From the latest issue of ASL - Out Now
What’s hotter than a Swedish steam bath? The latest issue of the Surfer’s Best Mate, is what. Once you’ve picked your jaw off the floor after checking the cover sequence of Julian Wilson you can rip into page after page of Australia’s awesome autumn, crazy cold waves in Norway, and the Lost and Running lads continuing their mad adventures around Oz.
We bring you all the action from the South Pacific leg of the World Tour, featuring thumping Teahupo’o tubes, wildcard wins, and Old Man Slater’s dominance of Fiji. Behind the scenes stories and naughty nuggets of gold are scattered in amongst page after page of pictorial splendour and interviews with the victors. www.surfinglife.com.au
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SCOURING SCANDINAVIA
New discoveries abound in the world of Vikings
Words, photos & captions by Yassine Ouhilal
The blizzard shook the van back and forth. Somewhere through the windscreen was supposed to be a perfect left point we’d discovered a few days earlier, but damned if we could see it through the snow. Sitting in the van with their wetsuits halfway on were intrepid surfers Ricky Whitlock, Cheyne Cottrell and Pat Millin. Morale was as low as the barometer.
"Out there boys! There might be a break in the weather!" I exclaimed, trying to motivate someone, anyone, to paddle out. Whiteout conditions, 40 knot offshores and three feet of visibility. No easy feat.
| | A fickle right inside Glacier Bay only turns on with the proper swell and tide combination. | Photo: Yassine Ouhilal |
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I don't know what clicked, but the lads decided to make a go at it. "This is madness" said Cheyne as he stepped out of the van, covered in thick rubber. Still sitting inside, rocking back and forth, I saw Pat's surfboard doing flips out towards the ocean before disappearing into the white, followed two seconds later by Pat, running like Forrest Gump to try to catch it before it was swept out of sight forever.
As they disappeared, I put on my survival suit and followed them towards where the point was supposed to be. Walking through waist deep snow with my back to the nuclear winds I wondered how I was going to shoot photos in such a hostile environment.
Standing on ice covered rocks trying to see something between gusts, I caught Cheyne dropping into an overhead wave that seemed to peel perfectly down the bay and into the snow filled air.
We were in the Arctic Circle, 2000 k’s from the North Pole, and we were on a surf trip.
| | Romain Laulhe setting up another barrel | Photo: Yassine Ouhilal |
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The pace is glacial
The snow-clouds moved on, revealing a massive mountain chain. In the foreground was "Glacier Bay", dubbed because it was so sheltered from the open ocean, way inside a glacier-sculpted fjord. It was such a fickle wave – out at sea the swell was maxing out at 30ft, inside the bay, only the cleanest swells would make it through, groomed by refraction over the three billion-year-old rocks dotting the point. Local fishermen told us there were only waves on a few days a year, and we happened to be there on one of those days.
Morale in the water was suddenly much higher. As quickly as the weather turned, so did the stoke of the surfers, each taking turns to catch the reeling little lefts. The only thing filling the air now was hoots and raised arms.
Driving back to the fish shack we were staying in I wondered how the Vikings, a good thousand years earlier, had settled in this hostile place and called it a home. The storm had cleared for the time being, and while driving under the stars a faint green glow began to appear on the horizon. Being so far up the Arctic Circle had its advantages - Northern Lights constantly batter the skies at night. We pulled over every few minutes to stare in awe at the display, pulsing in the sky like the embers of a fire and changing shape and colour over the snowcapped mountains. Apparently Japanese tourists come to the area on their honeymoons thinking it will supercharge their relationship, and you could see why; there was definitely electricity in the air. After driving the ice-covered roads we were completely exhausted, yet the magic of the northern lights energized us with its splendor.
| | Romain on the fickle right during his first session of his first day, fresh from the airport. | Photo: Yassine Ouhilal |
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Hvalbif is not beef
"Hvalbif is whalemeat?" I exclaimed while choking on the red, steaklike slab of meat which had been recommended so strongly as the restaurant's best steak. I had no idea. It looked red and juicy, and with potatoes, gravy and steamed vegetables it tasted pretty much like beef. I wasn't the only one on the Hvalbif boat. Ricky, Pat and Cheyne had also followed our host Thor's recommendation and we looked at each other, chewing slowly and wondering if we could keep it down. We felt awful, thinking of the whale that ended up on our plate, but for Thor this was tradition, one that still prevails in his homeland. We ate the veggies and made a mental note to ask a few more questions next time we ordered.
| | The "Garbage Left" is a super-long left point in Glacier Bay that used to be the local residents garbage dump. | Photo: Yassine Ouhilal |
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"Hvalbif is good for you, it makes you a strrrrrong man!" Thor Frantzen was the personification of the Viking god whose name he bears, the god of destruction and construction. He was a short, stocky man with a long mustache and somewhat resembled a dwarf. Thor ran the cabins where we stayed at with his son-in-law Tommy, one of the four local surfers, and all only surfed the one bay with a perfect right and left. When I asked Tommy about the other waves, he shrugged and said "we normally just surf here." Why bother to look elsewhere when there are perfectly good waves in front of you? Tommy and his friends were still living in what some would call a golden age of innocence and discovery. Crowds are not a problem in the Arctic Circle, a fact that had been rammed home to the boys on this trip by Frenchman Romain Laulhe, who had journeyed with me to this area in February, right in the depths of winter. Along with warnings of water temps getting down to five degrees, Romain’s stories of perfect, uncrowded waves and incredible scenery were all these boys needed to hear. Besides, the experience of surfing alone or with good friends in a surreal setting makes the cold weather a lot easier to deal with. One just has to get into a different sort of pre-surf ritual. Instead of changing on the beach, you change indoors, and make sure your wetsuit and 7mm boots have been hanging next to the woodstove all night. Perhaps bring some hot water to put in the boots and gloves before you put them on – that sort of thing.
| | With 18-20 hours of daylight it was not uncommon for California’s Ricky Whitlock to spend a large portion of that time in the water. With waves like these, can you blame him? | Photo: Yassine Ouhilal |
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Night surfing
As March turned into April, the daylight increases by an average of 20 minutes every single day. If the sun set at 9pm one day it would set at 9:20 the next, and starting at the end of April, the nights would be devoid of darkness. The Arctic enjoys months of the Midnight Sun, where the sun shines 24 hours a day, but in the winter the opposite occurs and some people have to go through phototherapy (where they sit in front of powerful lights) to avoid seasonal affective disorder.
As the days got longer, we could venture a bit further up the coast, sometimes exploring and surfing until 11pm. We slept until four in the afternoon, and when most people would be writing the day off we’d be paddling out for our first surf of the day, capturing golden light sessions for several hours into the night. We spent a lot of time exploring, driving up the coast, sometimes through whiteouts on ice-covered roads depending on what side of the coast we were on. The swell had been pulsing since we arrived and the bay where we stayed was often too big to handle the 15-30ft seas and the winds that came with it. Our only options were to venture further and find shelter from stormsurf and winds, and we came home exhausted at around 2am, to fall asleep and start over again the next day.
| | Romain Laulhe on his first day in Norway, clocking up session number three. we drove five hours to this spot to get an evening session for an hour. The waves were perfect and made the drive worthwhile, and we got the most amazing Northern Lights ever on our way back. | Photo: Yassine Ouhilal |
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We found ourselves hoping for the swell to drop so the left cobble/sand pointbreak setup in front of our rustic dwelling might start working, but most days the bay was just a big closeout. Finally we got our wish and with the swell dropping we stopped driving and Ricky, Pat and Cheyne gorged themselves with perfect waves. The left was almost like a mini-Mundaka with an easy takeoff and a grinding barrel right on the round cobbles, ending at a sandy beach/rivermouth. "This is my new favourite wave!" exclaimed Ricky at the end of another perfect session at the left.
Because the sun would go down on such a slanted angle it would take forever to set, and sunset lasted an hour and a half. In the tropics the sun simply goes straight down, but in the Arctic it just looms sideways, turning the sky and mountains golden and sending backlit green walls rolling down the point.
We were creeping ever closer to the midnight sun, and I became enthralled by the idea of surfing through the night in broad daylight. I decided I was going to get back, whatever it took, to surf under the midnight sun.
As Cheyne departed for a contest in France and Ricky and Pat went their separate ways and I took on another assignment, I kept thinking of Thor and Tommy’s little bay.
| | The auroras are a regular occurrence in this part of the world, and get so bright you could go surfing under them. | Photo: Yassine Ouhilal |
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Two months after our mission, I got my chance; a week between two other jobs in Europe. Returning, I found a different place to the one we’d left. Everything was green, with flowers everywhere, and only the tallest peaks still with snow. The sun never set but often the wind would be perfectly calm at night, so there was the whole day and night to pick the best time to surf. The rush of going surfing at sundown was no longer there! There was the whole time in the world.
Having been surf deprived for months due to the priority of taking photos, I gorged myself with waves for a few days. As is often the case the last day was the best, a pure, clean groundswell with light offshore winds and just me, Tommy and his friend Ola out. It was a day of days and the only proof would be in my memory, I had to leave the camera out and just surf. After all, this is what it was all about. After a six-session marathon day at the left, I came in exhausted and lay on the grass looking at the sun, shining straight from the north on its way back east. I looked at my watch: it was five past midnight.
- Yassine Ouhilal
For more on the story check out www.surfinglife.com.au
| | Glacier Bay | Photo: Yassine Ouhilal |
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