Top Scottish surfers head to Shetland for Gathering of the Clans club contest

About 20 years ago, I travelled to San Francisco for a friend’s wedding. After the ceremony, which was held in an almost ridiculously picturesque white clapboard chapel just across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin County, the best man and I hired a car and did what tourists in that situation are supposed to do: took the Pacific Coast Highway down to LA.

The best man wasn’t a surfer, and we had to get to La La Land and back on a fairly tight schedule, but there was no way I was going to drive past a surf spot as iconic as Malibu without at least stopping off and paying my respects, so one sunny afternoon we parked up, crossed the highway and headed down onto the hallowed sand.

Of course, I knew that Malibu got crowded – local legend Miki Dora famously said the place had been “ruined” by crowds way back in the 1960s – but somewhere in the back of my mind I guess I’d been hoping that somehow we’d miraculously catch it on a quiet day, and I might be able to paddle out and sneak a wave or two.

Not a chance. The break was so rammed with surfers that, from a distance, they almost looked like a swarm of insects. Very occasionally, somebody would manage to catch a wave without anyone else getting in their way and come soaring all the way down the point. When that happened, if only for a few moments, the place looked like heaven on earth. Most of the time, though, it looked like a scene from an aquatic version of Wacky Races. From a surfing perspective, early-noughties Malibu seemed to me like the epitome of paradise lost.

In retrospect, however, I should probably have paddled out and taken my chances back then, because – if recent reports are to be believed – the Malibu of 20 years ago was a much, much easier place to get a wave than the nightmare of today. For a start, post-lockdown the crowds are said to be noticeably heavier, partly because so many people took up surfing during the pandemic, but in addition to that, there now seems to be an almost total breakdown of wave etiquette.

This nuanced system that prevents surf breaks descending into chaos is too complicated to go into in detail here, but long story short: the surfer closest to the breaking part of the wave has priority, and everyone else should do their best to stay out of his or her way. Where this code is adhered to by the majority, most people out surfing a given spot on a given day should be able to get waves; where it’s widely ignored, however, well... then you just get chaos.

This is what seems to have been happening at Malibu recently, and things came to a head the other week when a 59-year-old Malibu resident called Andy Lyon collided with a younger surfer, chased his surfboard in to the beach and then smashed a large rock into it, leaving an ugly hole in the bottom. Inevitably, somebody was on hand to video the whole affair, and when they posted the footage on Tiktok the “Angriest Man in Surfing” went viral, found himself at the centre of a social media bunfight, and was ultimately let go by his employer.

Whatever your views on the Angry Man case (and there’s quite a range within the surfing world), it illustrates just how much tension there is out there in the water at Malibu, where there is now an almighty mismatch between the number of waves available to ride, and the number or surfers trying to ride them.

In Scotland, happily, this isn’t a maths puzzle that anyone really needs to worry about. True, some of the better spots can get crowded when the waves are good, but in general the numbers are in our favour: there are still many more waves out there to surf during each good swell than there are surfers competing for them. And in some places, of course, the numbers are particularly favourable. That’s certainly the case in Shetland, where even if all 23,000-odd residents were dedicated shredders, there would probably still be plenty of waves rolling through unridden.

That said, however, for a few days next month, the waves around Sumburgh could be significantly busier than usual, as it has been named as the likely venue for the Scottish Surfing Federation’s annual club competition, the Gathering of the Clans. At time of going to press, there’s still some uncertainty over whether this year’s Gathering will take place on 17-18 September or 15-16 October. Whenever it happens though, it should be interesting to see what the best surfers in the land can do in waves that are rarely ridden by anyone bar a lucky bunch of locals.

Could a reasonably high-profile competition result in more surfers making the journey over to Shetland in search of new waves to ride in the future? Perhaps. But it’ll be a while before Sumburgh locals are having to deal with anything like the kind of numbers that led to the Angry Man incident at Malibu.

There are still many more waves out there to surf than there are surfers competing for them

For more on this year’s Gathering of the Clans event – including confirmation of dates – see thessf. com and keep an eye on the Scottish Surfing Federation Facebook page