VIEWPOINT

"Where the grass is always greener and the tubes are always deeper"

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to go for a surf and actually get barrelled. Utterly and totally tubed, thoroughly pitted, properly shacked, locked deep within the green room.

Watching some footage of Mick Fanning trotting across the sand at Snapper on a summer’s day bought this into sharp focus recently. The shore break and whitewater were heaving with beachgoers and swimmers whilst throaty aqua-green, headhigh barrels spun insanely past just a few metres away. Each perfect keg threaded by a gleeful boardshorted blur.

My own surfing experience is somewhat different.

Not that I don’t wholeheartedly enjoy surfing In Cornwall, I absolutely love it. I haven’t yet had a surf that didn’t bring a smile to my dial. But I can’t help daydream about how it must feel to come in after a surf buzzing from the memory of just having sliced through a couple of sweet tubes.

I try so hard not to succumb to surf envy, yet once again I imagine how amazing it must be to live with barrels on your doorstep and I even begin to question if what I’m doing can even be called ‘surfing’.

Anyway, later that evening I visit my friend Andy and we catch up over a cup of tea. Inevitably talk turns to the sea and a run of great swell we just had. Andy is a really good surfer with a lovely smooth style who hasn’t been out on his surfboard for over a year. Yet he has probably spent more time getting covered up than anyone I know. He told me of a deep tube ride he recently got at Aggie where he even had time inside the barrel to look up and watch the light refracting through the wave above his head before he got spat out cleanly at the end.

And that’s when it hit me. Andy has been getting so many tubes on his bellyboard and handplane that he hasn’t even bothered to wax up his board more than a handful of times in the last 3 years. And he’s a bloody good surfer who always gets what I consider really good waves whenever we’ve surfed together.

Of-course there are barrels in Cornwall - I’ve just been on the wrong equipment for riding ‘em.