Board E-Book

David C. Flanagan

• Herausgeber: Fledgling Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

David Flanagan came from a long line of seafarers and thought learning to surf would be easy, despite the fact he was scared of the ocean and fast approaching middle age. As a journalist living in an island community, he had intended to write a light-hearted account of his progress towards surfing nirvana, but instead found himself facing danger, doubt and the spectre of childhood bereavement in an often wild and unwelcoming sea. Meanwhile on land, and back riding a skateboard after a 30-year-gap, David found himself facing bemusement, ridicule and the wrath of the medical profession. But his decision to turn back the clock to the 1970s would also prove remarkably life changing and, occasionally, utterly catastrophic. Warm, funny, touching and honest - with a strong dose of adrenalin - Board explores loss, ego, fear and fatherhood, charting a quest for inner peace against a backdrop of thundering Atlantic waves. At its heart, Board is an inspiring story about accepting some limitations and overcoming others, while completely ignoring common sense and social convention. "Board tells it as it is. It s like this: don t stand on the sidelines. Don t let society s prejudices stop you living your dreams. Do confront your demons. Do skate, do surf. David Flanagan s tale is an inspirational and honest hymn to getting out there and living your life." Alex Wade, author of Amazing Surfing Stories, Surf Nation and Wrecking Machine.

Leseprobe

For Shona and David

INTRODUCTION

I’m standing on a rocky finger of coastline, looking out across the expanse of the Mediterranean. It’s the height of the July day and the temperature in St Raphael has climbed into the 90s. Intense, broiling sunlight plays across the surface of the rather murky water, while a few feet below me gentle waves lap the base of my vantage point. The small beach to my right is packed with sunbathers, amongst them my three friends.

This is the first day of our week’s holiday on the French Riviera. Having graduated in journalism two years previously, we’re all now employed as junior reporters in Scotland. My three friends work urban beats in and around the city of Glasgow, whereas I work on the local weekly newspaper in my island home of Orkney. As such, I’m the only one who lives close to the ocean. I see and smell it every day and regularly travel across it on a ferry. I come from a long line of seafarers and my blood should be slightly saline. But my nautical genes are about to prove utterly worthless.

I’ve clambered onto the outcrop with the intention of diving dramatically into the water. Already badly sunburned, I’m wearing only a pair of skimpy Speedo swimming trunks and have equipped myself with a cheap mask and snorkel set, picked up for a few francs in the campsite shop.

My feet are shod in a pair of turquoise blue rubber water shoes, two sizes too small. They were the only beach footwear available in the shop, look like knobbly condoms and are agonisingly uncomfortable. I’d bought them earlier in the day after discovering how painful it was to walk on the rocky shoreline.

My friends watch from the beach with feigned interest as I pose for a few seconds, scanning the horizon in a moody kind of way. I think I look quite cool in my ridiculous shoes, tiny trunks and toy diving gear, but I’m pink and peeling on the outside and terrified on the inside.

Despite being surrounded by the sea back home, I’ve never actually dived into it before and the prospect is daunting. There’s no going back though. Two of my friends are women, so ego dictates I follow through on my plan to expertly plunge like an arrow into the depths of the Med.

Thankfully I can actually swim a little, though my technique is high on effort and low on finesse. Having spent much of my late teens and early 20s lifting weights, I’m not the most buoyant of individuals and have been officially classed as ‘one of life’s sinkers’ by a bemused swimming coach.

My stomach – tightly flexed for the benefit of my female audience – is churning. The water looks deep enough to accommodate someone of my size and weight hitting it at speed, but I feel as if I’m about to step onto the surface of the moon in nothing but my underpants, such is the alien nature of the ocean environment. I pull my mask and snorkel down over my face, take a deep, plastic-tainted breath and dive in.

From this modest height there’s not enough time to straighten out my body and I smack the water with my stomach. The mask and snorkel come off my face and relocate around my neck. Completely disorientated and with my eyes screwed tightly shut, I pull hard for where I think the surface is and emerge gasping and spluttering into the light.

A huge German Shepherd dog suddenly appears on the rocks above me, barks and dives into the water. It paddles towards me as a small wave slaps my body against the rocky outcrop. I feel something stabbing at my knees and panic rises in my chest. I’m blowing hard and scrambling to get a grip on the rocks to pull myself out, but the backwash sucks me away towards North Africa.

Another wave surges into the channel and slams me back onto the rocks. The dog, its French owner bellowing and swearing at it from the shore, is still barking and swimming around in circles behind me. I’m not sure whether it’s some official canine rescue effort or just an attempt at play.

More ocean surges into the channel and I’m lifted high enough to grab a better handhold on the rocks. I haul myself out of the waves and fall onto my knees. My ill-fitting rubber shoes ping off my feet simultaneously and drop into the water below. The barking dog grabs one in its mouth and swims off towards the beach.

Trying to compose myself, I look down at my knees, which now resemble pincushions. Black urchin spines are embedded beneath the skin and blood is starting to mix with the seawater, sun cream and sweat running down my shins. My pride is seriously wounded, but I make light of my injuries to my friends and spend the remainder of the day baking and peeling further in the sun, while pulling urchin spines from my knees with a pair of tiny plastic tweezers.

My worries about dying from urchin poisoning are superseded at night by the worst bout of diarrhoea I’ve ever had in my 25 years, my backside violently unloading whatever waterborne guests I’d swallowed earlier in the day. If, at this point in my life, someone had suggested I learn to surf, I would have laughed long and hard.

That trip to the South of France in 1992 pretty much confirmed everything I’d suspected about the ocean. It was beautiful to look at, but scary, moody and unpredictable.

After I returned home that summer, I went back to pursuing mildly risky land-based sports and feeding my passion for aviation. The early 90s had seen me qualify as a private pilot and, when I wasn’t walking in the Scottish mountains, I was flying over them in a light aircraft. I was comfortable in the sky and competent in hostile mountain terrain, but the sea represented a final frontier I wasn’t sure I wanted to cross.

Aside from trips to local beaches with the dog, I had little direct contact with the ocean again until 1996. On a winter holiday to the Algarve with my wife Shona, I watched two bodyboarders in wetsuits and fins jump off a pier into a raging sea. It seemed like suicide.

I simply had no frame of reference for an action like that. I’d spent a lot of time in the mountains and had a very clear idea of where my limitations lay in terms of the weather conditions I was prepared to venture out in.

Equally, aviation had a rigid framework of rules and procedures. One planned, checked, checked again and practiced continually for the statistically unlikely day when the propeller stopped turning, or the engine burst into flames.

Watching those bodyboarders leap off the pier into a thundering and relentless aquatic maelstrom, I didn’t believe I could ever possess sufficient knowledge of the sea to allow me to do something like that safely. I thought it was merely blind confidence, or a death wish.

But, I also saw the appeal. Riding prone on their short bodyboards, the young Portuguese guys shot across the face of the waves at an amazing speed, with some performing 360-degree spins along the way. Once they’d completed their rides, they’d either paddle back out to sea or exit the water and come running along the pier to jump back in. It all seemed so breathtakingly audacious.

A few days later, once the sea had calmed down, I waded into the shallows at the same beach with the intention of trying to tap into some of what those guys had experienced. It was sunny and the water was warm. But the power contained in the moderately-sized waves astonished me.

Within minutes of leaving the shore I was knocked flat on my back by a chest-high wave and rolled onto the beach to think again. The mental shift from pleasure to blind panic was instantaneous and transported me back to the dog and urchin day in the South of France. I’d had some shaky moments in aircraft – making seat of the pants approaches in bad weather, or getting low on fuel, but this rapid, unexpected assault at the hands of the ocean completely overloaded my senses. There was absolutely nothing I could do about it.

Again, people were watching me, so I composed myself and went in for another round only to get washed by a heaving green wave onto an unseen cluster of urchin-covered rocks. I had to visit a medical clinic to have the spines removed from my feet and hands by an impatient doctor who’d seen it all before. There was definitely a pattern emerging in terms of my relationship with the sea and you’d have thought, this time, I might just have taken the hint.

Surprisingly, it was against this backdrop that I decided to learn to surf. Whilst my fingers had been burned by the sea – and punctured by its inhabitants – I had a strong sense of there being unfinished business to take care of. My desire to learn to surf was only partly to do with conquering an environment that scared me. My limited experiences so far – and my ancestral connection to the sea – had taught me that butting heads with it would spell certain death. But my fear of the ocean and my ineptitude within it frustrated me.

Looking out across the sea, whether in France, Portugal or at home, I knew the ocean possessed life-changing, as well as life-ending, potential. And surfing, from what I’d seen of it and its exponents, seemed to represent the ultimate expression of a harmonious relationship with this fluid environment. Surfers apparently respected and understood the sea, but they also had the confidence to work with it to their advantage. I just wanted to take a peek through the door into their realm and perhaps absorb some of what they had found.

Hobbling around the Algarve resort of Albufeira with bandaged toes and fingers, I went into a surfy-looking shop and bought a couple of surf brand t-shirts, a wallet and a pair of blue Vans skate trainers. There were pictures on the wall of the shop of barrelling turquoise waves and cool, smiling, bleached blonde pro-surfers.

I quite liked all the associated clothing and wanted, rather sadly in reflection, to buy into the whole beach lifestyle thing then and there. Seeing the blue Vans had also triggered off some very distant memory about skateboarding in the 70s and they seemed appropriate footwear for someone planning to learn to surf. I left the shop armed with what I thought were the basic tools needed for my reinvention as a surfer.

It’s worth stating here and now that I didn’t take up surfing because I wanted to write a book. As a journalist I briefly – and rather naively – harboured some vague idea about creating a surfing instruction manual for older beginners, once I had the sport mastered. But I’ll never be good enough to tell other people, of any age, how they should catch waves. I can still barely catch them myself.

In the end almost 10 years were to pass after that Portuguese revelation before I found myself on a surfboard. By then I was approaching 40 and unaware of how hard the journey ahead would be.

CHAPTER 1

My pick up has been scheduled for 9.15am. I’ve arranged to be collected from outside a reception building in the centre of the large timeshare resort I’m staying in with Shona and our young son David. I have a rental car and map and would happily have driven the 40 miles north to the beach used by the surf school. However, they’ve insisted on coming to get me. It’s only 8.30am, so I’ve plenty of time to reflect on the fact I’m finally about to learn to surf.

I haven’t been in the sea since the Portuguese trip of 1996 and it’s now July 2005. In the intervening period, I’ve acquired even more of surfing’s lifestyle accoutrements – t-shirts, board shorts, magazines, flip-flops, wallets and key rings. But I’ve never actually laid my hands on a surfboard. It’s a glaring omission in my master plan, but the need to learn to surf has been reduced by the demands of work and parenthood to a kind of distant background noise in my life.

However, when the chance to use a relative’s timeshare apartment on the island of Fuerteventura arises – and I learn that this is a place with abundant waves – I again find my thoughts turning to surfing. This will be our first family holiday abroad, though, and I’m conscious that drowning would ruin it.

Ever supportive and patient, Shona buys me a 90 euro beginner’s package as a 38th birthday present from a surf school on the island. Every day since then I’ve been on their website trying to imagine what fate awaits me in the Canaries.

According to the website, my three-day immersion in the technicalities of surfing will get me on my feet and riding waves in no time at all. I’ll also learn about wave selection, safety and a load of other exotic stuff aimed at making me a confident waterman. I’m excited and, remembering my previous experiences in the sea, more than a little nervous.

Sitting on the steps of the resort’s reception building, I open my rucksack and pull out copies of the emails I’ve been exchanging with the surf school in the lead-up to my arrival on the island. I unfold them repeatedly and double check the time and place for collection, as if they were some kind of insurance policy, or tangible proof that my dream is about to come true.

The pick-up time comes and goes, but I’m on holiday and pretending to be cool. In my head I’m now very nearly a surfer. Getting uptight about bad timekeeping is no longer appropriate behaviour.

An hour passes and I’m still waiting, my veneer of cool and relaxed wannabe surfer starting to peel away. It’s getting warmer and the streets of the resort are much busier. The people in the reception area are now taking more interest in me, clearly wondering why I’ve been sitting for over an hour on their steps, staring at sheets of paper. I study the emails with a new intensity, and theatrically look at my watch a lot in an attempt to reassure them I’m not a criminal or suicide bomber.

A shirtless blonde guy in tatty blue board shorts suddenly appears in the street below me and runs up the steps. Barefoot, he’s out of breath and clutching a crumpled sheet of paper.

“Surfing?” he asks sheepishly.

I nod.

“Yeah. Cool,” he says, introducing himself as Alex and apologising profusely about the delay in picking me up. “Man! Finding your way around this place is a nightmare!”

Aged about 24, his accent is English, though the exact county of origin is impossible to detect as his voice has a languid, mid-Atlantic drawl to it. His distaste for the resort is obvious. I want to tell him I’m only staying there because I got the accommodation for free and I’m actually quite a cool, worldly kind of guy who would rather be sleeping in a battered VW camper van than this four-star place with its own pool, restaurant and children’s entertainer.

At least he looks the part, or what I think is the part. The sides of his head have been shaved, leaving a floppy, sun-bleached blonde section of hair on top. He trots ahead of me, taking several wrong turnings through the resort’s lanes, before we arrive at a dust-coated white minibus sporting some tired blue and yellow surfing graphics.

“I’ve got more people to collect from this place,” he says, waving his hand disparagingly at the tightly-packed resort apartments and villas. “We’re not down here much.”

The minibus’ clunky diesel engine fires up and we’re on our way. I sit up front beside Alex and we spend the next 20 minutes looking for more customers for the school. He drives with one hand while scanning his sheet of paper, trying to relate the information on it to the Spanish street and hotel names.

We go up and down a series of narrow side streets and finally spot an unhappy-looking couple sitting smoking cigarettes on the pavement outside a large villa. The bloke, who is English and about the same age as myself, is wearing a shiny, grey short-sleeved dress shirt, beige shorts and canvas espadrilles. He’s pasty, balding and a bit podgy. His much younger and very bored wife is dressed in skinny jeans and high heels. I’m guessing their beachwear is in the rucksack that sits between them on the pavement.

Alex jumps out to greet them and the guy instantly moans at him about his timekeeping. Alex apologises and repeats his complaints about the resort geography. Ignoring me completely, the couple clamber into the back of the minibus and continue smoking in silence.

Eventually, we find the main road leading out of the resort. Alex has his foot flat to the floor to make up lost time, although the minibus struggles northwards, asthmatically. As we drive I ask him about himself, but he gives very little away. He does reveal he’s lived in Fuerteventura for a couple of years and tells me that the surfing, particularly in the winter, is “epic”.

I earnestly share my reasons for wanting to learn to surf and tell him how my personal journey has led me to this day, but he’s got his face pushed to the windscreen and I think he looks remarkably tense for someone who spends much of his time in the ocean.

Forty minutes later and we arrive in the town of Corralejo on the north-eastern coast of the island. It’s much busier and bigger than the area I’ve been staying in and filled with tourist shops. According to Alex, this is where a lot of the locals live. Even though he says he lives here too, we spend another hour driving around the narrow streets looking for more surf school students.

By now it’s getting on for 1pm and I’m sort of wondering when I’ll actually see a beach.

I’m still working hard at appearing relaxed though, and fill Alex in on my nautical family history as he crunches through the gears and negotiates the heavy Corralejo traffic.

“I think I have the sea in my blood,” I tell him. “I just have this need to tap into all that energy, you know?”

“Yeah. Sea in your blood. Yeah. Brilliant.”

I think he’ll maybe understand better than most about what’s driven me to learn to surf, but I’m coming to the conclusion he’s probably heard this kind of guff every day for the past two years. I’m also suddenly conscious of sounding like an extra from the film Point Break and decide to shut up about ‘The Journey’ from now on.

Following smooth, wide roads that cut across Fuerteventura’s Martian-like landscape, we make a brief stop in the village of Lajares, where Alex loads up on water and pastries from a little bakery. Another 10 minutes of driving and we roll into El Cotillo, a fishing village on the north-western tip of the island. It looks like a set from a spaghetti western, with white stone buildings and a lot of dust blowing around.

We take a left up a side street and the road becomes a dirt track crossing a flat, desert-like expanse of coastline overlooked by dormant volcanoes. I can see vehicles parked along the edge of the cliffs. Several have surfboards stacked on top. Crucially, I can see the ocean. This has to be our final destination.

Turning off the main track we head south towards the cliff top parking area, bumping across rocks and throwing up clouds of dust. We park next to a battered white Toyota pickup truck that has a stack of brightly coloured surfboards piled in the back.

The door of the pickup opens and out steps a small and jovial Dutch guy called Bram who’s brought two more students for Alex, both English girls in their early 20s. There are others who’ve made their own way to the beach, so our group’s now 10-strong.

Alex and Bram start untying the ropes holding the boards in place while the rest of us stand around taking in the scene and feeling a bit useless. Below our vantage point is a huge beach curving north towards the small harbour of El Cotillo. To the south the beach hugs a broken coastline of steep, flat-topped cliffs.

The water beneath us is an intense blue, but the wind is whipping up white horses across its surface. There are tattered yellow lifeguard flags flying from poles on the beach, though I have no idea yet what these mean.

A smiling Bram lifts a large blue plastic drum full of wetsuits out of the back of the pickup. Instantly measuring each of us by eye, he distributes the suits. I get the only extra large one – a black and white short-sleeved affair that’s seen better days.

And then it’s finally time to get my hands on a surfboard. Bram and Alex invite everyone to take one from the back of the truck. The boards are long, thick and spongy. I don’t know it yet, but these are soft-topped foam beginner boards, or ‘foamies’. Their length and volume makes paddling easier and their forgiving spongy construction supposedly ensures the safety of other water users.

The boards are mostly yellow and blue, though there are a couple of slightly longer orange versions. Alex suggests I take one of these as, apparently, it’ll be better suited to my height and weight. The board, which has a thin coating of surfboard wax for traction, sports a number of holes as if it’s been stored with a family of mice. But it’s still a surfboard and I’m delighted to be finally clutching one.

Boards under our arms, we follow Alex down a steep, dusty path to the beach. The sand is burning hot and those of us who have removed our flip-flops quickly put them back on again. Alex trots across it barefoot, unaffected by the temperature.

The messy waves, loudly impacting along the shoreline, seem much larger now we’re down on the sand and I feel the first surge of apprehension rising in my stomach. We self-consciously pull on our wetsuits, laughing, struggling and sweating with the effort and unfamiliarity of it all. This is my first time in a wetsuit and I can’t believe how restrictive and hot it is. I also think it makes me look fat.

The training starts off well enough. Although we’re all boiling hot in our suits, we do a short warm-up, jogging back and forth along the beach a few times. Alex then tells us to form a circle around him and we follow his lead with a series of exercises, rotating our arms and stretching our legs.

And then it’s down to the real business of the day. Lying prone on our boards, Alex demonstrates how to paddle and “pop-up” into a surfer stance. This is the standard instructional stuff I hoped I’d get and, thankfully, I find it fairly straightforward.

I also know from my prior research that I’m classed as a regular footer, standing on the board with my left foot forward and my right foot close to the tail. The other way around and I’d be known as a ‘goofy’ footer.

Alex walks around the circle of students, checking our technique and advising on foot placement. He reaches a German girl who seems to be having a few problems in deciding what foot to have near the front of the board.

“Regular or goofy?” he asks her. The girl looks puzzled. “Are you regular or goofy?” he asks again, slightly irritated.

“I . . . I . . . I don’t understand,” she blurts out, looking as if she’s going to cry. Alex sighs, steps on a board and illustrates the difference in surfboard stances. I’m taken aback at his flash of impatience, given he’s never actually explained any of this to the group.

“Regular, like this,” he says, left foot forward on the board, “goofy, like this,” switching legs.

“I don’t know!” shouts the now tearful German girl, looking baffled. Alex walks off leaving her frowning and red-faced. She avoids my encouraging smile and looks ready to go home.

“Ok,” shouts Alex. “Wade out with your boards at your sides, turn around and try and belly board in on the white water. Then you can try popping up.”

With that he wanders back to the shade of a large rock and sits down to observe from behind his sunglasses.

I’d expected the training element of the course to be longer than this, but instead I’m wading out into what looks to be a pretty heavy shore break with my huge orange board at my side. I’m excited and scared, but it’s finally time to call my own bluff. I wanted to learn to surf and here I am.

I feel the water starting to lift me off my feet and decide this might be a good place to stop. I’m also conscious of a strong current running south along the shoreline. It pushes against my thighs, trying to unbalance me. Further offshore, a wave starts to crumble into a soupy mass of white water. Heart racing, I awkwardly turn my board around so the nose is facing the beach and clamber on. The rest of the class, spread out in a line like troops wading ashore on D-Day, is trying to do the same thing.

I hear the wave approach with a loud hissing noise and my heart rate rockets. I’m still trying to look behind me as the oncoming wave decimates our ranks. Some of the class haven’t yet completed their turns – others have made it to the prone position and are paddling furiously but going nowhere. Boards flip into the air and bodies disappear in the white water.

I’m also engulfed and the next few seconds are completely disorientating. Eyes tightly shut and body tensed, I’m rolled along the seabed with an unexpected ferocity. Feeling my legs hit the sandy bottom I stand up in the shallows, water streaming out of my nose. I’m breathing hard and my heart is still hammering, but I’m also smiling. I realise this is my first official surf wipeout, even though there was no actual surfing going on.

I wade back out into the ocean with renewed confidence, pushing my board over the oncoming white water. Although there are people all around me, I’m conscious only of the sounds and smells of the sea. The warm wind is blowing spray into my face and I can taste salt. The green water is clear and I can see the sandbank below my feet.

This time I push my board a little further out, beyond my line of classmates. I can no longer feel the bottom and lie sideways across the board, taking in the scene. A metaphorical wave of satisfaction washes across me as I contemplate where I am and what I’m doing.

The sense of calm doesn’t last long. A much larger wave rears up ahead of me and for a second I’m transfixed by the process in which it turns from a silent and smooth green and blue mass, to a hissing and spitting avalanche of white water. I pedal my legs frantically to get onto my board and turn it around to face the beach, but I’m scooped up before I make it fully on. The impact is more brutal this time and again I’m rolled along the seabed, staying underwater for a few seconds longer.

But I surface unshaken and head back out, determined to stay on my board for the next wave. It comes and I’m swamped again, a process that’s repeated for the next 30 minutes.

I’m starting to get tired, as are some of my classmates. A few of them are managing to ride the white water prone on their boards, but three of the girls have given up and are sitting on the beach, drinking water and talking to Alex. He’s not paying much attention to the rest of us. My arms are starting to ache from wrestling my board through the currents and white water and there’s a growing sense that actually riding a wave is going to be much, much harder than I’d thought.

Just about ready to give up, I finally manage to ride to the beach prone on my stomach and the sensation is mind-blowing. My board seems to come to life, rocketing towards shore with no visible means of propulsion and for a brief moment I get some idea of what it must be like to surf properly. Suddenly re-energised, I head straight back out with the intention of trying to stand up on the next wave, but every single attempt fails.

I briefly make it to one knee, but wobble and fall off the side. Frustration starts to grow along with fatigue and I decide to take a break.

A blonde girl in a bikini, who I assume is Alex’s girlfriend, has joined him. She’s got her legs wrapped around his waist and he’s stroking her hair. The three young women from my group are now sat further away, chatting and eating sandwiches. The German girl is sitting alone, despondently looking out to sea.

The balding guy and his wife from my resort are nowhere to be seen, but then I spot them floundering around in the shallows, 100 metres south of our position. Alex suddenly notices them too, stands up and whistles. They look over and he signals for them to move back up the beach. Clearly he’s paying more attention than I’d thought.

After reapplying sun cream and drinking the remainder of my water, I head back out to try again, but my efforts are no better than before. I wade out, turn my board around, climb on and paddle, but I simply cannot stand up. Each time I attempt to spring into a surfing stance, my toes clobber the tail of the board and I end up with my feet briefly together in completely the wrong position. Then I fall off. It’s starting to irritate me hugely and I look to the beach, hopeful I’ll get some pointers from Alex, but he’s too busy hugging his girlfriend to notice my predicament.