WAVE POOLS – AGAINST

Marco points out to our right, sighs and - with a sad voice - says: “my favourite wave used to break right there”.

Marco (his real name is Made) is a Balinese surfer from Tuban, near Kuta, who makes a living by taking surfers on a boat out to the outside reefs by the airport. But the wave he is talking about is not one of those legendary coral reef breaks where hordes of surfers have had their first surf in Bali for years. It is (or rather “was”) a small fast peeling sand bottom shore break wave that would only happen for a couple of hours at certain tides. Only the local kids and the boat drivers used to surf that wave on their old beaten boards, normally in between trips to the outside reefs, displaying a performance level and style that many of us will spend our whole lives trying to match. Now, where that wave used to break there is a brand new T-shaped rocky pier, one of many along this stretch of coast. Their purpose is to keep the sand of the brand new man made beach - that runs the length of several kilometres in front of fancy hotels and resorts- in place.

Many of you will wonder what this has got to do with wave pools and with Tenerife’s Siam Park. For plenty of surfers (me included) one of the most appealing things in surfing is to found ourselves immersed in nature: the light, the colours, the textures that the breeze draws on the wave’s surface, playing with our own shadows on the sand bottom… or the opportunity to spot some wildlife. For many of us surfing is more than just a quest for adrenalin; depending on our mood we might even prefer a surf in crap waves, but in a breathtaking scenery, than one in perfect waves in a grey and dirty industrial area.

The human being has not quite gathered –yet …and let’s hope it never does- enough scientific knowledge to duplicate nature’s features at its own will. To this day several wave pools have tried to bring a solution to the ever growing problem of overcrowding and/or the lack of surfing conditions… only to fail. Some have shut down and disappeared altogether, and some reconverted themselves into mere wave pools for bathers. In some cases the lack of business has been the cause, like Myazaki’s Ocean Dome, which produced the best man-made waves by far. To try to duplicate the perfection and randomness of a natural wave in a chlorine pit – albeit with an intense turquoise-painted bottom- is something we haven’t quite managed to learn. To do it somewhere like Tenerife, an island blessed with high quality breaks but where several of those waves disappeared not too long ago and some more are endangered because of human development, is an insult to our collective memory. If we accept wave pools as a valid alternative –especially in those places where real surf spots are in danger of disappearing – they might be offered to us in exchange for taking away a natural surf spot. We shouldn’t be taking this risk, especially when the whole world is trying to clean its energy production and, no matter what, no wave pool engine will ever be as clean as the winds that create the swells we hope to ride in the ocean. Let’s just hope that we shall never be Marco and point at a pier to say “this is where the best right hander I have ever surfed used to break” while walking to the nearest wave pool.

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A new 3sesenta has come out (issue #131, check the cover on the right hand side column) and it features this short text (above) in which I express my views regarding wave pools. In this same issue there is a large feature on the brand new Siam Park wave pool located in Southern Tenerife; hence my rant.
I’m off to Southern Portugal for a couple of weeks …or three, but I shall be updating the blog regularly. Cheers.

Why Europe will never win the XXL Big Wave Awards

With winter just around the corner and the big wave season about to start, the time has come for a wake up call: this year, once again, no European will win a XXL Big Wave award! You think I’m being too harsh? Well as I see it, it’s just the plain truth.

No matter how hard we keep trying year after year, cold winter after cold winter… it’s all to no avail: the big wave award always ends up going somewhere else. As a European surfer, the realization that we are never going to win was not enough; I wanted to know why not only we haven’t won, but we never will. And here are the only four reasons why they will never give us the awards, no matter how big and gnarlier than everybody else’s our waves are:

1) Sorry, but what’s your name again??
Picture it, the typical host at the award-giving ceremony, up there in Anaheim, just about to announce the winner of the Biggest Ride of the Year. He smiles at the audience, opens the envelope, reads the name on the paper and then slowly glazes his eyes over as he tries to figure out just how the Hell he’s going to pronounce… Ibon Amatriain.

Try it, it’s a little challenging, isn’t it? And yet, with a little bit of practice it shouldn’t be that hard. Read my lips: Eebon Amatree-ine. Ok, maybe it is that hard. And it could be even worse: Hugues Oyarzabal, Indar Unanue, Axier Muniain or… Ok, I think I made my point.

So maybe, and only maybe, in order to avoid hiring a multilingual host for the night… or the extra cost of simultaneous interpretation for the guests and other nominees, it is much better to give the awards to more familiar names. Such as the ones we read –month in, month out- in the surf tabloids. Names we know so well that they feel like family: Long, Parsons, Baker, Dorian, Gerlach, Knox... Good ol’ names that any North American can pronounce safely without feeling lost in translation at his own party.

2) And where in Hell are you saying you caught that wave?!?
I honestly believe there’s more chance of a European surfer winning an XXL award for surfing an American wave than for surfing a European one. In the US, European waves are the stuff jokes are made of. They are the center of endless discussions regarding whether they are good enough for a WCT or not, never mind for an XXL award. They rank just above Brazilian waves (minus the babes but with mellower crowds), and the Japanese ones (sushi is good, but endure a cold flat winter spell in Japan and you’ll know what I mean). Some Hawaiian badass even went so far as to say that one of Europe’s biggest waves –no matter how big- was safe enough for his little kid to go and play with (I have to agree with him: better his kid than me to face a 50 foot Belharra monster). And those tides: since when can a wave only be surfable for –like- three hours per day? It shouldn’t even be called a surf spot at all, it should be called a… hoax.

And by the way… where exactly are those waves? Most of the time they are found at the bottom of endless, spooky cliffs, or rather far out at sea… Even the average European surfer hardly sees them going off due to their remote location. On the other hand everyone knows that Mavericks sits off Half Moon Bay, not far from Santa Cruz, and has a great vantage point from up the hill by the aerial. And that Ghost Trees is plainly visible from one of California’s most famous golf courses. And that you can check Waimea from the road on your way to the most expensive supermarket in the world. But… Belharra? Aileens? Playa Gris? Isla Pancha? Jardim do Mar? Obscure names for obscure places that hardly anyone has seen but for a couple of times in the media every ten years. No chance of winning anything there, pal.

3) Is that water or mud?
Now, now… there is something our photographers need to work on: color and light. A photo of a wave from dark Mordor will never win an award in the sunny Shire. And if the XXL Judges have to spend the whole allocated 10 minutes just trying to figure out where the black suited surfer is on the wave’s face because everything looks brown, bleak and gloomy… well, that makes our chances of winning even slimmer. Now, bringing a few spotlights on the cliffs’ face and throwing some liters… -excuse me- gallons of turquoise paint in the line-up, that’s not cheating; that’s cosmetic surgery, dude. And have you checked just how close Anaheim is to Hollywood?

4) Have I seen you somewhere before?
And that might just be our biggest problem: European big wave riders are mainly an unknown bunch outside their own neighborhoods. No current or even former pro WCT surfers; no free surfers with paychecks in the mail at the end of the month; no Amex stars. They all have jobs; the lucky ones have jobs within the industry, which allows them to leave their desks when conditions are right. The rest are just a bunch of survivors with no jobs, no paid trips to the Mentawais and –thus- no exposure in the media apart from the local European mags after the winter season. It is very hard to win the judges’ favor competing with guys who have been in the media almost since before the media was born. It’s like Rick Kane wanting to get a set wave on his first day ever at Pipe: it’s not about the skills, but rather about being well known enough so the locals let you have one.

So what can be done?
There’s always the possibility of an Irish surfer nailing the award on behalf of all of us. You see (1) most Irish names are normal-sounding by American standards (since lots of north Americans have Irish origins); (2) thanks to John F. Kennedy and John Wayne all of America loves Ireland; and (3) although the Irish are full members of the EU -and even gave up the punt to embrace the €-, most Americans ignore this fact and think of them as half-euros (just like the British), so they won’t feel like they are giving us an award.

But that is a long shot. On a more realistic way, the only chance Europe has to win an XXL award is to go the Australian route and set up our own XXL awards.

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This text -in this very Lewis Samuelesque tone- was submitted to Surfline as they were interested in some European content. Apparently they didn't like it. Their loss and this blog's readers win.

A new age

Well, where do I start? Ok, as you might have guessed we came back from Bali a couple of weeks ago but because of work, commitments and some changes in our lives (more on that later) I’ve been extra busy, hence my absence (my other blog hasn’t been so inactive). Bali was great: my wife, who had never been there, enjoyed herself lots surfing small Kuta Reef and learning first hand why surfing a reef is so much better than a beachbreak (looooooooooooong peeling rides). On my side I had more time than during my previous visits to see and experience Bali (the two previous times Bali had just been a launching platform to other nearby destinations) and, thanks to some friends I managed to score some semi-secret waves in places I had never thought they could get swell. On top of that we had a great time, we ate plenty of healthy food, we didn’t get too sunburnt and, apart from a bruised rib that kept me off the water the last few days, we managed to come back home in one piece.

And once back at home the big –bad- news: the company I’m working for is not doing that great and they decided to cut the mkt budget so much that they only need me half time. I’m not going to go here into whether this is the right decision to solve the company’s problems or not (it will help in the short term but will make things really worse in the mid/long term), but the fact is that for the last two and half weeks –and for the first time since I left Uni- I’m not a 9 to 5er.

The immediate consequence of this is that my salary has been cut in half and that we need to get another source of income. But also that –weather and waves permitting- I will be able to surf pretty much every day… even during the short winter days. Hooray!!

The extra time -and the need for some extra income- is giving me the opportunity to try out a few projects I had in my head but, due to laziness and/or lack of time, I had never managed to get myself into. And one of them is writing. So with this in mind I’m giving it a go at the chance to write and have some stuff published one day. In the short term I will increase my collaborations with the usual surf mags (mainly 3sesenta, the oldest Spanish surfing mag). Although my first post-Bali collaboration has come out today in the free surf journal Surf Time, where I’ve written a short piece on the current state of the WQS circuit.

On the other hand I will slightly change the focus of this blog. Until now It's mainly been about the waves of the Bay of Biscay as seen by other bloggers, most of them great amateur photographers. I think I’ve made my point and all you have seen that there’s much more than Hossegor and Mundaka; from now I’ll give this blog a more personal touch. Let’s see how it goes.

I hope that the -very- few of you who have followed me until here will keep on bearing with me.