I learnt to surf while living in Bournemouth, the butt of many jokes for those fortunate enough to live near ‘good’ waves. But how do you define a ‘good’ wave and when does a wave reach the mythical status lavishly flaunted by the surf media as ‘perfect’?
Let’s face it, a perfect wave can only exist in one particular surfer’s reality. Because no matter how fantastic a wave may seem to you, there will always be someone who would prefer it to be a bit longer, higher, hollower or have more take off points, more bashable lips, more air sections, more cut back sections.... the list is virtually infinite.
Robert August and Mike Hinson in the 1960’s classic ‘The Endless Summer’ believed they had found “the perfect wave” at Cape St Francis, South Africa. While 30 years later, in the film ‘Biggest Wednesday’, Ken Bradshaw describes 50 foot Outside Log Cabins in Hawaii as “huge and perfect”. Two very different definitions but who’s right?
Like everything in this beautiful pursuit of surfing it’s subjective and significantly depends upon what you ride and how you like to ride it. Many of us consciously or subconsciously realise this and measure a wave not just on it’s physical attributes but on it’s emotional impact - known to true surfers as stoke. It’s a magical word that sums up that intensely revitalising feeling when you kick out a good wave and your being tingles and pulses with natural energy. A good wave can be surfed over and over in the mind and it is the memory of that sensation, when nothing existed but you and the wave, that stokes the body and soul.
It is a natural human trait that we are always looking to increase our own happiness and one of the incentives for surf travel is to find perfect waves that will increase that joy. Some people book a smart hotel somewhere exotic and jump on a plane, while others choose to rough it through jungle and bush sleeping on beaches and living on rice alone. But the point is that with a realistic and open attitude we’re all capable of capturing our own perfection in the water - and it doesn’t have to be Hawaii.
As a collective it is sometimes easy to forget that stoke is unique. For example, who has the right to say that a beginner being pushed into their first wave experiences less stoke than Slater getting deep in a Backdoor barrel? In our subjective world, the beginner’s two foot wall of whitewater might be as perfect to him or her as Slater’s Pipeline pit or a Teahupo’o tube.
Let’s imagine that we had one chance to fulfil our most outrageously perfect surfing fantasy. How about a warm turquoise barrel that you could pull into and ride for an hour (wave pools excluded)? If you didn’t faint with ecstasy or exhaustion by the end of it would you be stoked? Of course, but with no chance of ever riding a wave like that again would you bury your board in the back garden and never go surfing again? The chances are anyone serious about their surfing would get a familiar calling back to the ocean and still find stoke and so relative perfection in what was available in his or her own reality.
Unfortunately it is easy to lose touch with our own reality. Surfing magazines and videos taunt us with what they consider perfect waves and indeed part of their attraction to us as consumers is the fantasies and escapism they provide. However, surfing is essentially an art and the canvas on which the surfer paints does not necessarily have to be beautiful to start with - its the sense of freedom and enjoyment that the artist archives that matters. I’ve found more stoke surfing two foot on shore waves with just a few mates than surfing tubey double overhead Ankas with 50 other people all hell bent on grabbing as many waves as possible.
It was these thoughts that flowed through my mind as I picked off the choicest set waves of this northern Morocco beach break, not huge but clean and playful. Waves that at home would have had me putting life on hold and scrabbling frantically for board and wax now passed by unridden. I didn’t want them because I knew if I waited the perfect wave would come through. Perfect, in a relative way.
Originally published by Will Newitt in Surfer's Path Magazine
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