It’s hard to imagine the modern surfer as the Hawaiian aristocrat, worshipping the ocean and its creatures. A frenzied consumer of acai bowls, fat-tired electric bikes, 4×4 Jeeps, boat trips and surf camps on private islands, the figure of the rebellious, adventurous, anti-social surfer also seems to be receding a little further each day. It’s only natural, after all, since surfers are no different from other men in that they are part of their time, surfing the waves of history.
The commercial society finds in surfing an extraordinary breeding ground, feeding off its many facets: the return to nature, the seventies, travel, hedonism, the taste for risk, the beauty of the body. And if we strip away all this mercantile decorum, the fact remains that surfing as a sporting discipline commits every accomplished surfer to a path that diverts him or her from social conventions and, in particular, from time as it is perceived and experienced in developed countries.
Because it’s a natural sport. To be fulfilled, it must conform to the rhythm of nature, which is not the time of office hours, the time of the 5-day week, the time of Sunday rest, the time of school or the time of religious celebrations. It’s a form of pantheism, a supreme respect for lunar cycles and multiple subtle atmospheric parameters.
The same applies to the Capbretonnais fisherman who leaves port at high tide because he knows that at full tide, the channel becomes dangerous; or to the farmer who follows the lunar calendar for planting and the variations in the weather. Likewise, there are good times for surfing and bad times, and these times are constantly changing.
There’s no fixed schedule for surfing, unlike other sports that don’t have an unstable natural environment as their playground, the ocean being the personification of chaos. To find order in disorder, you have to bend to the rules of the ocean and its waves on shore. You have to accept the unexpected, the variable, the absence of a pre-established program.
The abolition of social time
We leave our workplaces for the vacations, longing for adventure and the unexpected, but our conditioning is such that it’s sometimes difficult to break away from the timed PROGRAMMING of our daily lives. Vacation time, which is a time for rest and letting go, has to be rationalized to such an extent that the encounter with the ocean sometimes just can’t happen.
This is true of all ocean-related activities: the topography of the beach means that swimming becomes dangerous at certain times of the tide, while at other times of the day, conditions will be mild and clement on the same stretch of beach. The tide, controlled by lunar cycles, shifts by 40 to 50 minutes every day, and its amplitude varies daily and weekly.
But there are other parameters that will enable you to swim or surf in complete safety: the size of the swell, its intensity, the strength and direction of the wind, the possible presence of a thunderstorm – all conditions that are impossible to predict long in advance. There are a multitude of tools available for forecasting swell and swell quality a week in advance, but like the weather newspaper, more than 3 days ahead is far from absolute accuracy.
For example, a fixed schedule for surfing is heresy, nonsense and even dangerous. Sometimes, at Ki Surf School, a stranger calls me to book a surf lesson on such-and-such a day at such-and-such an hour, down to the minute. I explain why, but sometimes I lose a client. Never mind, I’m not sending pizzas, I’m selling an experience to people with different sensibilities, and it has to be done in the best possible conditions. The ocean is a potentially dangerous environment if you don’t abide by its rules, which are set in a time that is nature’s time.
Isn’t the surfer a bit of an animist, complying with the commands of a superior force emanating from the combined elements of wind, swell, land and sea? This form of abandonment is the opposite of social time, which should be productive and which discredits the so-called idler. Meditation, for example, would be a waste of time, when on the contrary it enables us to refocus on ourselves and escape the hubbub and inane agitation of the world. The same is true of surfing, which forces you to let go, following the variations of the elements; the whole experience is contained in this abandonment.
The surfer’s enemy
Sunday lunch
As a result, surfers are often misunderstood. The father of a family who takes to the roads every weekend to play his rugby match is excused, but when the surfer refuses an invitation to eat because the waves are nice, it’s considered heresy.
Perfect surfing conditions are rare, and to miss them in order to eat grilled sausages all afternoon and drink rosé is inconceivable for any self-respecting surfer. But society doesn’t accept this excuse for the variability of the natural environment: social time must always take precedence over natural time.
I can’t, I have a pool
Just as a good wave doesn’t come along every day, postponing a swimming or tennis session won’t have any major consequences: the pool water will still be as flat and chlorinated as ever, and the tennis court will still look the same. On the other hand, in the ocean, the perfect waves will sometimes have been replaced by large waves distorted by the wind, to take a telling example.
Cancellation of a pre-booked course
Cancelling a surfing lesson at the last minute, unless you’re ill or in difficulty, is also rather badly perceived. On the one hand, booking a surf lesson presupposes respecting your commitments.
But more importantly, beyond the financial loss to the surf school, the student who cancels his or her session at the last minute prevents another individual who was unable to join the group because it was full, from benefiting from a highly enriching experience. The excuse of lunch, pony-riding or fatigue is not acceptable. To deprive another surfer of his pleasure is pure madness, and he will resent you for the rest of his life, so addictive is the exhilaration of surfing.
The traveling surfer
Surfers immersed in other cultures discover that some people don’t follow the time of the clock. When the moon is full, the saltwater people of the Solomon Islands stay out all night chatting.
Any project can be put off until tomorrow. The fisherman, if he’s tired, takes a rest and goes out to sea next time. Because social time is above all money time. The guinea pig has to run constantly to keep the system’s wheels turning. We tell him fables to make him hate not the master who chains him to the machine, but rather the multitude who have little more wealth than he does, but seem to make a little less: so, in the same basket, civil servants (because they have social benefits), rmistes (because they don’t work), immigrants, seasonal workers (because they sometimes receive social benefits during their non-working period) and surfers on holiday (because they’re not supposed to stop working).
The surfer who travels to indulge his passion is sometimes the enemy in his own family. Here again, social and family time make it indecent to take more than a 2-week vacation.
Surfing is more than just a sport: it’s about stripping yourself of all those social fables, and devoting yourself to the pursuit of personal fulfillment. Which doesn’t mean you can’t adore your job, your family and your children.
In fact, telecommuting is becoming increasingly popular, enabling people to organize their time according to the rhythms of nature, which encompasses their bio-rhythm and temperament in a natural environment. If you take a surfer away from the ocean, he’ll dry up.
