The View from the Shoulder

Introduction

A BIG part of the allure of Western surf culture, as crystallised in the music of the Beach Boys and the films of Bruce Brown, is its seductive promise of a never-ending summer. In marketing terms, it's genius. Want to sell something to the millions of people living in cold, dark, northern cities? Then pitch them sunshine! Pitch them warmth! Pitch them palm trees! Surfing, a sport which originated and evolved in the world's balmier latitudes, promises all of that, plus a side-order of adrenaline. No wonder they put it on a T-shirt.

But even as the dream was in the process of being sold, it was also in the process of being lost. In the middle of the 20th century, as surfing enjoyed an explosion of popularity along the sun-kissed, wave-rich coastlines of California and Australia, the best spots started to become crowded. Bruce Brown's iconic 1966 film The Endless Summer may start out as a celebration of California surf culture, but ultimately it's about trying to escape from it - first to Senegal, Ghana and Nigeria, then to Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti and Hawaii. The iconic climax of the film arrives when Brown and his two travelling surf stars, Mike Hynson and Robert August, discover perfect empty waves breaking at Cape St Francis in South Africa. 'Nothing at all there,' as Brown later put it, 'just perfect waves.'

The seek-and-ye-shall-find philosophy of The Endless Summer inspired a whole generation of surf explorers to go looking for their own untouched nirvana, and new warm water surf paradises were soon located, from Costa Rica and Mexico to Indonesia and Sri Lanka. Inevitably, however, these locations soon started to attract crowds of their own, and so the gaze of the surf-seekers began to shift elsewhere. Improvements in wetsuit technology (double-lined neoprene in the 1970s, blind-stitched seams in the 1980s) meant surfers could spend more time immersed in cold water, and so the search for uncrowded waves was extended to chillier parts of the globe. Iceland, Norway, Newfoundland and Alaska have all been on the surfing map for years, as have the southernmost reaches of Chile and Argentina.

Although Scotland got its first mention in Surfer magazine, the California-based Bible of the sport, back in the 1960s, it was as part of this second, cold-water wave of surf exploration that it truly became part of the global surfing consciousness. Surfing's great free-thinker Derek Hynd played a major role in raising the profile of the sport here when he held an experimental surf contest on the Isle of Lewis in 1991, featuring some of the top pros of the day including three-time world champion Tom Curren, and any lingering doubts about whether Scotland might be a legitimate surfing destination were blown clean out of the water in 1996, when Surfer ran an extensive travel story on Scotland's north coast, showing another posse of pros, including Curren's little brother, Joe, enjoying heavenly conditions on the north coast.

In spite of all this, however, when I first started writing about surfing in Scotland two decades ago plenty of people still seemed to think it was the punchline to a bad joke. One spring afternoon in the mid-noughties, driving along the coast of Sutherland after an idyllic solo surf, I remember turning on Radio Scotland and listening to a couple of presenters having a good chuckle about the fact that American pro surfer Rusty Long was hunting for big waves on the Isle of Lewis. Had he somehow become lost on his way to somewhere warmer, they wondered? Not long afterwards, while covering one of the first professional surf contests ever to be held in Scotland, with more than £35,000 of prize money up for grabs, I witnessed a Scottish TV presenter concluding a piece to camera by stripping down to his boxers and running into the sea in order to confirm that, yes, the water in the Pentland Firth is indeed chilly in April. Hard to imagine him being required to confirm the air temperature at an international rugby match at Murrayfield in the same way.

Just for the avoidance of doubt then: yes, the water off the coast of Scotland is indeed cold, relatively speaking, but wetsuits work, and have been doing so for decades. There's nothing weird about wanting to go surfing here. What is weird is that, with more than 11,000 miles of coastline (if you're counting all the islands), much of it exposed to the second largest ocean on earth, it's taken so long for the idea of surfing in Scotland to gain mainstream acceptance.

To be fair to the naysayers, in the early years of the new millennium surfing was even more of a minority sport in Scotland than it is now, and if anything, it appeared to be going backwards. Scottish surfing's governing body, the Scottish Surfing Federation (SSF), founded in the early 1970s, had only just emerged from a five-year hiatus, which had meant no national competitions to bring Scotland's scattered surfing tribes together between 2000 and 2004.

Fast-forward two decades to the present day, however, and the picture is very different. Spots that would have been all-but empty on a good swell in 2005 are now teeming with enthusiastic wave-riders. Scotland has its first pro surfer, Tiree's Ben Larg, who is paid to travel the world riding giant waves by multinational action sports company Red Bull. Another surfer, Andy Hadden, has just opened Europe's largest artificial wave pool, the Lost Shore surf resort, in a former quarry at Ratho near Edinburgh. With a price tag of £60million, it's the most ambitious sports infrastructure project completed in Scotland since the Commonwealth Arena and Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome in Glasgow in 2012. Thanks to a reinvigorated SSF, Scotland now has a lively contest scene, and our top surfers have shown they can hold their own against the best in the world at international competitions like Eurosurf and the World Surfing Games.

The idea of what a surfer looks like has also changed: there are far more women in the water now than there were 20 years ago, not to mention more kids and more people of retirement age and beyond. And Scotland's surfing population hasn't just grown, it's also grown up. These days, surfers are GPs and hospital consultants, teachers and university professors. This isn't just a sport practised by a few thrill-seeking twenty-somethings any more, if it ever was - it's woven into almost every aspect of Scottish life. Even the First Minister John Swinney is a surfer. Cling to the lazy stereotypes if you like, but these days surfers are literally running the country.

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I first joined The Scotsman newspaper as a junior reporter in the summer of 2000, and officially I've worked on the arts desk ever since. Unofficially, though, I've also been writing about surfing for the paper since 2005, first on an ad-hoc basis for the features pages and then, from 2009 onwards, in a weekly outdoors column in Saturday magazine. In my two decades of sporadic surf scribbling the Scottish scene has changed out of all recognition, but this period is only the tail-end of a much longer story. Over the years, I've been lucky enough to interview several of the early pioneers of Scottish surfing, from Andy Bennetts, Ian Wishart and Bill Batten, who were among the first wave-riders on the east coast, to Shetlander Vince Attfield, who, on a walk home from the pub with a group of friends one night in the early 1990s, decided that it was about time somebody tried surfing in Scotland's most northerly archipelago, and that it might as well be them. These interviews form the basis of the first chapter of this book, which sketches out Scotland's early surfing history.

The second chapter deals with surf contests, from lighthearted affairs like the retro board contests held by the folks at Coast to Coast Surf School at Belhaven Bay near Dunbar to serious professional events with life-changing amounts of prize money at stake. It also charts the attempts of the Scottish Surfing Federation to gain recognition for Scotland as an independent surfing nation - a goal they finally achieved in 2014 - and the overseas exploits of the national team in the years that followed. There are, of course, plenty of people within the surfing community both here and elsewhere who don't see the point of surf contests. Surely, they argue, surfing is a spiritual activity that doesn't require timed heats, trophies and somebody on the beach shouting out scores after every wave. Those who don't choose to surf competitively - the vast majority - are known as freesurfers, and Chapter Three focuses on non-contest surfing.

Since Scotland first started to embrace surfing in the 1960s, it has developed its own distinctive surf culture, with its own art, films and literature. Chapter Four includes interviews with artists like Ross Ryan and Laura Maynard, who have committed Scotland's waves and its surfers to canvas, and it also takes in some of the films, music, books and magazines the scene has produced over the last 20 years.

Finally, Chapter Five looks at the entrepreneurs of Scottish surfing as well as its innovators and its activists - the people looking for ways to move the sport forward, and those who seek to protect the marine environment on which its future depends. At the beginning of the 21st century, the Scottish surf industry consisted of little more than a handful of surf shops and surf schools dotted around the country. Since then, however, it has grown to incorporate surfboard shapers like Jason Burnett and homegrown surf brands like Staunch. And then, of course, in the autumn of...