Northern Dream
Scotland's a beautiful, stark and odly Nordic place. We travelled to the very northern tip of Scotland; it was desolate and cold. I live in Penzance which is pretty much the other end of the United Kingdom and it takes about fifteen hours to drive up.
It's amazing because there are so many different breaks; you can pretty much surf anywhere as long as you have massive kahonies and a decent pair of walking boots. Around every headland there's a slab, beachbreak or pointbreak. If you're up there while there's a decent swell running, it's one of the best places to surf; empty, cold, pumping waves.
It was particulary cold this time. The winds were prodominently from the north straight from the arctic and belive me, you felt it. This meant the waves were onshore; a lot of the swells we surfed were quite wind swept and chopped up. We tried our best to find something but most days turned into walking days, which, when you're in a place so scenic, you don't really mind.
By the last day I had grown dissheartened with the lack of waves as the trip a few months earlier had deliverd the best waves I had ever surfed. However, on the last day, we decided to go and see if a certain spot was working; we hadn't really given it a look in as you had to walk over about a kilometer of marshy moors to get through it. After finally making it across, we arrived at one of the most beautiful point breaks; the set up was unbelievable and it was empty. We changed and waded through some pretty thick kelp and waited. It was pretty inconsistent but when it came through it was perfect. Sat in the line up you felt pretty intimidated by the local seals which were getting closer and closer and growing ever so aggitated with us (I'm scared of seals). We stayed in until dark and trekked back over the moor.
The trip was pretty momentous in that there were sixteen likeminded people. I wouldn't normally go away with sixteen people but my good friend Hugo Petit asked me and he did organsise a pretty amazing trip with the help of Yubl. We didn't get many waves but there were a few wild nights and, to top it off, we saw the Northern Lights which were incredible.
Words: Connor Stratton-Darling
Photographs: Jack Johns | Dave Muir | Connor Stratton-Darling
