The Scotsman

Surfing in summer is fun, but autumn brings the best conditions – and a sting in the tale

- Rogercox @outdoorsco­ts

There’s something special about the first proper swell of the autumn. After several months of making the best of the mostly small, mostly gentle waves of the North Sea summer, September’s first pulse grabs your attention like a slap in the face. Even if the waves themselves aren’t necessaril­y all that much bigger than the last time you got wet, they have more weight to them somehow, more punch, more heft. The air is cooler and crisper, the sun a little lower in the sky, the shadows cast by the cliffs slightly longer than you remember them. And when you drop into your first wave and feel, for the first time in a long time, a burst of real accelerati­on under your feet, you remember why you bothered surfing all those pointlessl­y small days back in July and August: to stay in some kind of shape for this, surfing’s golden time of year.

Because September is when the North Sea kicks itself out of bed, brews itself a pot of strong coffee and gets on with the serious business of making waves. If you’re unlucky, you might get a few weeks of ugly, short-interval windswell kicked up by small, local storms. At least once or twice, though, a big low pressure system will roar across the Atlantic and up into the northern reaches of the North Sea, sending thick bands of long-interval groundswel­l reeling in our direction. And when that happens, and the sun shines, and the wind wafts gently offshore, the east coast of Scotland – for a limited time only – becomes a true surfers’ paradise.

September is also a sociable time of year, a time when people you may not have heard from for a while start getting back in touch. It’s hard to phone somebody up in the dog days of summer and see if they want to come and mess around in two-foot

ankle-slappers, but when the online swell charts abandon the customary light blue of summer (signifying little or no swell) and start turning all the colours of the rainbow, well... then it feels OK to start making plans.

I’d been watching the charts gradually turning promising shades of yellow and orange and was about to text my friend Steve when he beat me to it: “fancy a surf?” We hadn’t seen each other for ages, but it was straight back to the old routine: same stretch of coast as usual, same quick discussion about which spot to surf, same decision to paddle out in the same place as the last time we were here – and the time before that, and the time before that... There were probably all kinds of places up and down the coast with much better waves breaking at that exact moment, but we had occasional zippy, shoulder-high right-handers all to ourselves and we didn’t really care.

One thing that makes a proper autumn groundswel­l feel different to a summer sort-of swell is the interval between waves: on this day the interval was 11 seconds; in the middle of summer you’d be happy enough with eight. This makes it easier to put yourself in the right place to catch an incoming wave and it makes it easier to paddle back out again (two fewer waves landing on your head every minute), but it can also mean more time spent sitting out the back, waiting for the next set to rear up on the horizon; and it was during one of these lulls that I was stung by a compass jellyfish. I was sitting on my board, looking out to sea and absent-mindedly stirring the water with my hands when I felt what I thought was a piece of kelp between my right thumb and forefinger. Perhaps because my hands were cold, I didn’t immediatel­y register that I’d been stung; it was only when I blew on them to warm them up that I started to feel a tingling sensation, a bit like a nettle sting. Then I glanced down and saw the culprit: a beautiful translucen­t dome with brown v-shapes radiating out from the centre and tentacles drifting around underneath. In more than 20 years of surfing on the east coast I had seen plenty of these creatures washed up on the beach and a few of them bobbing about in the water, but I’d never actually been stung by one. I’d always wondered what it would feel like and now I was pleased to discover it wasn’t all that bad.

The long-distance swimmer Lewis Pugh said that one of the biggest problems he faced on his recent endurance swim from one end of the English Channel to the other was the number of jellyfish stings he had to endure, but on the whole my first jellyfish encounter was a positive experience. It was almost as if this sensation was something I should have been familiar with after all the hours I’d spent in the water – a rite of passage that was long overdue. Then again, if I was spending five hours in the sea every day for 49 days wearing nothing but a pair of Speedos and some lard, I suppose I might feel differentl­y.

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