Tim Conibear: Ode to the ocean
One surfer's love of the simple, life-affirming joy of the sea.
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I’m writing this from my ocean side apartment in Kalk Bay, Cape Town, looking out over the expanse of blue that is False Bay. Everyday I rise to this most effortless of backdrops, its ever-changing moods marking the passage of the days and seasons. As city life unfolds so uncomfortably around me, the changing faces of the ocean keep me grounded and I can start my day in peace. I owe this to the sea. Without it I would be lost.
I was too young to remember my first experience of the ocean, so I will tell it as my father recounts it to me. Growing up inland, we would head to Cornwall every summer, where we’d swim and sail and bodyboard. It was a family ritual, my grandfather would make the same pilgrimage with my father long before I was born and the M4 motorway heading west from our home to the seaside had been built. Theirs was a 16 hour trek across rural Britain with a caravan in tow, getting stuck on single-track hills until the local farmer arrived.
My grandfather would make bodyboards for the family, bending and shaping the wood using the weight of his car, then varnishing and finishing them in time for the summer. These same boards we grew up surfing with as kids, relics from a bygone era, and my father recalls the day he looked up in surprise to see me dragging a huge rented foam mal down to the water’s edge. From that moment, the wooden boards became forgotten family relics and the ocean became my obsession.
For me, the most significant time was the day I got my licence. I’d stay at my friend's house, it’d be 2am and we’d make the modern-day three-hour charge down be the motorway, frothing at the possibility of waves. These were the days before internet forecasts so we’d just go in hope. Some days it would be on fire. We’d surf all day and stop only to eat. Other days, it would be junk but we’d surf just as hard. Often, we’d sleep on the beach too. I remember once waking to dolphins playing off Treyarnon Bay near Padstow. It was sometime around 5am and a tractor was tilling the sand in the early morning light. I suited up and jumped in without a soul in sight. This was freedom on a new level and we lost ourselves in the object of our deepest desire.
As the single-mindedness of my teenage wave lust waned, so my appreciation for the ocean changed and I found myself becoming increasingly introspective about my surfing and what it meant to me. Through my obsession, I’d become increasingly ostracised from the circles I had grown up in and I began to feel increasingly ill at ease when land locked. The world I’d found at the ocean’s edge atrophied beneath the rotten concrete and asphalt of England’s cities. I began to realise it wasn’t just the surfing I missed, it was the ocean and the communities that thrived off it. In them, I could see myself.
Increasingly, I was drawn to the road in search of something different. I avoided the main surfing hubs and instead ended up in Peru, Ecuador, Northern and Southern Africa and the Western Sahara, spending time in some of the most impoverished yet wonderful and welcoming communities I’d met. We were united through our love of the ocean. It broke down the cultural differences that existed between us and allowed us to interact as friends with a common bond. I remember the fisherman in Peru, sharing with me his fish head stew by candlelight in his threadbare mud-brick cottage. He was picking the flesh from the gnarled jaw and sucking the eyeballs as the fillets had been sold at market so he could educate his children. A simple existence forged from the ocean and for which he gave thanks each day in prayer. He was happier than any man I’d met. And for every country I visited, there was another such example. All happy, all giving thanks to the sea - the great provider.
It was around this time I graduated and I was free to make my own path. I’d become deeply uncomfortable with the society I was in and the selfish and materialistic mindset it encouraged. Success was assigned a monetary value and drive was the key to achieving top dollar. And for what, I couldn’t quite see. Everything it extolled, I had found the opposite by the sea, and there I’d also found happiness. But I ceded to pressure, the responsibility to consider a future.
I tried for a short time to fit in in England’s industrial core but what I found was all I feared; materialism, indulgence, selfishness. It left me depressed and devoid of life. I longed for a return to the beach and the open water as there I found context and reason. It gave me simplicity, honesty and a tangible link to the natural world. The city was fake, artificial, a graveyard to the soul. The freedom I sought, I found on the natural fault line between ocean and land.
Today, the ocean is a part of me and indelibly so. It’s impossible to articulate a respect that runs so many fathoms deep. The lessons I’ve learned stretch far beyond the shoreline and have reached deep into my life. I cannot imagine a life without the sea, yet I still know so little and there’s so much still to explore.
In the ocean, I see life in all its beauty and fragility, and all of which I lost in the city whose lights extinguish the stars above and whose concrete smothers the earth below. In the sea’s constant flux I see spontaneity and renewal: the ebb and flow of the tide, the reshaping of a sand bar, the arrival of a new swell, the coming of the basking sharks at Harlyn Bay, the arrival of the Southern Rights during the winters of Cape Town. The ocean is alive and in delicate balance, where days unfurl and are subject to the chaos of the passing elements. Yet life in all its resilience wins through. It is here I find comfort in moments of doubt, assurance that I will be OK.
As I look out over the ocean at the day’s end, I am humbled.
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Ode to the ocean (text) by Tim Conibear is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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