Roger Cox: Don’t bring aggro to the waves

 

FOR the last few days of August, the attention of the surfing world was focused on the coast of Southern California, as a monster swell from Hurricane Marie lit up such fabled breaks as Malibu and The Wedge.

At the former spot there were dramatic scenes when big-wave specialist Laird Hamilton picked off one of the biggest waves of the week and rode it right through the middle of Malibu Pier, calmly slaloming between giant wooden pilings while being chased by a rumbling freight train of whitewater.

Meanwhile, over at The Wedge – a heaving, warping freak of a wave which gets its distinctive shape from swells rebounding off a breakwater and suddenly doubling in size – the acts of derring-do were almost too numerous to mention. Chief clown in this particular carnival of lunacy, however, was pro surfer Jamie O’Brien, who paddled into a clean 15-footer with one surfboard balanced on top of another, hopped to his feet on the larger one, tucked the smaller one under his arm, surfed along for a while, then casually stepped off the larger board onto the smaller one and rode the rest of the wave on that.

Any Scottish surfers watching video footage of either of the above events (almost instantaneously uploaded to YouTube) will probably have had the same two thoughts at about the same time: nice waves; pity about the crowds. O’Brien’s wave is a beauty, but as he takes off you can see in the wave face directly beneath him not one, not two but six surfers all scrambling to get out of the way, with a further four or five paddling frantically just to his right, trying to make it to safety before the wave breaks on their heads. Aerial footage of Hamilton’s second wave at Malibu, meanwhile, shows more surfers than I’ve got time to count strung out across the length of the bay.

The first time I saw Malibu in real life, from a moving car on the Highway, I thought there was some kind of insect swarm in the water – my best guess was flying ants. It was only when I got down onto the sand that I realised the little black dots I was looking at were surfers, hundreds of them, all jostling for waves.

That’s the trouble with Southern California: yes, it is blessed with some heavenly surf geography, but it also has an enormous ...more