HOW SURFEBRUARY SAVED MY SURFING
I committed to surfing every day for the month of February to support integrative cancer care and research. I wasn’t expecting it to recharge my own surfing life
By Tim Baker
As any surfer the other side of 50 can tell you, maintaining your froth factor as age advances can be a challenging business.
Injuries, crowds, family and provider commitments and the ravages of time can all conspire to steal away your stoke, and have you contemplating the virtues of golf or lawn bowls.
I have to admit, I was beginning to feel like my best surfing days might have been behind me. At 56, health challenges, the relentless Gold Coast crowds and a certain creeping laziness saw my early sessions getting later and later, my surfs getting shorter and further apart, and the incidence of outright frustration on the rise.
I signed up to SurFebruary as an act of charity, to help raise funds for the Chris O’Brien Lifehouse, an amazing cancer hospital in Sydney that specialises in integrative cancer care and research, to treat the whole person and not just the tumour. There was some self-interest at work here too, having had my own experience with cancer and discovering first-hand the virtues of an integrative approach, combining evidence-based complementary therapies with conventional oncology.
Muscle memory kicks in as the old fella squeezes into a tight little barrel at UrbnSurf
What I wasn’t expecting was that my own surfing life would so quickly be transformed by the experience. The simple act of committing to surfing every day for a month has already had a profound impact on my enjoyment, fitness and overall sense of well-being. Knowing that I was raising money for a worthy cause that makes a real difference in people’s lives has made every surf an act of virtue.
I’d recently bought myself the most progressive, high performance board I’d ridden in years, as a Christmas present to myself, a beefed up 6’6” shortboard that looked like a Ferrari compared to the user-friendly, high volume shapes I’d favoured in recent years. The first few surfs on it, I thought I was kidding myself, that this was a deluded fancy of fading youth and I should just succumb to old age and get on a longboard (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
In preparation for the start of Surfebruary, I started getting up at the crack of dawn, keen to get a few, good warmup surfs under my belt before the month began. Just being up before the sun was a revelation. This was always my favourite time of day. Why had I forsaken it for so long? You could get a parking spot for starters. I’d just about given up on surfing the Gold Coast points because of their chronic over-crowding, but getting out there on sunrise meant I was at least getting a decent half hour and a few sweet rides in before the hordes descended.
By my third early surf session in a row, I was starting to get the hang of the new Ferrari and re-discovering the joys of that lively, sensitive feeling under my feet. By the time Surfebruary kicked in, I felt like I was surfing better than I had in years – off a pretty low base, to be honest, but the excitement and sense of stoke was palpable.
Calling in some old friends to help me through my Surfebruary mission
The next unexpected thing that happened was I started re-evaluating my quiver. If I was going to surf every day, come what may, in any conditions, I was going to need a diverse range of equipment. Most of my old boards were sitting in a rack gathering dust and so I pulled them all out, laid them out on the front lawn, hosed them down to wash off the years of dust and neglect and suddenly appreciated what an expansive selection of boards I’d accumulated over the years. Eight-foot gun, a sleek 7’4” spear, 7’0” channel bottom, a handy 6’10” step-up, eggy single fin, twin fin fish, a few standard thrusters, and the obligatory longboard for small days when my local is one foot and peeling for 500 metres.
I started looking at their battle-scarred, yellowed condition with fresh eyes and a new appreciation. Between them, there was something for almost any condition and they would become my trusted allies in the days and weeks ahead.
My Surfebruary campaign also coincided with a trip to Victoria to see family, my first chance to visit them since COVID, and a reunion of old surfing mates at our former stomping ground, Phillip Island, where my surfing life began. The heady nostalgia trip combined with my daily surfing commitment meant riding the waves where I grew up and learnt to surf was a rich and poignant experience, even if our local break was shorter and crappier than I remember it.
The old stomping ground - realising the waves you grew up surfing were actually pretty terrible
The real challenge of my Surfebruary campaign came when I got back to Melbourne, but the legends at UrbnSurf had me covered and sorted me out with a daily session in the pool to keep the froth factor going. The wave pool was a blast – with sessions on the lefts and rights, at cruiser, intermediate and advanced settings. Halfway through the advanced session, they crank the thing up a notch and suddenly a gaping barrel section opens up and you’ve got no choice but to pull in. Again, muscle memory kicks in and before I knew it, I found myself dragging a hand along the face as that glorious almond-shaped view spun and beckoned in front of me. I’m here to tell you a tube in the pool generates just as much adrenalin and endorphins as one in the ocean.
You know how one good surf can brighten up your whole day and top up flagging levels of enthusiasm? It seems obvious to me now, but it turns out if you surf every day those levels of enthusiasm just keep getting topped up until you’d be hard-pressed to wipe the smile off my face with a lump of four by two.
I’m only halfway through SurFebruary but already I sense some lasting change, a glorious rejection of the inevitability of surfing prowess fading with the passage of time. They say salt is a preservative, afterall, and it turns out spending enough time immersed in salt water can preserve your surf stoke too.
The old body might be feeling a few niggling aches and pains, but the sense of an indefinable energy awakened, a long dormant pilot light of grommet-like excitement flickering back to life, is more than enough to soothe any physical ailments. The fact that I’m raising money for integrative cancer care and research, something I’m deeply passionate about, just makes it all the sweeter.
If you’d like to support my Surfebruary mission and help me raise money for cancer care and research through Chris O’Brien Lifehouse, check out my Surfebruary fundraiser page.
Putting the Nev Submoon Fish through its paces at Urbn Surf - the perfect ride for the, er, older gentleman surfer
