape seven years previous.
“Steve Guthrie ran the car park in Watergate Bay for years and then the council took it off him,” says current Gone Feral manager Joey Jeremiah about the shop’s founder. “He needed a new job so he decided to open a surf shop.” And when a little annex on the beach-facing side of the Phoenix pub became available, Steve jumped at the chance to set up shop.
The Aladdin’s cave of surf-related paraphernalia is now a local treasure and as well as supplying boards to individuals (£6 - £7 for three hours or £10 - £12 for a full day depending on the type of board) it supplies the popular local O’Neill Surf Academy too. An impressive feat when you consider Steve “used to rent boards from the car park originally”.
So what happens when the cold sets in and custom freezes over? “We close for the winter,” explains Joey. “From the mid-to-end of November through till Easter. Most of the guys who work for us go off to Morocco for the winter and I tend to disappear off snowboarding.” And if that’s not enough to convince you this is the best job in the world a couple of hours sitting with Joey in the pub overlooking the bay will.
But is there a downside to this halcyon days-esque lifestyle? Joey pauses to think for a minute. “Rainy days,” he laughs. “And tourists!” But a wide grin and a welcoming attitude says otherwise. This is just one dude who has life sussed and those who can should stop by to absorb some of the stoke.
The ramshackle exterior.
A smörgåsbord of waveriding planks.
Joey and customer.
The view of Watergate Bay.
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Indie Spotlight: Gone Feral (text) by Shelley Lee Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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