It’s Good to Be Cringe About Surfing, Actually
or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Grom
As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a surfer. On one of my last days in A-Bay, Southeastern Sri Lanka, I spent a few hours sitting in a little café by Main Point, watching a mix of beginner surfers and a few exceptionally talented ones riding the incredibly clean break that curves around that part of the bay. While the tide at the time meant the best surf was just before sunset and late in the evening, even in the middle of the day the waves were better than most of the Irish surf spots I was used to. Well maybe not the very best, but still, they were stunningly consistent. But the break there is deceptive. The reason there seem to be more board repair shops by the water than board rental places is because the white, sandy, postcard of a beach quickly gives way to a shallow, rocky reef, noticeable even at the water’s edge. It rips up feet and fins and the wrong wipeout will put a crack right through a surfboard. I like to think people generally manage to avoid hitting their heads when falling off in the shallows.
When you walk around A-Bay, you’ll see a lot more white people and foreigners than you do in most other parts of Sri Lanka, many of which are insanely tan or completely burnt bar the pale patches on their face where they applied a bit of surf zinc. Suncream is hard to find here, with many not bothering with it at all. Where available, it’s often got low or exaggerated SPF and is formulated with skin whitening and bleaching agents. When I asked around about getting some decent suncream, an employee of a local surf shop advised I “just stay away from the sun.” It’s generally considered a little gauche to remind anyone in A-Bay that there’s no such thing as a healthy tan. Sunburn and its consequences are not huge concerns to people who are busy imagining themselves in the surfing scene from Apocalypse Now.
Surf zinc, especially a coloured one, feels almost more ceremonial than functional. Obviously it’s useful when you’re in the water, with the sun reflecting up off of the surface onto your face. It’s one of the more reliable ways of preventing a red face coming out of the water after a few good hours of surf, since most suncreams wash off pretty quickly. It’s also meant to be better for the environment, made of stuff that doesn’t harm reefs or the creatures that live in them, but that’s a little harder to verify in practice. But more than any of that, it communicates to anyone who sees you with it smeared across your face that you live a specific kind of lifestyle, at least while you’re here, that necessitates it, and that abates the embarrassment that would come with wearing it outside of this novel cultural bubble of surfers, beach bums, yogis and chillers. Wearing it outside of major surf spots or at any significant distance from a major body of water feels strange. Disconnected from the lifestyle of surfing and water sports, it makes no sense to wear. What water is the sun reflecting off of onto your face? When disconnected from these specific contexts, it feels unnatural to wear something so visible on your face as an accessory, as a lifestyle indicator without the adjoining lifestyle. It is a functional tool that is more for aesthetic than function (protecting only a small portion of your skin while being incredibly obvious).
I sat on the beachfront, where the bars and cafés have signs that say things like “please do not leave surfboards on tables,” and watched as people made their way out of the water, grab a drink or some food, and head back in again. Most of them were men, greeted onshore by a genre of women I can only refer to as surf WAGs (Tiny bikinis, lots of jewellery) who I have many unanswered questions about. The longer I sat there, the more I started to notice familiar things. The attitude and habits of some of the more hardcore surfers I’ve encountered at home in Ireland seem fully formed. The culture they all seem fluent in is like the object casting the shadow I’ve been in before elsewhere. I’ve always been fond of surfers, the ways they dress and talk and wear their hair, the hours they keep, their simultaneous intensity and relaxation. In some ways they’re like other athletes, dedicated to their sport and its accompanying lifestyle. But surfing isn’t always a sport, it’s a lifestyle, a spiritual practice, a meditation - and some of the surfers who say things like that are so genuine that it isn’t even annoying. I like the way surf culture and its aesthetic signifiers say we have waves all over the world, we do this everywhere, it’s the same everywhere, and it’s not the same anywhere.
There’s all kinds of food in A-Bay. There’s tourist fare, sure, but with nods to the community of visitors and nomads that surfing blows into town: Hawai'ian, Japanese, Mexican, Middle Eastern, there’s even Australian beef in the burgers. Most restaurants in Sri Lanka are by definition for tourists, even if they are serving Sri Lankan food, since many Sri Lankans (for a variety of economic and cultural) reasons cook and eat at home. The country doesn’t have the same street food culture as many other parts of Asia, its cuisine and culinary traditions are pretty unique. Part of this restaurant landscape is obviously classic gentrification. A-Bay is a small town, and tourism has made it crowded, dirty, loud, and 2-3 times more expensive than most places around here. But part of it, if I can allow myself the kind of optimism that people who can afford to bum around on the beach all day tend to have, is community. As people have travelled further and brought surfing to different waves all over the world, we’ve brought ourselves as well.
In Castlegregory, we have this one spot called the Drainpipe, named after a literal drain pipe set in a concrete block on the shore. Exotic, right? In the surfing documentary Step into Liquid these American lads (The Malloys) say that the surf in Ireland is misunderstood, but that when it happens it really happens and the waves are perfect. Out there with my dad, sun shining, perfect ankle biters rolling in for a beginner like me to really build up my confidence on, we pointed to the drain pipe and joked that we make our little jokes comparing it to Pipe in Hawai’i. There we were, on the North Shore of our own little Meg and Gary O’ahu. It’s funny how easy it is to connect the dots between such vastly different surfing experiences, but it’s the kind of thing that keeps you stoked no matter where you are.
Every other sport or form of exercise I've done in my life has made me feel like shit. It’s made me wish I was stronger, or faster, or just completely invisible. In school I would pretend to be sick during P.E or get so nervous about how much that hour would suck that I would actually start to feel sick. So maybe surfing is the best sport ever invented or it’s not a sport at all. I’m not strong or fast or even very good, but whether I’m standing up or eating shit, I want someone to look at me. I want to pop up out of the water and throw a shaka or a thumbs up to the friends and family inevitably smiling and laughing with me because the same thing happened to them a few waves ago. it doesn’t make me want to be thinner or lighter, it just makes me wish my centre of gravity were lower.
On my last surf of the summer I looked out into the Atlantic Ocean, eyes level with the water as the weak sunlight hit the surface, and the ocean looked almost black and white. I was so warm in my wetsuit that before I got out I pulled the top of it down and dived right back under the waves, just to really feel the salt water. I don’t think about a lot of other things when I’m in the water, and when I get out I think about the next time I’ll get back in again. But these days I spend a lot of time thinking about surfing and not being able to go. I have to do other shit. I have to go to work, I have to be away from the ocean. While I understand why, it also doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Surfing was invented in Polynesian society not out of any necessity- it doesn’t serve any explicit function for providing for the community’s or individual’s needs. But the societies that developed it were advanced enough that they had significant amounts of leisure time. My leisure time is significant in its scarcity and not much else. There’s a widespread pressure to do something productive or monetisable in our leisure time, But unless you’re competing at a level where you’re getting brand sponsorships or making TikToks or something, surfing produces nothing. It makes no money. It generates no tangible value. If it creates anything, it’s a desire to return to the water again and again in a way that defies any economic rationality.
When I surf in Ireland I’m struck by the sense of novelty. Surfing has become exponentially more popular in the last few decades, but beyond that there’s no real history of it here. The culture is new, but the waves are old. There have been perfect waves here for centuries at least, with no one surfing them. Sure, part of that is because it’s really hard to independently invent or even import surfing before you’ve got access to a few millimetres of neoprene. At a time where it feels like we’re approaching the logical end point of so many things - climate change, capitalism, neoliberalism, whatever - it’s refreshing to be at near the beginning of something. The surf culture in Ireland is new. It’s malleable. It’s growing. Not only that, but the waves aren’t for surfing. They’re not for anything, similar to how surfing itself isn’t for anything. Purpose doesn’t just exist, we make it. We exist, so we make meaning for that and because the waves exist, so we made surfing for them.
Buying in to this kind of optimism around surfing feels naive sometimes. The sea and the beach and my personal holidays do exist in the same dimension as everything else. Anyone who believes that because of how surfing makes them feel that everything must be alright is at best stupid and at worst the digital nomad incarnation of Patrick Bateman. Changing temperatures are affecting the fish and wildlife on coastlines around the world and changing weather systems affect the waves. There are some localised efforts to preserve the ecological balance of coastal regions that happen to be surf spots though, and the work they do can have a surprisingly large impact. The Maharees Conservation Association are doing phenomenal work to protect and preserve the environment around the surf spots where I fell in love with the ocean. The work they do is ecologically important, but also - at least to me - it’s deeply personal. In a somewhat more exotic context, The World Surf League One Ocean initiative marries environmental conservation with competitive surfing and organisations like Coral Gardeners capitalise on people’s affinity for beautiful reefs to promote conservation over destructive tourism.
Surf spots around the world feel the strain of over tourism and pollution - the litter, the sprawl, the habitat destruction, even things as simple as anti-shark nets can be devastating to species that get trapped in them. A lot of the money that pours into surf towns through tourism (including eco-tourism) makes it difficult to develop sustainable economies for local communities, often displacing them and syphoning public funding away from investment into the people and environment that made them so popular and beloved in the first place. When David Foster Wallace wrote about athletes as being profoundly lacking of any conscious processes taking place while they perform the feats at which they excel, he understood that it’s not simply a case of them being unable to articulate what’s happening in their heads while they do their thing, it’s that there is fundamentally no articulable phenomenon involved.
Call it instinct, transcendence, sublimation, or just being kind of dumb (not mutually exclusive things), but it is incredibly evident when surfers try to talk about surfing that they simply can’t. The most profound experiences they have in the water become insufferably dull as they try to put them into words. The fact that I can write this essay is proof that I am not good at surfing. If this essay turns out not to be very good, it’s proof that I’m getting better. But either way, even if there is a communicable experience in surfing, those best at realising it for themselves are least able to communicate it. You have to go out in the water and see for yourself, and maybe if you go with them you’ll find something communal in place of the communicable.
In the absence of an ability to talk about the thing itself, I think surfers should try to talk about the context in which we do it. I want to believe that we as people are as good as surfing makes me feel like we are. We throw ourselves into the ocean, opaque and deep and endless, just to be spat back out towards familiar dry land over and over by waves pulled by the moon hundreds of thousands of kilometres above us. All the earth to walk on and we insist on the part where we can’t even breathe. And we do it for fun. It’s the most unnatural way to commune with nature. The sense of belonging I feel in the water with people I love and people I don’t even know feels a lot more meaningful than I know how to explain to anyone who has yet to experience it. I think those feelings, and their universality among all surfers, from heavy water lovers to kids at their first surf school, all means that we are capable of fostering a global surf culture that doesn’t destroy the things we love. I want to believe that we can build better surfing communities and share our spots, our culture, our homes, without ruining the things that make them special. I want to believe that we want to do that.
We don’t get to choose the good bits of surfing without the bad. We probably need to travel less and appreciate our local swells more. But whenever someone arrives at an unfamiliar beach with a surfboard, they’re doing something that humans have done for a long time. Not because it’s productive, not because anyone will remember it, not because they’re good at it, but because that’s what we do. It’s what we’ve done all over the world, even if we had to travel very far to learn how, or wait a few centuries for the gear that could help us withstand the cold or the sun or the rocky sea floor. We bring ourselves to the ocean, for better and for worse. I don’t know what surfing will look like when the sea levels rise, or what anything will look like really. I don’t know what will happen next for locals dependent on surf tourism. But whatever happens next in surfing, we’ll bring ourselves as well as bringing our boards. Whether it’s good or bad, wherever we go, there we are.
if you liked this post, or if you didn’t, consider donating to the Maharees Conservation Association here.