Vancouver Island Surf Beneath the clouds
Vancouver Island has come a long way. In fact, it’s come all the way from the South Pacific. Over the millennia it steamed in a northeasterly direction until it finally careered into Canada’s western coastline. The impact caused the Pacific seaboard of the mainland to buckle and crumple, forcing up a mountain range that is now home to the powder fields of Whistler/Blackcomb. Meanwhile, this 280m long geological battering ram rests just off the coast, shrouded with dense forest, its mountainous interior snow-capped in the winter.
There are few roads on the map. Highway 4 bisects the island, dropping down onto the western coastline and a T-shaped peninsular smothered by the Pacific Rim National Park. The north is home to Vancouver Island’s own ‘Surf Town’ and year-round tourist destination Tofino. The more workmanlike Ucluelet covers the peninsula’s southern end. Between these two poles there is nothing but 26m of forest and beach. The rainforest that backs onto the sand is now protected from exploitation and acts as a natural break on the towns’ growth rings.
And then there’s the weather. On Vancouver Island, Canada Dry isn’t a drink – it’s an oxymoron. It rains – a lot. “I remember once it rained for a whole month – that was a bit of a strain,” says Krissy Montgomery, the manager of Surf Sister. She’s leaning on the counter of the bright boutique as another dark squall blows through outside. It is the base for her successful girls’ surf school and café. The number of female surfers on V.I. is unusually high, up to a third of the dark silhouettes in the line-up. What’s surprising is that you don’t really notice. “The thing about the girls who surf here is that they are really committed and serious surfers,” says Krissy. “It’s too cold to hang around the beach.”
“The thing about the girls who surf here is that they are really committed and serious surfers,” says Krissy. “It’s too cold to hang around the beach.”
Wayne Vliet is one of the original Vancouver Island surf crew – first taking to the frigid waters in the mid-sixties. The original surfers weren’t Malibu surf bums or Waikiki beach boys, but men carving a living from what the Island had to offer – logging or the fishing boats. In Wayne’s case it was carpentry. “The perfect job for a surfer,” he says. “Plenty of work and you can have flexible hours.”
In between playing a bit of Hawaiian slide guitar, Wayne strokes his beard and recalls the early days of this remote surfing outpost: building their own plywood boards, struggling with old dive suits and eventually stumbling into board making. When the shortboard revolution struck, he began cutting down boards for people: “We didn’t really have any role models – in the beginning we were pretty much in a vacuum. The nearest surf shop was in Oregon. It was pretty much a summer thing. We’d hang out at Florencia Bay. There was a hippy commune down there too – it was the late sixties. At the start of the seventies the National Park kicked everybody out.”
I ask about the influence of the surfers who came north from the US during the draft. “The young Americans were on the road doing their Jack Kerouac thing. The Vietnam War was on big and they were leaving the country and some of them built a bunch of driftwood shacks down the beach. But most of those people were fairly low profile. We didn’t have any real growth through the seventies. For ten years we probably surfed with little change in the surfing population. We’d go to Cox Bay and there might only be three of us surfing.” Then, Wayne says, came the boom times: “The nineties. I think it was a global phenomenon. Suddenly surf videos were out. There was also better equipment and wetsuits.”
After spending the day with Wayne it becomes clear that he’s underselling himself. He didn’t come to the island to surf, drawn by romantic ideas of the life of a frontier surfer. He grew up with the scene. He’s the real deal. With his friends he pioneered remote spots, sometimes taking boats up the coast and wading ashore to surf new breaks. In his shaping bay he shows us an old brown board from the early eighties. “This was the first thruster that I shaped,” he says tilting it to reveal a pop art explosion on the deck, the letters WP emblazoned across its dimpled surface. “I told my girlfriend it stood for ‘Waynie Poo’, a nickname she used to call me,” he recalls with self-deprecating honesty. “I told everyone else it stood for ‘Water Power,’” he says laughing heartily. He props it next to a freshly finished pea green fish. The irony of an ancient thruster propped up against a brand new twin keeled fish isn’t lost on him. “I don’t know why people are still riding these retro boards,” he says shaking his head. We retire to the pub where Wayne tries to explain the rules of ice hockey to us over some thick, dark Canadian beer.
Every surf trip has a defining moment – be it a wave ridden, a scene glimpsed. Our pupils dilate. A sudden moment of clarity – this is it.
The small, gravel car park is surprisingly busy in the mid-morning drizzle. I pull on my winter wetsuit and look down at my damp neoprene gloves and hood as they lie on the floor. This is not the kind of place to linger with a damp towel around your waist. The first duck dive brings that familiar grip of an ice-cream headache. I stop paddling and pull my hood over my head. The ocean has a green marble translucence and a remarkably low salinity – saltwater lite. “I think it’s the amount of fresh water run-off from the forest,” says Paul as we sit on our boards. “From the rain.” There is a clean shoulder-high swell running, fanned by off-shores.
The dark silhouettes peppered through the line-up face out towards the horizon, scanning for the next set. After a couple of quick waves, I turn my back to the ocean, captivated by the panorama. The bay is wide and the rainforest has pushed to the very fringe of Chesterman’s Beach. An isolated cedar stands like a watchtower near the point. Suddenly a huge shadow takes to the sky and sweeps over the line-up, its white head scanning back and forth. I follow the Bald Eagle as it arcs out towards the offshore island when a blazing gold flash catches my eye. The sun has broken through the cloud, and although it is raining here at the coast, the mountainous interior is suddenly splashed with sunlight. Individual deciduous trees shout their presence amongst a sea of huge evergreen cedars - the reds, burnt oranges and browns of their autumnal leaves brought to life by the morning sun. Snow-capped peaks are revealed for a short, fleeting moment before the clouds again roll through and the scene fades to grey. It is the kind of raw natural beauty that makes you forget why you paddled out into the frigid waters of the Northern Pacific in the first place.
The remains of the Pacific Surf School lie compressed under weight of the red JCB. It seems a fitting analogy for the changes taking place here in Tofino – the changes taking place in surfing. Not a symbol of failure, but of growth. Just as the last piece of the old building comes down, Pacific Surf founder Jay Bowers explains that soon a new and bigger unit will sit here.
For an island once driven by logging and fishing, the changing socio-environmental climate has seen tourism take over as the principal economic force. Surf culture has become a fair-sized piece of the local economy. There are now over half a dozen surf shops and a handful of shapers on the island. A couple of weeks before we rolled into town, the Quiksilver Crossing was here. Hot local surfers like Raph Bruhwiler, Sepp Bruhwiler and Peter Devries have hooked up sponsorship deals, appear in the US surf magazines and entertain visiting surfers like the Malloy brothers. This is a community coming to terms with the spotlight of the outside world falling on their isolated piece of paradise. House prices have rocketed and property tax has gone up accordingly. Accommodation is devoured by the tourist sector through the summer months, meaning a shortage for the young who work in the service industries – including surfing. It’s a universal theme as common to California and Cornwall as it is here. “You can find places to let through the winter and spring,” says Jay. “But they want the space for the summer so they can capitalise on the influx of tourists. Many are forced into caravans or tents.”
Surfers from as near as Vancouver and as far as Australia are crossing the Strait of Georgia to sample what is still a pretty unique surfing experience. Not everyone is over the moon with the growth in numbers. But some take a more philosophical view. “Sometimes I pull up at Long Beach and there are maybe 150 people in the water,” says Wayne. “I look at it and drive away. Having had it pretty much to myself, it’s pretty disconcerting. But then when it’s good the people are spread out. The thing on Long Beach is that you can spread out and find your own spot – find your own wave.”
For the last half an hour we have been bumping down a rutted logging track deep into the forest in Jay’s 4X4 pick-up. We are heading to one of the area’s legendary secret spots, a point break that would grace any list of world-class surf spots. When the road runs out, I wonder whether we’ve either taken a wrong turn or the forest has simply taken back the road. The sun has broken through the clouds for the first time in a week and we are slipping and clambering over the immense fallen trunks and through the dense undergrowth trying to keep up. We can hear the sea, but the rumbling echo could be coming from any direction. There is a base smell that underlines the forest. The smell of damp cedar pervades everything. It is the smell of Vancouver Island. We scramble to the bottom of a steep bank and see Jay waiting ahead, silhouetted by the sun on the fringe of the forest. We break through the last branches and stumble onto the rounded, volcanic boulders that line the point, our eyes adjusting to the sudden brightness. Every surf trip has a defining moment – be it a wave ridden, a scene glimpsed. Our pupils dilate. A sudden moment of clarity – this is it.
This story originally appeared in Huck #001.
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