Those who mapped Scotland’s great surfing spots, we salute you
Tomorrow, Sunday 2 September, will be the 50th anniversary of one of the key moments in Scottish surfing history – the day when three Edinburgh surfers, Andy Bennetts, Ian Wishart and Stuart Chrichton met up with Aberdonian surfer George Law on Aberdeen Beach, thereby establishing that they were not the only surfers in the country (as they’d previously assumed) and laying the groundwork for what would eventually become the distinctive Scottish surf scene we have today.
To mark the occasion, Final Words met up with Bennetts, Wishart and their friend Bill Batten, another pioneering Scottish surfer, and asked them to share some of their memories of the good old days – days when the waves were empty, the boards were long and the wetsuits were either homemade or nonexistent. Last week and the week before we dealt with the crew’s discoveries in South-east Scotland and the famous trip to Aberdeen in 1968; this week we look at what came next – the gradual realisation that there were great surf spots to be found all around the country, just waiting for somebody to come along and surf them for the first time.
In the early days, Bennetts points out, there wasn’t much incentive to go looking for waves beyond the breaks of East Lothian and the Borders. Once they’d found spots like Belhaven, Pease Bay and Coldingham – all within easy striking distance of Edinburgh and with nobody else around to surf them – there wasn’t much point wasting valuable water time searching elsewhere. That said, they did occasionally try surfing in different places just for the hell of it. Batten remembers one session at Dunbar that got him into trouble with the law.
“I surfed off the rocks at Dunbar once,” he remembers, “where the harbour is – in the town itself. That wasn’t a great idea because the police pulled me in and said ‘What are you doing? We were about to send the lifeboat out for you!’
“I thought ‘The lifeboat would probably have been wrecked, but I’d have been alright.’”
No matter how good the waves on the east coast were, however, it was only ever going to be a matter of time before Scotland’s surfers started looking west, to the powerful waves of the Atlantic. Travel times and costs being what they were in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the islands were a tricky proposition, but Machrihanish, on the swell-exposed southern tip of the Mull of Kintyre, was a little more accessible (although only a little), so it seemed like an obvious place to try.
Although it can have great waves in certain conditions, Machrihanish and the spots nearby have a fairly narrow swell window so they can be maddeningly inconsistent, and in the days before accurate surf forecasts this made a trip there even more of a gamble than it is today. “Machrihanish is relatively sheltered,” says Bennetts, “so you didn’t really know when you set off whether there were going to be waves until you got there.”
The next major discovery was just around the corner, however, and it was Batten who made it, stumbling upon the untapped surfing potential of Scotland’s north coast completely by accident.
“I went to a wedding up there in about 1970,” he says, “to a place called Bettyhill. I looked out of the window in the morning and these waves were rolling in and I thought ‘Oh wow, this is the place to be!’ I didn’t have a board with me of course, but I did have a trip up there very quickly after that and that got the north shore going.”
The now-famous barrels peeling along the reef at Thurso East weren’t surfed until the mid-1970s, and they didn’t really appear on the surfing world’s radar until 1978, when Liverpudlian transplant Pat Kieran finally got lonely surfing them all by himself and wrote an article for an English surfing magazine appealing for people to come and join him.
In the early 70s, however, before Thurso became synonymous with surf, Batten, Bennetts, Wishart and Co found plenty of other great spots to keep them entertained around Bettyhill.
“Bettyhill was good because there was a choice of waves up there,” says Bennetts. “You had Torrisdale, Farr Bay, Strathy... and nobody else had ever been up there [to surf ] as far as we knew.
“The thing I remember about going up to Bettyhill was the drive,” he continues. “You used to leave work [in Edinburgh] at four o’clock on Friday night and you drove for hours and hours and you got to Bettyhill at halfpast eleven, because there was no Kessock Bridge, it was the Kessock Ferry, and there was no Cromarty Bridge either. We took the single track road for the last bit from Helmsdale, by which time it was usually getting dark. So there would be three or four cars charging up this single track road, being aware of sheep...”
And that seems like as good a place as any to leave our three surfing pioneers, driving north through the lonely countryside of Sutherland as night falls, a little string of tail-lights following the winding course of the River Halladale towards the sea, and the promise of waves in the morning.
Surfing, it is often said, is a sport that leaves no trace, but everyone who has surfed in Scottish waters since Bennetts, Batten and Wishart has been following in their footsteps, whether they realised it or not.
“I looked out of the window in the morning and thought ‘Oh wow, this is the place to be!’”