Standing at the water's edge at Belhaven Bay near Dunbar the other week, I was reminded of Malibu Beach, California – and not just because the sun was beating down from a cloudless sky and the air temperature was hovering improbably around the 60 degrees Fahrenheit mark. This was the venue for a retro surf contest organised by local surf school Coast to Coast, and surfers of all ages were skimming across gently peeling waist-high waves, perched on the long, elegant surfboards of yesteryear.
Most surfing contests these days feature serious-looking aquatic athletes riding almost identical short, pointy surfboards with three fins on the bottom. Known as shortboards or thrusters, these are the F16s of the surfing world, and they allow surfe
rs at the top of their game to pull off spectacular, explosive manoeuvres in fast, hollow waves. In fact, it could be argued that the thruster represents the high-point of surfboard evolution: the basic design was created in the early 1980s by Australian shaper Simon Anderson and top surfers have been using it to win world titles ever since.
In the 1960s, though, when surfing had only just broken into mainstream culture, the surfing vehicle of choice was the longboard or Malibu board, named after the pointbreak of the same name, which had become the epicentre of the California surf scene. Over 8ft in length, with one fin on the bottom and usually wider at the nose than at the tail, these boards create a completely different surfing experience to the modern shortboard. Whereas shortboards are set up to allow their riders to make tight, powerful turns, longboards are quite happy to travel in a more-or-less straight line, providing a stable platform on which the rider can perform tricks and stunts. These range from the balletic art of noseriding, which involves "cross-stepping" to the nose of the board and hanging either five or ten toes over the end, to more comedic moves such as "riding coffin" – lying down mid-ride and crossing your arms across your chest as if you're about to be buried.
Riding a longboard, then, is a way of tapping into a bygone age when surfing was all about goofing around and having fun, and the Coast to Coast retro comp perfectly reflected that vibe.
The junior final was won by Clover Christopherson, daughter of Coast to Coast's head honcho Sam and at just seven years old almost certainly the youngest person ever to win a surfing competition in Scotland. Clover impressed the judges with her nonchalant poise in the curl and also with the length of her rides – her highest-scoring wave seemed to go on for about ten minutes.
The senior final, meanwhile, featured four very different surfers: Angus MacDonald has a beautiful, fluid style and seems to flow along waves with hardly any effort at all; Tim Christopherson, brother of Sam, is the exact opposite – a ferocious surfer who rides a longboard like most people would ride a shortboard, making sweeping, spray-flinging turns; Max Ferguson Hook, just 14 but already surfing better than most grown-ups, has an uncanny ability to generate speed from nowhere; while Sam himself is a true disciple of the old-school, with a dazzling repertoire of tricks at his disposal.
MacDonald started strongly, tucking into the curl of a fast, reeling right-hander (a wave breaking from right to left as you look at it from the beach] and then Ferguson Hook joined the fray with a speedy right topped off with an attempted backwards nose-ride. In the end, though, it came down to a battle between the brothers Christopherson. Tim must have thought he'd won when he smacked one of the biggest waves of the day all the way to the beach and then backed it up by riding coffin on a perfect little two-footer. In the end, though, he narrowly lost out to Sam, who pulled off a headstand, screamed through the longest nose-ride of the day and then, for the piece de resistance, demonstrated an oddly pious take on the coffin ride, with his hands pressed together in silent prayer.
I visited Malibu a few years ago, and I'm sorry to say its golden age is long gone: it's far too crowded now, and as a result the atmosphere in the water can get downright unpleasant. Scotland may be colder, but it has some of the best waves in Europe and advances in wetsuit technology mean it's possible to surf them comfortably all year round. Our surfer population is still small, our best waves still go mostly unridden and total strangers still give you a friendly wave when you paddle out into the line-up. Our golden age is now.
This article was first published in The Scotsman Magazine on 14/11/09