Cold Water Souls
Surfers have always been drawn to the comfort of warmer climes. Migratory instincts are triggered as the mercury drops and restlessness stirs the souls as winter front’s sweep in. California’s habitually seek out some refuge along the desert coastline of Baja, European waveriders flock south to the sun-baked point breaks of Morocco and Australians abandon the chill of Bells Beach for the balmy waters of Indonesia’s jungle fringed reefs. The flow was always in search for the perfect wave. The cliche was chasing an ‘Endless Summer’ around the globe armed only with boardshorts and a block of warm water wax.
Yet there have always been those pioneering souls who swim against the current, eschewing the increasingly crowded tropics for a new search. While surf charter boats rock up in air conditioned comfort at the most remote corners of the Indian Ocean, a new breed has been scouring the planet with a fresh agenda, the mission for them has shifted to a search for classic waves away from the numbers. In looking again at the globe, they found their attention drawn to some of the planet’s chilliest locations. They dreamed of huge swaithes of coastline where classic point breaks and thundering reefs were peeling in splendid isolation.
So in this first chapter of Chris Nelson’s exploration of some of the planets coldest and most commited surf spots, he brings us a short piece from his recent Nova Scotia trip:
- We climb the ladder into the large 4th level attic space. It’s one of those rooms loosely scattered with bags, boxes and assorted, accumulated ‘stuff’. Jim swings open a giant hinged window between the roof apex at the far end and there before us the mist fringed Atlantic is revealed, greying in the advancing afternoon light. The air outside is cold and heavy with moisture, wafting into the room, the droplets condensing on my face. “There’s The Right over there.” Jim sweeps his arm towards the pine covered, rock fringed headland to our south. “Probably one of the best waves around here,” he says lowering his voice in a conspiratorial way – although there’s no one else to hear. “And that point to the north we called The Left, and in the middle of the bay sits The Cove. We weren’t very original when we named these spots,” he smiles. He turns again to admire the view.
Jim Leadbetter’s house sits back from coast road enjoying an elevated stance, yet is just tucked in behind a screen of pine. Jim wasn’t the first surfer in Nova Scotia, but he’s certainly first generation, catching the bug in the mid sixties, when surfing here was just a couple of years old. “We never thought we were doing anything that ‘out there’. It was just fun. There’s times when you were out there, middle of February, minus 32 windchill. In the old days, often we went out without hoods. Back then a lot of us had long hair, and you’d have chunks of ice frozen to your hair as you came out, like dreadlocks. I used to have to sit in the tub for an hour to warm up – I was borderline hypothermic. I wasn’t alone – everyone would. You’d get the woodstove cranked up so you knew you’d be nice and warm when you got out.”
“The other thing that happens here is that we get full on ice flows come right into the area. Not icebergs as such, but big chunks of ice as big as this room. Then we get the slush ice, that’s really interesting. To watch a wave move through that is incredible. It’s a whole field of slush. We used to get up on the ice pans and when a wave came you could run off and dive in and catch the wave off it. Kind of like a little island out in the middle of the surf break.” He smiles and turns. “Coffee?”
Surf writer Chris Nelson is currently touring the planets most frigid location, from the icy waves of Alaska, Nova Scotia and Maine, to the frozen shores of Iceland, Norway and Scotland researching his latest project ‘Cold Water Souls’, a book celebrating the untold story of the planets cold water surfing pioneers and their communities. www.coldwatersouls.com
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