North America > Canada > Nova Scotia > Halifax > Surfing > Articles > North of the Border

You know you’re not in normal surf territory when the road sign beside the surf shop warns of ‘Blowing Snow’. When I came across this motoring advice last September it would be another two months before snow became a traffic hazard – in fact the sun shone warm on our backs, and shorts and t-shirts were the order of the day rather than parkas and snowshoes - but once it starts blowing that snow whisks its way up and down the Nova Scotia coastline for a good six months of the year, if not more.

And through the spindrift the local surfers will don thick wetsuits, boots, gloves and hoods and paddle out into frigid North Atlantic swells to do what we all love best, catch a few waves.

Despite the fact that this ain’t exactly what you’d call your average surf paradise, these guys are fiercely protective of their waves. They would happily tell me where I might find a good break, then in the next sentence insist that I don’t mention it to anyone else, least of all the readers of a surf magazine. I wouldn’t call it localism exactly – indeed, the welcome was as warm as I’ve had anywhere in the world – but it did make me promise not to reveal all.

As a surfer this wild, forested land threw me into a state of some confusion whilst I headed east on a two-day road trip from Toronto. I drove across a landscape that progressed from flat plains to unending forests punctuated by glittery lakes, beside a shoreline boasting the world’s biggest tides, past the stately city of Halifax that is almost more British than its Yorkshire namesake and onto a wild, indented coastline that put me in mind of Norway and the Outer Hebrides.

At times I forgot altogether that I was here to surf. After two days behind the wheel I simply felt the urge to get out and breathe fresh, maritime air or walk through pine-scented forests. Indeed, there’s nothing about the landscape that brings surfing to mind, and it comes as a shock when I see a car with a couple of boards on the roof. Once the surprise has subsided that familiar, elemental urge gnaws at my stomach and snaps away at my brain: surfboards = surf = what you’re here for = head to the beach, fast!

This ain’t too easy in the massive RV I’m driving, which yees and yaws around the bends on the bumpy beach road like the trawlers that ply the local waters, but eventually the glass bright reflections of the Atlantic come into view and my pulse quickens further. I know I’m approaching one of the few surf beaches in Nova Scotia known to ‘outsiders’, but will there be surf…?

No. Typical – you drive 2,000 kilometres for a wave and it’s feckin’ flat when you get there. So I do what we all do when it’s flat and head for the local surf shop to talk waves, boards and weather systems with the people who know this coastline better than anyone other than the local fishermen. And to get the low down on what it’s really like to surf in mid-winter in what is essentially iceberg territory (in case you were in any doubt about this fact, the Titanic was sunk off the coast of Nova Scotia, with many victims buried in Halifax).

So here are the bare bones of it: Nova Scotian surfers, the hard core at least, surf year-round, despite the fact that from January to March water temperatures can fall to just below zero (saltwater doesn’t melt at 0° C like freshwater, so it remains, in theory at least, surfable), and air temperatures will fall many degrees below zero, whilst daylight hours in the depth of winter are very short.

This means that going for a surf can be more like going snowboarding – you brush the snow from your board, trudge through snow laden pine forests to the ocean’s edge, and, snowboarding comparisons abruptly coming to a halt, wade out through slushy sea water into what are often perfect waves (hell, they’d need to be to put up with all this climatic hideousness).

Sessions will be short – even in the best wetsuit money can buy the cold soon seeps into muscle and bone and an hour or so in the water will be plenty for most people. As local surf photographer Yassine Ouhilal says, “Surfing anywhere else in the world that’s colder would be impossible – the water would freeze”.

I can’t even begin to imagine what it must have been like to ride the waves of Nova Scotia three decades or more ago when wetsuits were far less effective, and guys like Joe Reardon, Stan Halloway, Joe Murphy and Australian Paul Camilieri started surfing some of the pointbreaks near Halifax.

I call in to view ‘surf art’ at a gallery in Seaforth and John Brannen, the husband of the gallery owner, takes a break from housebuilding on an adjacent plot to surprise me with tales of himself and his buddies riding local waves in the days before thrusters, just a few hardy souls surfing icy cold waves on the very fringes of the surfing world. And then he tells me of ‘classic’ Nova Scotia conditions and his eyes light up – “In September we can have water that’s 15° C or more and 28° C air, light offshores and perfect hurricane swells peeling off point breaks created by drumlins laid down in the last Ice Age” (I wonder by that does he mean last winter…?).

This sees Canadians in their native surf in shorties, some even surfing in boardshorts – proof positive that the world of surfing is never short on surprises.

And here’s one more surprise. Locals tell me that when it’s at its best around these parts the surf can top six metres in height and a good break may peel for up to a kilometre, which perhaps explains why, when it’s really firing, surfers from the US east coast will hop on a flight north and descend on the waves; St. Lawrence River surfers from Quebec Province may make the eight hour drive south-east; and the surfers who make up a minority of the half million souls of the university town of Halifax will head out to the local beaches to catch a few waves (John reckoned there are now some 500 surfers in and around the Halifax region).

In the kind of conditions that occur in winter, of course, you can knock a couple of zeros off that figure in terms of numbers in the water. And even in prime conditions, as is the case in most parts of the world the majority heads to one of a handful of well-established breaks, yet for those in the know, those who have explored, there’s a vast selection of waves to be ridden with no one but your friends.

I, for instance, ‘discovered’ a number of breaks on the west coast of Cape Breton Island, a mountainous and forested fist of territory that juts out into the North Atlantic, the coast and the sea in perpetual battle against each other. These were breaking – albeit rather messily – on the back end of Hurricane Hugo, but had I been at home in Wales in similar conditions I’d have paddled out for a surf despite grey skies and strong cross-shore winds. However, I had neither board nor wetsuit with me and I sure as hell wasn’t going to find anyone up here to borrow them off, so the waves peeled shorewards unridden, as they have for aeons.

The guys in the surf shop at Lawrencetown Beach also regaled me with tales of long road trips north in search of new found surf. You really must feel like you’re surfing on the edge of the known surf universe once you head even further north than Nova Scotia. I forgot to ask if they had icebergs in the lineup, but since they do drift this far south after calving off the Arctic ice sheets further north I see no reason to doubt they do.

The locals worry about an American invasion of their waves, with Yanks from north-eastern USA buying up incredibly cheap property on the Nova Scotian coast as a base and heading up here when a good swell hits, but this seems like an unlikely threat when these guys can just as easily head south to the Caribbean for their hurricane swell fix.

Neverthless, the scene is now big enough for the likes of Rip Curl and Red Bull to be sponsoring surf contests, and even for big wave heroes like Garrett McNamara to recently head up here with tow partner Scott Chandler in search of big, hurricane generated waves.

Yassine Ouhilal met the guys at the airport and accompanied them to catch the action on film – a change for him, I suspect, from shooting pristine but empty lineups. Airlines being airlines, the guy’s tow boards were delayed, but nevertheless they drove up the coast with Yassine in a 4x4 to – well, let’s just say to ‘an island’ surrounded by deep water, with several breaks within close proximity of each other and facing different prevailing winds.

The island is also home to a community of Acadian fishermen of French origin (their ancestors were deported south a couple of hundred years ago to found what is now the Cajun culture of the US deep south) who told the guys of swells so big that in the past their entire village had been flooded by them.

Sure enough, they discovered wedgy, hollow waves that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in Indo or Hawaii and had Garrett labelling them as 12-ft Tahitian-style barrels. Yes, in Canada. However, without their boards they couldn’t surf them. Until, that is, Norwegian surfer (I know, this whole tale gets more and more surreal) Bjorn Henricksen turned up with a brand new 6’ 4” pintail and lent it to Garrett. With Sea-Doos ready for their planned tow surfing they were now able to head out into late summer waters that were approaching 20C, allowing Garrett to wear a shorty in iceberg territory (see what I mean about surreal).

Despite a dropping swell the two guys caught heaps of class barrels between them. “They were catching waves so quickly that I barely had time to change films,” said Yassine. But in keeping with the easy-going attitudes up here in the north, the big name guys didn’t ruthlessly keep all the waves to themselves, and invited locals Fred Hamilton and Stephen Foley to enjoy a taste of tow surfing at the same time as getting a few useful tips from the experts. Whether this was the germ of a new Nova Scotian tow surf movement remains to be seen, but at least the far north has seen and experienced the ‘future’ of big wave surfing.

But what of the future of surfing in general in the far north? Like most people I’d always thought of the cold, winter aspect of wave riding here, but Canada does have a summer too, and as Yassine pointed out, it can be a very special and surprising place then. “From August to November the water in Nova Scotia is actually warmer than in parts of California and more and more surfing tourists are coming during this ‘golden season’,” he says, pointing out that in the autumn of 2004 Quiksilver vice president Tom Holbrook visited with Tom Carroll, Peter Mel and a host of photographers and other pro surfers, along with their new float plane. Not quite your average surfers on your average surf trip, of course, but apparently Quiksilver now plan on making this an annual trip, and where the big names go the rest of us eventually seem to follow.

Indeed, the head of business development at Quiksilver has personally targeted Nova Scotia as a kind of ‘northern Mentawai’ where surfers can go to evade the crowds and not have to worry about malaria or culture shock, claims Yassine, who feels that as tropical surf destinations become ever more crowded some people will choose uncrowded cold water alternatives like Canada – and if you think about it, this has already happened in Ireland, which has similar water temperatures (although not as cold in winter).

Like a true local, Yassine ended by telling me “I’ve been to many tropical places like Costa Rica, the Galapagos Islands and Hawaii and you know, there is actually no other place I'd rather be than with just a few of my friends on a perfect empty NS point break, because it is something really special. Pro surfer Josh Mulcoy recently scored a week-long swell here in mid October and said it was the best surf trip he had ever been on”.

Add the strangeness and charm and wildness and welcome of this part of the world and I guess its inevitable Nova Scotian surf will become more crowded, especially in the fall months. But it has a very long coastline.

And for those really seeking solitude – well, there’ll always be winter.

Articles

• More from Alf Alderson
• More on the same theme