Master the waves
We try some world-class windsurfing in Scotland
WORDS | ALEX RAYNER
PHOTOGRAPHY | JOHN CARTER
SPLASH! AFTER 14 YEARS OF NEAR UNBROKEN SHORE LEAVE I have found my way back on to a windsurfer. But the board-and-sail contraption that used to carry me easily across the sea has taken to pitching me in it instead.
I’m quaking a little as I approach the water, hoping that the wind, sails and water won’t prove quite so cruel as they have been of late. You see, I was once pretty good at this. In 1996, when I was 20, I spent a summer teaching windsurfing at an English holiday resort in northern Sardinia. What time I didn’t devote to teaching the guests, I patiently applied to my own skills. At the season’s end, I was as good as I was going to get at any sport, and I could cut about across the bay with all the agility of a fluoro-flecked porpoise. Well, that’s how it felt at the time.
Since then, I’ve tried to recapture those salad days, with lessening degrees of success. A decade back I rented a board in Morocco and managed to get it up to a pretty swift clip before somersaulting through its sail and wrecking a few thousand dirhams-worth of kit.
More recently, an afternoon flailing about in Fuerteventura’s shore break set me against the sport. I couldn’t even leave the beach and, after an hour or so messing about in the surf, I had to return to the hire shop, defeated.
My life on the ocean’s waves might have ended there, had I not come to the Tiree Wave Classic. This event, held on a small flat island in the Inner Hebrides, is a major fixture on the international windsurfing calendar and celebrates its 25th anniversary later this year. Relearning my watersports skills in the presence of some of the world’s best practitioners might not have been the wisest sporting decision that I’ve ever made. Yet Tiree remains an enviable spot for the pastime, whether you’re a highly skilled pro or a wary rank amateur.
The Wave Classic’s founder, Andy Groom, remembers the point in the sport’s development, back in 1985, when, thanks to technical innovation, windsurfing went “from being all about a fat bloke on a bit of plastic to a high-tech sport, much more like surfing.”
A straight-talking Englishman, Groom ran the Glasgow extreme sports shop Seventh Wave prior to the cup’s foundation. He first heard of Tiree’s winds from a friend who had been making a documentary about the island’s crofters. Groom took a surf safari to Tiree, which lies just beyond Mull, 20 miles from the Scottish mainland and he held the inaugural competition on the island’s virgin gales and waves. Catching the extreme sports wave well before it broke, Groom’s tournament has since become one of the world’s most revered, especially for riders who look for waves rather than speed.
“If this were Formula One,” says Northern Ireland’s Timo Mullen, one of the UK’s top five wave riders, “then this is Monaco. It’s the most prestigious wave competition in Europe. I’ve travelled all over the world and I still believe the best waves I ever get are in Scotland.”
While no one doubts the event’s appeal to elite wave sailors, long shadows have been cast over its financial viability. Though Groom and co are celebrating the Wave Classic’s quarter century, they haven’t had an unbroken run of competitions.
“The event actually stopped in the late 1990s,” explains Groom over a cup of tea in the island’s An Talla community centre, which serves as a kind of clubhouse during the tournament. “You need a lot of cash to put on something like this, and it just became harder and harder.”
Indeed, the Wave Classic’s fortunes mirror both the island and the sport’s fate. Tiree’s soil is fertile, the climate surprisingly warm, and the island thrived during the 1830s, with its population swelling to 4,500. Yet the Highland clearances and New World emigration diminished the isle’s population to just over 700 inhabitants today, with farming and tourism supporting the hardy lot who remain on this surprisingly flat, pastoral island, edged with silver-white sand.
Windsurfing’s rise and fall might not have so wide a historical sweep, yet it’s just as choppy. Duncan Coombs won the first Wave Classic and has returned over the years to judge later competitions. An early international champion, Coombs was ranked among the best in the world, and remembered a time when windsurfing attracted an ever-growing phalanx of sponsors, TV broadcasters and budding fans. These good fortunes changed, he believes, during the early ‘90s.
“It became a little too expensive,” he says. “There was a recession, and rather than flooding the market with affordable stuff, manufacturers decided to cut the amount of people doing it but put the price up.”
Other equally thrilling sports, such as snowboarding and surfing began to compete for the same market share; interest dropped off and participation declined. Though Britain is still a centre for windsurfing excellence, the sport remains a minority interest, which is a pity, as it has never been easier to pick up.
At the island’s Wild Diamond windsurfing school I’m surprised by how much the kit has improved. Boards, once as long and thin as those used in surfing, are now shorter, with lots of buoyancy at the stern, giving unsteady sailors like me a less wobbly ride. The sails are almost solely constructed from monofilm, a lightweight but super-strong material.
Once, putting on wetsuit felt like cramming yourself into a damp catsuit sewn together from carpet underlay. A decade and a half on, these garments have got thinner, warmer and comfier. Rather than looking as though they add half a stone to your figure, the new suits even manage to be slightly flattering. Masts are also thinner, and booms (the wishbone-shaped piece that sailors hold on to) feel sturdier.
It takes me a while to recall how wind-dependent the sport is. My sailing slot has come up on a day of light breezes, meaning I crisscross the loch sedately; this feels like nautical tai chi. Indeed, it is only when I’m on the water that I truly recall how tranquil this can be.
It is all a bit Driving Miss Daisy in comparison with the competitors’ Days of Thunder. Timo Mullen wins the event, arcing above the six-foot waves that crash down on Tiree during the first few days of the Classic. Looping and leaping off their crests, he proves just how thrilling a sport windsurfing can be.
Looking back over photos from the winning day’s sail in a snug Hebridean pub, it’s hard to fathom why thrill seekers head out to the Canadian Rockies or the West Indies for overwhelming adrenalin adventures, when equally exhilarating kicks lie closer to home, and in as enviable a setting.
The 25th Tiree Wave Classic takes place this October; www.tireewaveclassic.com A one-day beginner’s course on Tiree costs £100 and includes equipment hire. www.tireewindsurfing.com
