If you’ve ever wondered about Arctic Surf Blog using idealistic utopian mythification to paint the polar coasts as an unaccessible earthly paradise isolated from the outside world, you might be correct. That’s why this article is about Vancouver Island. The following is an honest dialogue about the place from local wave surfer Alex Haro. Alex is an adventurist who took a break from oil rigging and forest fire fighting to spend a few summer months warming in the lower latitudes of Southern California.

How would you compare/contrast Vancouver Island surf culture with Southern California surf culture?

There’s way more of a scene in SoCal.  Tight pants and flannel jackets are everywhere. Cousteau-style beanies grace the top of the hottest heads, and everyone seems to be making sure they’re talking to the right person.  People’s pockets are filled with names, and they drop them all over the place. I keep tripping over them.  But, that being said, it is pretty much the centre of the surfing universe, and this is where to come if you want to be involved in the industry. Vancouver Island definitely has its share of name droppers, but they’re all dropping two names: Devries or Bruhwiler.  Localism can get kind of bad there, too, but none of it is too serious.  There have been a few broken windows here and there, but mostly it’s just grumpy old dudes that hate the fact that the Island is slowly getting discovered.

What are some ways you’ve seen surfers handle cold temperatures on Vancouver Island?

As long as you have a decent 5/4/3 suit, you’ll be fine.  Boots and gloves help a lot if you plan on staying out more than 5 minutes.  I’ve never seen anyone with Vaseline on their face like the stories you hear from the east coast, but maybe it’s colder there.  Or maybe we have thicker skin.  Another good one is carrying a flask in your suit.  A bit of whiskey never hurt anyone, and it’s hilarious when you see someone tipping one while they’re sitting outside.

What is it like to surf there?

Lots of waves don’t have any noticeable trail into them; you need to know where they are. You sort of have to bushwack a little to get down to them.  I’ve got a couple of friends who found a wave last year and cut a trail down to it with chainsaws.  At the end of it is a 60 foot cliff to the water. Gnarly. We still haven’t surfed it, but we’re waiting for the right swell. If you go to the right place, you can find lots of perfect, shallow points, long paddles, huge trees, bears… it’s rugged and beautiful.  It’s rewarding.

Do you prefer surfing in remote cold water places?

Honestly, I can’t stand cold water.  It’s nice to do it for a couple of days, but if we have a swell filled winter, I’m pretty over it by the spring.  It does add an element of excitement, though.  Hiking in, crazy weather, it’s all part of the experience.  I love it when I’m not there, and I hate it when I am. I miss it until I go back. I’m in a constant conundrum where I’m trying to decide between cold and empty and warm and crowded.  I love warm water, but it always seems to be full of people.  Crowds suck.  So does cold water.  I want my own tropical island with a perfect right point right out front.  Is that so much to ask for?

According to the rare-earth hypothesis, there is a strict set of conditions that allows life on earth to succeed. Imagine our planet was moved a few inches from its current path: the factors that keep us alive would be changed enough to drastically alter the earth into a dusty orbiting rock. Even within the comforts of our atmosphere life is sensitive and vulnerable. This is the case in the severe climates of the poles, and it’s why there are not a lot of people living on the islands off the coast of Antarctica.

On one such island it’s not only cold, but it’s illegal to make a landing without papers, so there truly is no one there. But say you are interested in going there, and all the correct forms are filed, and you’re approved, and you’ve registered with the captain of the ice-busting  “Polar Bird” and paid your way, even then you would only be granted a few days’ access.

You’ll need to spend each night on the boat because there are no man-made anythings on the island. And everything you bring to land must be collected and brought back off the island. These are some of the reasons why no one has ever come to surf here and why it could be a long time until anyone does. But beyond these difficulties lies an island so mysterious and so furious that it would gray even the most colorful arctic surf fantasies.

The island, which is about the size of Martha’s Vineyard combined with Nantucket Island, has 17 known sandy and reefy point breaks.  The proposed names for these breaks, starting from the northern tip of the island and going clockwise, are: Cosmic Lefts, The Cove, The Station, The Sledge, Prometheus, Quasar Reef, Numbs, Ninnies, Noobs, The Spit, He-Man, Doom Reef, Leviathan Left, The Terminal, Frosties, Pod, and Gandalf.

While I’m not sure if armchair naming of breaks is allowed — someone told me that I have to be the first to surf it to name it — I feel like having these names establishes the breaks in our minds and on the map and brings them out of the abstract, all of which they rightly deserve. There are a few waves that look to be some of the biggest waves on the planet, and one or two lefts that are longer than G-land.

There may be a profundity of waves in a small area, but it doesn’t change the reality of how unfriendly this place is. It is rare to see anyone here. Mankind on this cold and hostile rock is like volcanic lava flows mingling with glacial terminals. What I mean is the two are very different things, and when they come into contact with each other the stronger always wins. So if mankind naturally gravitates toward a strict set of conditions in which life is comfortably preserved (which he does), then why the fascination with such severe and deadly beauty?

Iceland: Every day roughly 65,387 flights are coming and going from the capital city of Reykjavík. These planes ferry bankers, economists, tourists, musicians, writers, politicians, farmers, craftsmen, builders, scientists, and psychologists back and forth between the home island and separate lands.

Desolation Island: there are no flights to Desolation Island. No one has ever landed here, ever! And there are no cities. The only representation of mankind is a small outpost of nomadic scientists studying the island’s biological profundities, like the wingless butterfly. Desolation Island is one of the most remote places on earth – not to mention one of the most difficult to get to – and yet it has a few things in common with Iceland.

Both of these islands are geological masterpieces. They have a bunch of fjords, glaciers, and tons of treeless ice-scapes. If you look at a picture of the two side by side you might easily mistake one for the other. Also, Iceland is close to the 50º latitude, while Desolation is close to the 50º latitude, south. The island is stowed away in the Furious Fifities, a vast conveyor belt of meteorological monstrosities located in the southern hemisphere. Giant sea storms rage here unobstructed and free of continental road blocks. When storms descend on the island it’s with velocity. Desolation Island is the Iceland of the south, but wilder, less elvish, and more defiant. No one has ever surfed here. But like Iceland, pack your hoods and booties, because there’s surf.

As I think some more about Desolation Island, I wonder what it’s actually like to surf there. What’s it actually like? And what are the chances that I’ll see a photo of Dane Reynolds throwing fins there like he did that time back in Iceland when he was wearing a tweed overcoat and a bus-full of famous surfers almost slipped off an icy cliff?

The fact of the matter is, getting to the cold is all about cash. It will take the resources and interest in sending four professional surfers to the bottom of the world. But who’s going to go to an island with no airports and only a handful of gravel roads and the first nazi grave from World War 2?

Wherever there’s money, there’s people. Surfing is not about people, it’s about no people surfing good waves. And its also about money, so that no people surfing good waves equals lots of money. Therefore I conclude, the time it will take to see a photo feature of someone shredding Desolation Island is the time it will take to surf all the other unsurfed places on this planet that are less expensive and more easily accessed. Until then we can only imagine the island’s picnic basket of icy Uluwatus peeling off into the sunset with no one there but nomadic scientists and wingless butterflies.

Lone man sits on his board a few yards out from the beach, staring toward the sea in a catatonic pose as if looking past the horizon. Notice that his posture is immutable and transcendent of time and space, the way his arms are rigidly held at his side, the way he continuously looks ahead.

Who knows how long he has sat here this way. A thousand years?

A perfect A-frame set begins to build directly in front of him. The wave grows, but surfer remains in rigid posture. He finds it unnecessary to move. As wave reaches its breaking point, surfer lays down on board, aims toward shore, takes four complete strokes, drops in.

This absurdity is the Everyday Surfer’s Dream. The surfer only had to make the most fundamentally necessary movements to catch this wave, the ocean did the rest. Perfect wave, perfect position, perfect paddle speed, in-sync and in rhythm. It is so simple it actually appears to be mundane and arbitrary. Most striking, however, is the existential loneliness of it all. To watch this scenario unwind over and over again gives a strange sense of cosmic determinism in the vein of Groundhog Day, where every day repeats itself like the last.

Isn’t this the ultimate goal in surfing, to find a completely isolated A-frame peak that breaks the exact same way all day long?

The World’s Third Most Desirable Arctic Surf Spot: Arctic Norway. This environmentally pristine and secluded surf sanctuary is a friendly finger in the scandinavian neighborhood, next door to the Nobel Prize awarding Sweden. Closely rivaling wave-rich Chile in geographical skinniness, Norway gets a gold star for cold wave quality. Why the most desirable? Colorful beach cottages and fishing villages, dramatic mountainous scenery, and a unique species of arctic ocean shark make Norway a prime choice to surf in the arctic.

Photo Credit

The photo below shows a different angle on a different day. Look at waves peeling further in to the inlet. Pretty interesting. With some bigger swells there would be some nice waves coming through these parts.

top photo cred: sanda, bottom photo cred: christensen

#5: Falling into 5th place is alaskan glacier surfing. Why is this the most desirable? Because the wave is perfect, the scenery is breathtaking, and the water is freezing cold glacier-melt. If it’s so good, why is it in 5th place? The melting water of glaciers deposits enormous amounts of sediment, meaning the water is thick with silt, almost mud-like, making the actual surfing experience a little bit more unpleasant than what one would be used to day-to-day.

#4: Number four on the list of the Absolutely Most Desirable Place To Surf In the Arctic or Antarctic Regions is none other than Elephant Island. Scouted by Steve Hawk and Chris Malloy, this small chunk of rock close to Antarctica had some surfable waves worthy of a news arcticle in the LA Times. Made famous by  Sir Ernest Shackleton’s renown expedition and survival story, these courageous surfers have contributed to arctic-surf history by pulling into a few icy shackletons of their own.

Finally Arctic Surf Blog resumes. Thank you to those of you who have held tight, and are still dedicated to discovering interesting facts about surfing in the arctic and antarctic. In this post I would like to pose a question to you, the reader. Please list the top 5 freezing cold places to surf that you find are the most desirable. I will be compiling a list of my own, utilizing the extensive database of research we have at our disposal here at our station, and will post the definitive 2010 Most Desirable Arctic Surf Spots shortly. Remember to take into consideration the beauty of the natural environment, lack of inaccessibility, harshness of weather, perfection of surf, viciousness of the wildlife, and friendliness of the surf culture as factors in gaining a higher desirability. Looking forward to seeing your votes!

A nordic depiction of this spot in the northern coastal region of Canada: