Cool Water

Wave sliding

We made the mile long walk from the car park along a gravel track onto a pebble laden beach. An arching sprawl of sand spawned from the fog as we traversed closer and closer to the place where we would usually sit and surf from. On this day we could not tell if we were right on top of it or half a mile away. The silhouettes of people came, passed and vanished like they were never there. Only their footprints and welcome greetings a sign that the beach was comparatively busy. The water had barely warmed from when we first arrived on the east coast and so we wore mittens and boots for our surf. Or at least attempted to pull these on before we dove into the frigid slosh of the North Atlantic. Despite it being Canada day and the year having progressed somewhat into summer, the cold pervaded every aspect of the this summer’s day - getting changed in the car park had not been a sunny undertaking albeit a lot warmer than our first few surfs in Nova Scotia when day temps barely breached 10 celcius.

I had surfed cold waters for the majority of my surfing life and also always felt that cold water surfing added an edge onto surfing that warmer water could not, and Canada had remained the ultimate example of this. Cold water could make you enter a state of mindfulness even if you’re not totally prepared to be present or in the moment. When the cold water gushed through the back of my leaky old wetsuit I felt I was there. Like it or not.

The first of the small waves lapped around my feet and forced an onset of feeling childish - we entered the water with strange toy like craft in order to play - that kind of childish, we were there to play. Over the years I had felt a few instances of people that overstepped the childish mark and careened into semi-violent behavior. It had mostly always been older blokes with a severely diminished head of hair and pot bellies that caused aggro in the water. An accurate synopsis of world politics and all of its jaggedness and conflict - caused by older blokes that lived for yesteryear and chased olden day glories. The lineups in Nova Scotia had been the antithesis of this. Within a short time of surfing there we knew the majority of the surf community by their first names and so paddling out meant more time spent chatting than actually getting into the waves. We made friends through the time we spent waiting for the surf to arrive. Going to coffee shops and hanging out with people who were like minded.

Surfing in Nova Scotia was a mixed affair. On many occasions I was the only guy out surfing with the percentage remaining high on the gender mix all of the other times. Women normally added a much chiller and cooperative attitude to the lineup. Something that made surfing much more joyful and less aggressive. There were all kinds of people in the lineup too. My friend Barry who worked as a school bus driver and had studied photography in an earlier life. We frequently sat and talked about making photos while waves passed us and crashed further on in on shore. I never liked sitting in the water chatting. I always much preferred to get waves but everyone in the water was so friendly and welcoming I felt rude chasing the very thing we all got rubbered up for. I had after just moved there and decided to chase a fairly lacking resource - waves. So I felt an unpaid debt in staying to chat about my accent or jokes that were lost in the in the depths of the atlantic somewhere between British English and Canadian English. Language had always been fascinating to me and I felt the maritime Canadian accents particularly interesting given the fact they sounded like some of my old friends from the Emerald Isle. The long drawn out a in car which was ubiquitous throughout western Canada sounded much more like an American pronouncing the word air.

The power of wave sliding to unite many of us was always a feature of this pastime that I loved. Knowing no one was totally negated by the fact that we all chased fickle moments of fun stood up on ripples of energy that originated in one place and came to us from far away. It had been like this in many parts of the world. A common language spoken and understood by many. Often far more powerful than politics, money or any of the other made up attributes that divided us on dry land.

I had actually decided to bring my camera for a while before surfing. Canada day meant a far busier beach than what had been normal. The heavy fog somewhat nullified my attempt at making myself known as the photographer at this surf break owing to the fact you could not see further than 30 metres. The fog gave my photos a quality that suited Nova Scotia - cold and harsh yet retaining a distinctive charm that needed to be explored. Distant pine trees abbutted the edge of the beach. Looking much like a Bob Ross painting sans the tall peaks but nonetheless a dreamy scene of serenity was there to be photographed. My water housing protected my camera from the cold water for a good while. A thing that ocean photographers frequently did to keep their housings from steaming up was to put silicone sachets into their housings to mop up any excess condensation that would build up inside their hard plastic housings. The temperature difference still remained between air and water temperature so after about 45 minutes of shooting my housing fogged up, the camera had made too much heat and the ocean continued cooling which led to a mass of condensation building up on the inside of my lens port of my camera housing.

Thanks for reading along

and to my American readers, happy thanksgiving

Steve