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Scott in Sport: Surf
Friday 28th May, 3pm, meet at the Sports Centre.
Luckily it was another sunny day as Friday dawned and I was really excited about trying surfing again. I have only ever done two days of surfing and that was two years ago, so I was expecting to be right back at square one and was a little apprehensive as a result. When we met up, I had the usual nerves about meeting a new club and being “that sports president girl” or similar rather than just Emily, but the Surf Club made me feel wholly welcome right from the off.
We grabbed the key to the container and traipsed inside to get surf boards. I opted for a foam one as that’s what I had been on when I previously tried and they are meant to be easier, I think because they float better. We put the roof racks onto the cars and strapped the boards on top. After tightening up all the strapping, we hopped into the cars and then hit the road.
I was driving and had five in my car. I could certainly feel the extra weight, especially going up the hills, and it was a bit odd having the surf boards on the roof as I could see both ends through the windscreen and in my mirror. We hit the A64 to head eastwards towards the coast to find a huge amount of traffic. Unfortunately, we had failed to appreciate that it was a Friday afternoon of a sunny bank holiday weekend and the road was rammed with caravans! We decided to be brave and opted to take the small country roads rather than sit in traffic and get frustrated. It wasn’t long before we discovered the East Riding of Yorkshire is incredibly beautiful and even if the journey may have taken the same length of time had we just sat in the traffic, we certainly felt we had made the right choice.
At one point, the boards started slipping a bit from my roof, so we had to have a bit of a stop to re-tighten them on, but it wasn’t long before we were back on the road. The journey was really good, full of good chat and tunes (good passenger seat DJing!). We got to Cayton Bay (slightly down the coast from Scarborough) around 5.30pm after a much slower than usual journey, parked up and got kitted out.
I had brought my wetsuit with me, but there are wetsuits available for hire from the surf shop that the club uses on a regular basis. When I pulled my wetsuit out of the bag though, I pretty much got laughed at – not only is it rather big for me (due to an unfortunate assumption of my mother that I would grow into it, which I guess is fair considering it was a 12th birthday present!), it’s rather old (I’m now 23 – eek!) and is apparently really thin compared to what everyone else was wearing. Mine was a 2-3 (I’m not quite sure what the numbers mean, but they are an indication of thickness), and everyone else was in wetsuits that were 5-3. I assured everyone that I’d be fine and that I was a hardy Northern Irish girl used to swimming in lakes and the Atlantic from a young age, so I was given some gloves, booties and a hood to borrow and we headed towards the beach.
We walked down a steep track to get to the sea and I was told stories of how the track can get really slippery when it’s icy and they were telling me how they’ve been surfing in the snow. I was starting to think they were a little crazy! I know I would rather not go anywhere near the sea, let alone spend quite a lot of time in it whilst attempting to surf, if it was snowing – what’s wrong with curling up under a duvet with a Disney film eh?!
When we got to the beach, I practiced my ‘pop-up’ a few times on the sand so that hopefully I would remember roughly what I needed to do to stand up should I actually manage to catch a wave. It went okay and we headed into the water. It wasn’t long before I started to get I the Beach Boys ‘Surfing USA’ into my head and knew I wouldn’t be able to get it out for ages!
It was so much fun in the sea! I managed to stand up before too long and was so proud of myself that of course I promptly fell off my board and back into the water. I also decided that I quite liked body boarding and knee boarding on my surf board when I couldn’t quite muster myself into a standing position. I did keep trying to catch waves after they had broken though and kept ending up back at the shore, when everyone else was more disciplined and waited for the ones that would be worth it, as well as not necessarily catching them the whole way back to the shore.
One of the boys came and got me after a while and brought me out beyond the breakers with them. I thought I would act like a pro-surfer and sit on my board dangling my legs into the water looking cool whilst waiting for the right wave. That was all well and good, but I then clearly forgot that I wasn’t any sort of pro-surfer and decided to try to go for a wave that was definitely much too big for me to even attempt. However, attempt it I did and the result was an epic fail! I must have ended up doing about five full rotations in the water and was mildly concerned that I was going to strangle myself on my surf board’s leash. I was completely fine though and when I reappeared on the surface rather sheepishly, I was pretty chuffed with the impressed comments I got – not that I had succeeded in the slightest, but that I had been bold and attempted it!
Unfortunately, it wasn’t too long before I realised why everyone else was wearing thicker wetsuits and why it’s quite important your wetsuit fits. I had forgotten at some point in my bragging about swimming in the Atlantic that the North-West coast of Ireland is blessed with the warm Gulf Stream, which keeps the Atlantic Ocean at a more bearable temperature around those parts. This is something the North Sea does not have!! I somehow seemed to end up with constant pools of flowing water streaming into my mittens and booties that never warmed up even slightly. This made me a rather cold and I got out at one point to do some star jumps on the beach with the intention of warming up.
After nearly two hours in all, I decided to call it a day given how my body temperature seemed to be falling constantly and I was starting to feel completely knackered. I realised another disadvantage about being small was that when I tried to battle past the breakers I would often get picked up and dragged back towards the shore each time, taking me longer and longer to get beyond them and making me more and more tired. I let the others know I was going to head back to the cars and waved a fond farewell to the chilly sea.
Then I got back to the car and took a while to warm up. The next person came back only about ten minutes after me and the hardcore people stayed out for perhaps another half an hour after that. We then all got dried off and I wished for Ugg boots to warm my toes up, before hopping back into the cars. Before we hit the road properly, we went to get Fish & Chips, which we all felt we whole-heartedly deserved!
We ended up back in York around 10.30pm after a fantastic afternoon with an awesome bunch of people. I would definitely recommend going surfing if you fancy it – they club is incredibly welcoming, whether or not you are akin to Jack Johnson (in his pro-surfer rather than singing days) or if you’ve never tried it before. You need to be able to swim though, but apart from that I would say the only pre-requisite is being keen to have fun!
Until next time,
Emily xo
