Scrap Gold

Posted on March 11, 2007 @ 3:27 PM

The picture above is of Honolua Bay on the Hawaiian island of Maui, photographed by Rick Leeks. Unbelievably, it didn’t make it into this issue’s huge retrospective on the greatest right point of them all. The piece is stacked, and painful decisions had to be made. Numerous and diverse devotees of this wave generously offered us their nuggets in the form of photographs and memories. Thanks to all of them, and apologies for all those that didn’t make it through the final tussle for space.

But I couldn’t let this shot go unpublished. This one just does it for me. See, my home break is a righthand point and, for me, few waves in the world can match it (I’m biased, okay). But to my mind, Honolua Bay sits at the top of the planet’s right point hierarchy. Nowhere else has its range, from small days to mammoth moments like this. And, naturally, this being the mother of them all, I’ve long had a dream of surfing it.

This picture both horrifies and satisfies me. It reverberates around my soul and shivers my timid timbers, forcing me to wonder just how much I want my surf fantasies to come true. It’s why I want to surf the Bay, and why I don’t, all in one evil, toothy hook.

Gratuitous, maybe. But I hope you agree it has no place lying on the cutting-room floor.

What happened to the secret spots? Are there any left?

Nah. Not unless you either get lucky with some very fine details, or you spend years on the ground watching the infinite interplay of swell, wind, tide and sand. Our world is so mapped and monitored these days that, in general, the secret spots that do remain aren’t actually new spots at all, they’re combinations of conditions on known coastlines.

How mapped and monitored is the world? Almost completely. I heard about a guy in France who’s spent years dividing his map of the planet into neat coastal sectors. Apparently it’s his aim – and he’s well on the way to achieving it – to compile the juice on every single strip of coastline, accessible or not, so eventually, like some James Bond bad guy, he’ll have surf details for the whole world at his fingertips. Need info on the Gulf of Bothnia? The Sea of Okhotsk? Kerguelen? Pas de problem ...

And now there’s Google Earth. If you haven’t come across it yet, it’s literally the whole world photographed from space. You can zoom in to any part of the planet and, in places where image resolution is high, see unbelievable detail on the ground. For instance, I can zoom in and look at my house, the garden, and see that my van wasn’t parked outside on the day the satellite picture was taken.

As a tool for surf hunting, it’s pretty handy. But be careful, you can waste serious hours idly perusing the coastlines of the world, checking every nook and niche in your chosen stretch. In some places the satellite images were taken while a swell was running, so you can see how every reef, wrap and beach deals with it. It is fascinating, and also a little frightening.

The best news is that chaotic nature has a way of kicking against man’s attempts to impose order. In the end, whatever technology offers us, there’s still no substitute for spending real time in one place, closely observing nature’s infinite combinations of swell, wind direction, tide, and shifting sands, and seeing what they do to a coastline we already know.

Can you believe it? Instead of a friendly government grant to help us offset the cost of producing a greener magazine, we’ve been hit with a 10% increase in the price of recycled paper. The result is that I’ve been asked to encourage you, the readers, to help us by buying this mag through subscription if you don’t already. The more people subscribe, the better we can judge how many copies to print, which helps us avoid overprinting. (At the moment, unsold copies go to a landfill, they don’t get recycled; we have to buy them back if we want them). All in all, subscribers really help us keep up with the costs of trying to stay clean in a surprisingly hostile economic environment.

Perhaps it’s an omen of a completely paper-free future (who really wants that?), but as well as receiving the mag through the mailbox every issue, subscribers can now download an ‘electronic copy’ of TSP, complete with page-turning hands and interactive content. This is the brave new electronic future of publishing, although no one knows where the hell they’re going, so it might kick ass or it might flop. Please let us know. We’d love to hear your views, either electronically, or, naturally, by carrier pigeon. – ADR

Send this article to a friend

Page 1 of 1 pages

Archives