Cold water surfing on this remote BC archipelago.
photo: Masa Takei
Emerging from the warm cocoon of my quilt, I can hear rain drumming on the tin roof above me. I snap on a headlamp and climb down from the sleeping loft to stoke the fire. Sweetie Pie’s wood stove is ample for the 12’ x 16’ cabin. Soon the comforting sound of flames crackling overlays the thump of surf breaking outside. Through the beach cabin’s expansive front window, North Beach comes into view in the morning’s gathering light. It’s mid-December, just shy of the solstice, the longest night of the year. Here on Haida Gwaii (f.k.a. the Queen Charlotte Islands) full daylight won’t come until close to 9a.m.
I can make out the headlights of a pickup cruising past on the sand flats, the silhouette of surfboards over its tailgate. Its occupants survey the waves from the warm confines of the cab, as sleet whitens the ground. They have about 40 kilometers of beach to choose from. Their brake lights flare. A decision has been made, they chuck a u-turn, and pull up a couple hundred meters back down the beach. I scan for other headlights, in particular those belonging to Mike’s Ford F-250. We’ve been waiting for waves for a week. But I don’t see sign of anyone else in any direction. If it weren’t dark, cloudy and sleeting, I’d be looking clear across Hecate Strait to Alaska.
“Haida Gwaii waves are fickle, cold and terribly difficult to get to.” So says Mike McQuade, 39, owner of North Beach Surf Shop in Masset, a FORMER fishing and logging town of about 1,000. He points out that many surfers down south with $800 in their pocket would rather book a ticket for warmer climes, such as Hawaii. But there are still those from off-island who make the trip north to take their waves frosty.
My rental cabin, ‘Sweetie Pie,’ is at All the Beach You Can Eat, run by ‘Rapid Richie’ and his wife, Lisa. They’re almost at the end of the road that runs the length of the island. Rich remembers when he built the first shacks out on North Beach, 30 years ago. “If you saw two cars out here in the same week,” says Rich, “that was a big deal.” He also remembers, more recently, when the local population of surfers numbered just one, ‘Surfer Jeff.’ Rich’s cabins are still on a dirt road, off the grid, though traffic has picked up some since and land developers have moved in, crowds, on or off the waves, are hardly a problem.
When McQuade had organized North Beach’s second annual Expression Session last November, the event had attracted some 30 surfers. Almost all were from on-island. The notable exception was Joe Curren, a California pro-surfer and photographer, who had flown in to help host workshops.
By the time that Mike pulls up in his truck, there are still just a couple of surfers, black dots in the water down the beach. Otherwise, it’s just Mike, the water, and me hemmed in by hummocks of sand, grass and ranks of spruce trees that taper off into the mist. Mike’s huddled up in an old fleece-lined warm-up jacket, embroidered with his name, a carryover from his previous life as a swim coach.
He’s still got sleep in his eyes and a grizzled look but that may just be his scruffy beard. We head into the cabin and stretch into our 6/5/4mm wetsuits, the thickest available, and cap our extremities with even thicker neoprene mitts and booties. We’ve morphed into hyper-insulated seal creatures, our hands now flippers and our earless heads wrapped in tight black hoods. As we trot with our boards the hundred meters to the water’s edge, cappuccino sea foam scuds along the wet sand toward us.
To call what I do ‘surfing’ is like calling a headfirst slide on one’s back down the bunny slope, ‘skiing’. I go out with a board strapped to my ankle but consider success, not inconveniencing my friends by drowning. This time, however, I’m hopeful that under Mike’s tutelage, I’ll finally ride a wave in passable form, raise my arms in triumph and be showered in praise and backslaps.
This week standing water will freeze over, as will the water pipes from the cabin’s rainwater cisterns. Taking a beating from the waves was a given for a rookie like me, but what I’m more apprehensive about is the cold. The wet kind that seeps into your very being, gives you an ice-cream headache and sucks your will to live. Paddling out, the shock of the first wave washing over my head elicits a treacle of dread. But my fears turn out to be unfounded, the fatty wetsuit does its job, leaving me to do mine: which is to flail, drink seawater, and generally get schooled.
Usually, winter storms bring big southwest gales, which converge with Aleutian lows here to produce perfect conditions for waves. Local surfers enjoy regular head highs, sometimes even double-overhead, with the biggest waves jacking up to 20 feet. But today, the waves are small enough that without me here – and the preceding two weeks of flatness – Mike would otherwise have been back at the house working on an epic home reno. We cruise out further, him on an 8’ longboard, me on the 11’6” stand up paddleboard that he’d busted in half on a wave but routered back together.
The sky and the ocean blend in a flurry of greys, like a messy charcoal drawing
The cloud cover is thick and heavy with rain in some sections and silver bright where the pale sun fights to burst through in others. Interludes of rain sweep through, and water comes in from everywhere, plinking off the neoprene brim of my hood and running into my eyes.
A long brown snout breaks the oceans surface as a sea lion, a cow, spy hops out of the swell to check us out. Mike involuntarily draws his legs up onto his board, mentioning that he’s had bull sea lions bluff charge and even breech up onto his board. We keep a wary eye out when she reappears closer.
Mike catches a couple waves, dropping a knee. But as things get bigger, we switch up; I take his surfboard and he hops onto the SUP to show me how it’s done. With a few deep paddle strokes, he catches a wave and it plows noiselessly past like a train of pure inertial energy. He glides onto its curling face, cutting a heroic form. And shoots along the peeling line, effortlessly hoiking over the highside as the wave closes out around him. I follow him, on my belly, riding out to the last of the white wash, allowing myself a little, ‘woohooo.’ I’m not surfing in any true sense, but I’m out on the water, on top of a board and having a butt-load of fun.
I try my hand on the SUP again, battered by the wind that’s coming in east-south-east, and riding, what Mike calls the elevator lift of a swell that comes up behind me, picking me up, but dropping me off the backside as it carries on inexorably toward a frothy wreck with the shore. I see Mike’s arms arc into the water, and a few fluttering kicks and then his head and shoulders as he stands, walking on water. We use the cabin as a point of reference to keep from getting swept too far down shore. Smoke chortles merrily out of the stovepipe, like cotton smoke in a supermarionation diorama.
Mike eventually calls it a session, heads ashore and back to his home renovations. But he leaves me with a board and urges me to continue trying.
A few hours later, completely spent, I pull up on shore and lay on my back in a couple centimeters of water, my board still leashed to my ankle. Staring straight up, my eyes slightly closed to shield from raindrops, my entire field of vision is filled with scalloped cloud. Being out here is as close to the edge of the world as I could imagine. A pure elemental expanse.
With no one around to observe me, I can lie here, content and indulging in my flights of fancy.
But eventually, I pick myself up and battle through the break again. And not too long afterward, it happens. I’m in the right place, at the right time, a wave jacks up and I don’t fall off. I’m standing up on my two hind legs, just as God intended. I’m surfing.
My dismount may have left the judges wanting but after I come up out of the water, sputtering through a open-mouthed grin, ‘HO-LY!’, I crane around like a boy who just rode without training wheels, looking for whoever bore witness. But there is no one.
I’d like to say that the moment was just as sweet, among these cold, remote, and inconsistent winter waves, but if misery likes company, ecstasy absolutely demands it.