A sideways look at the best and worst season.
Take a look out the window. What do you see?
Snow, ice, dull grey metallic clouds, swirls of rubbish and a confused pigeon being blown around by the gale that's been blowing for the last week straight?
If so you might be experiencing a curious meteorological phenomenon known as 'winter'.
This bizarre seasonal occurrence happens most years. Generally it's identifiable as the portion of the year that's grey and not quite as warm as the grey and warm bit of the year known as 'summer'. Other sure signs of it being winter are a lack of tourists at the beach, a 5% lessening in the amount of surfers in the water, your 3mm wetsuit being mildly uncomfortable and creme eggs being widely available.
In the last two years this status quo has shifted, winter has got its claws back, no longer does it hover in the low double digit ˚C for a few months before returning us to the warmth. It has been proper nasty, with snow, ice, travel woes and lots of other chaos type things that make rolling news networks very happy.
You'd kinda think we had never had a proper winter before. Half a day of snow and everyone runs around with their hands in the air like the world is about to end in a frozen water based apocalypse. The roads turn to ice rinks, the trains curse selling off the snow plough attachment they used to have in the old days and the airports, those bastions of high tech, grind to a halt. No one seems to have suggested adding some little skis on the bottom of the 747s so they can land on our woefully unheated runways or using them oh-so-hot and powerful jet engines as weapons-grade snow blowers.
If you can make it to the beach through the winter carnage however then you will be granted with something special— waves. Bruce Brown and his Endless Summer buddies got it all arse about face... Surfing is all about the Endless Winter. It is the time of year when real swell marches in to our coast (and lets be honest, pretty much every other coast in the world), the little known deep shelter spots that slumber most of the year come to life and those mysto reefs, that you've heard about but never seen, get their 'one afternoon a decade' shot at glory.
Conversely the open beaches become a veritable 'victory-at-sea' scenario— endless walls of white water stretching to the horizon in an unpaddleable morass of spume. You'd have to be an ironman, a sadist or mad to even attempt paddling out at Watergate or similar in February on a big swell.
Winter separates the men from the boys... Well, those that are actually in the country, and haven't taken the soft option of going somewhere warm where they can flounce around in silky boardies, drink chai lattes, get braids in their hair and get one of those cancer-inducing suntans.
It's a simple thing winter. You just need a good dry winter wetsuit and a sound attitude. It's all in the mind. Getting out from under the fart-infused duvet when its minus something and frigid outside is easy. It ain't minus in your house; unless your house is a tent. Get a bacon sarnie in your face and a pint of sugary coffee in a travel mug for the car (bring a flask of your favourite hot beverage for later as well), get rugged up and hit the road. Heater on, tunes on, coastward bound. The drive is the easy part. Getting out of your car and checking the surf and then making the call to go in is best done quickly, hesitation is fatal, 'ummm' and 'ahhh' too much and the cold will set in and you're beaten. Even better surf somewhere you can check from the car with the heater on full.
Then comes the hard part. Getting into your wetsuit (unless you are one of the lucky buggers that lives near the sea and can get suited up at home and drive gimp-like to the beach) do it quick, do it smart, don't try and do it in the front seat unless you are a circus contortionist. Once suited and booted and gloved and cap-twatted you are good to go... (that said we strongly recommend a wetsuit with a built-in hood for maximum winter warmth). From then on its business as usual— go charge.
The other end of the session is the worst bit. Getting changed when it's raining, snowing, and there's nowt but frosty mud on the ground is a real pisser. Especially when your hands are so cold you can't get the key in the door —not an issue since the un-surfer friendly invention of electronic car keys— but on the plus side you no longer identify surfers cars by the tangled network of scratches around the keyhole. Same as on the way in speed is of the essence, have your towel and clothes ready to roll, suit off, hat on, coat on, hard bit over, struggling the boots and legs of your wetty off ain't no thang when your core is warming (feel free to imbibe you favorite hot beverage from your pre-prepared flask at this point).
And there you go. You did a winter session. Not so bad eh? Did you enjoy the smaller crowd and more punchy waves? How was the winding slap of the seemingly denser water when you hit it? Ears still ringing from that sledgehammer lip to the head? The boffins will tell you water isn't perceptibly denser when cold but it sure as shit seems like it...
You'll have noticed I managed to get near the end of this piece without mentioning piss.
That's right. The elephant in the room. The dark secret of winter surfing. Thing is times are changing. Once upon a time before welded seams and state of the art hooded 6mm suits drinking a few pints of water before a sesh was essential to give you the oh-so-warming flood of urine based warmth halfway through. Because you knew by the end of the session a few good drubbings would have flushed you out. These days wetsuits are so good, so tech, so well fitting and sealed that pissing in your suit, whilst still infinitely pleasurable in a non-German fetish movie kind of way, is actually a bit minging. The days of cold water flushes are gone. It's toasty warm and that pish just works it way right around you so when you get changed your whole body honks of slash. Which ain't cool.
The only solution is about as welcome as punching yourself in the face— actually pulling your wetty neck out and flushing yourself manually...
I'll leave it up to you to decide. Just let it be known that the general public would find the concept of smearing themselves in their own urea and then going out into the world, well, a bit odd...
Winter surfing. Can't beat it eh?!
