Boarding time
Shoe designer Emma Hope swaps her stilettos for a surfboard to catch the big swell in Corn wall
THE FIRST HOLIDAYS I REMEMBER were in a lagoon in Malaysia, sitting in yellow blow-up canoes, legs dangling into clear water, my father fishing jellyfish out of the sea around us so we wouldn’t get stung. Although I loved the water, I was nervous of what was in it.
When we returned to England and my father left the navy to become a solicitor, we would be sent down every summer to stay with my grandparents in Cornwall so he could revise in peace for his law exams. Setting off on our own from Paddington station, my brother, sister and I were booked into a carriage with a seaside view and a table for our summer comics and my collection of trolls. I remember the excitement of first seeing the sea as we left Exeter. My grandpa would meet us at St Germans, just past Plymouth, and take us to Granny. The summer really began with his extraordinary gift of £10 holiday money.
Independent and solvent, able to watch TV as much as we wanted, and with the sea and the moor as our playgrounds, Cornwall seemed like the promised land. Day trips to Polzeath, on the ‘other side’ – ie the north coast of Cornwall – involved Granny making pasties and packing them alongside wooden and polystyrene surf boards into the boot of their Austin Allegra.
More than 25 years later, I went to stay in a clifftop summer rental in New Polzeath, above the same rocks where we used to park and take our picnic and boards for a day of surfing.
Having always body-boarded and regarded stand-up surfers as flotsam to be avoided, I first tried it by chance when my friend’s son had dropped out of a group lesson. I found myself being zipped into a damp wetsuit then lying scrabbling on the sand pretending I was paddling and trying to leap up on to my board from the safety of the beach. By the end of the lesson, the little boys had got it and were standing up and surfing. But the other adults and I were either wobbling on one leg or lying on the boards and cruising in on the white water. Nevertheless, I was hooked.
The next winter was the beginning of the new millennium and I was staying in Devon with a friend. On New Year’s Day we went to the beach at Saunton Sands, hired wetsuits and boards from a man in a van and raced into the sea. We only lasted about five minutes before rushing back to the gravelly car park to change out of our suits, barefoot, frozen, and with ice-cream headaches from the waves.
The following year, 2001, I was in Hawaii. Carried away with enthusiasm, I had told everyone I could surf. I found myself hanging on to the leashes of two instructors as they towed me out. A girl with long black hair in a bikini and shorts sped off the shore over the breakwater, following us at first and then overtaking us on her board with one leg idly up in the air for balance.
The ‘paddle, paddle, paddle’ that the instructors instilled in me when trying for a wave was not enough. It was clear I had overstated my abilities. As we bobbed around the breaking waves, the main thing that kept me on the board was my fear of tiger sharks taking my leg off. In Hawaii, after it rains the ocean becomes murky and full of seaweed. I looked into the water and thought there might be sharks swimming around. So I bottled out and headed for shore, finally getting dumped on to the beach in a washing-machine cycle of sand and rocks. It took days to get the sand out of my hair and ears and elsewhere too.
Back in Britain, I visited Polzeath almost every weekend between May to September that year, and booked in to have lessons. Hire of the wetsuit and board was free with the lesson, which I did until economics made it sensible to buy my own wetsuit, a second-hand one from the previous year’s classes. I got to know all the instructors at the Surf’s Up surf school on the beach at Polzeath, and after a couple of lessons gradually built up to standing up, although I would always be thundering in to shore on the white water. When it was flat calm, the instructors took us on a paddle out to the rocks at the end of Polzeath at Stepper Point, where you could jump off your boards into rock pools, before paddling back.
Sometimes staying on a workday Monday, I’d feel guilty. But the blue skies over Polzeath and the soothing baptism of the waves would instantly whisk you away from reality and I started to want to catch a green wave – the huge one before it breaks. Stung by remarks made by one of the instructors – “Are you always going to be messing about in the white water?” – I desperately wanted to get out beyond where the waves were breaking, out past the ‘impact zone’.
Once during a quiet weekday, Wailin, another instructor, gave me a solo lesson on a choppy sea under thundery clouds. As I constantly turned on my board to scan for likely waves on the bobbing horizon, I kept asking him whether they were green waves. He laughed and teased me: “No, they’re purple waves!”
Catching your first green wave is such an extraordinary new sensation – it rates in your memory with remembering where you were when Elvis died. Instead of thudding in on a jumbled broken wave, you feel like some unseen hand has picked you up and suddenly you are slicing through the water. It’s similar to the cleanness and excitement of skiing, but instead of the energy coming from the gravity of the slope of the mountain, it comes from the superhuman force of a wave that has travelled all the way from Hawaii. The thrills never fade, even after 10 years of surfing. I used to think it looked really annoying and difficult, and it is. But once you get the hang of it, there’s nothing like the feeling of being pushed along by the whoosh of a wave. It’s as near to heaven as you can get.
I caught my first green wave with Ned, a patient instructor who was encouraging in a quietly convincing rather than goading way. Out back 20 or so yards behind the breaking waves, Ned was sitting up on his board watching out for waves we should try for – lifting into peaks and then falling away, or building into a wall that will start to peel just as you take off. It’s a question of recognising which wave you should paddle for. Too late and you would be paddling frantically as the wave rose and broke in front of you, too early and you would be in front of it as it broke.
One sunny morning, towards the end of a lesson, Ned suddenly shouted: “Go Emma, this one’s for you”. As I paddled sideways to it, I felt the wave picking me up and, incredibly, I remembered to slide to my feet, keeping low over the board. Instead of looking towards the beach and the windbreaks and shops of Polzeath, I was up and gliding along the face of the wave, being pushed through the water by some supernatural force, heading towards Stepper Point to the far left of the beach where the seagulls were swooping low over the grassy pasture.
In the words of surf philosopher Wailin, my other instructor: “Look into the distance and you’ll get there.” And for the first time in my life, I had.
CREAM OF CORNWALL
From the sexiest hotels and hippest cafes to the most exhilarating coastal walks and surf beaches, Emma Hope picks her favourites
My idea of a perfect surfing beach is one that has good waves and a dream café. I fell in love with Porthmeor beach with its stone houses tumbling down to yellow sands. It has a good beach break, with big swells offshore. There’s a good café called the PORTHMEOR BEACH CAFÉ, which also has a surf centre offering lessons. If you want to escape the crowds, pack a picnic and visit the wild, beautiful beaches on the Lizard.
Polzeath has a very wide bay so when the tide is out, there’s a bit of a swell with lots of room for everyone. THE LITTLE AVALON café does great breakfasts and lunches with smoothies and paninis. You can read the papers in the sun away from the crowds. I always fantasise about their fresh orange juice and chocolate-crunch cake after I’ve got out of the sea. You can have a lesson at the Surf’s Up school or stay at their cool seaside surf lodge at Port Isaac, where you can play pool by the swimming pool with their handsome instructors. www.polzeathcornwall.co.uk
In Padstow try RICK STEINS’S SEAFOOD CAFÉ, not his expensive Seafood Restaurant. The café is really nice and jolly [+44 (0)1841 532700, www.rickstein.com]. You can also visit the tiny church at nearby Daymer Bay, which was unearthed from the sand in the 1960s. John Betjeman, the English Poet Laureate, is buried there.
People love PRUSSIA COVE, a music retreat and privately owned house. They have a music festival and there’s a great beach nearby with another fabulous café [+44 (0)1736 762014, www.prussiacove.co.uk].
THE LOST GARDENS OF HELIGAN are more charming than the Eden Project, with pineapple beds and Victorian graffiti on the outside loo from the builders who built the greenhouses [www.heligan.com].
If you get to St Mawes, stay at the Tresanton Hotel [+44 (0)1326 270 055, www.tresanton.com]. Nearby, there are some romantic spots, pretty gardens and ancient old churches.
THE SCARLET is a new eco-hotel [Mawgan Porth, +44 (0)1637 861800, www.scarlethotel.co.uk]. Perched on a cliff, it has seaweed hot tubs and a beautiful courtyard garden perfect for stargazing at the cliff’s edge and a buzzy Michelin-star restaurant with imaginative dishes of locally grown food.
Try organic Cornish ice cream from ROSKILLY’S [www.roskillys.co.uk]. You can even stay in a vintage caravan on their farm [www.lovelanecarvans.com] and spend the afternoon walking through their woods and making friends with the donkeys and ducks.
Take a walk among the woodland and wildflowers at ANTONY HOUSE in Torpoint – Alice in Wonderland was filmed there [+44 (0)1752 812191, www.nationaltrust.org.uk]. It’s pretty magical and a great place to chill out. Clear your head and dream.
GO FOR A COASTAL DRIVE – rent a convertible, a classic Triumph or E-type Jag and hit the road in style [www.cornwallclassiccarehire.co.uk]. Along the way, stop by Port Eliot House in St Germans, home to Lord and Lady Germans, which is open most afternoons during the summer [www.porteliot.co.uk].
