coast COLUMNIST
DOVER
Join WILLIAM THOMSON on his journey each month exploring a Shipping Forecast region
Every Shipping Forecast region has its quirks, opportunities and dangers.
Some face west towards the vast Atlantic Ocean where you won’t find land for thousands of miles, while others - like Dover – overlook a narrow strait towards France where you can see buildings on a clear day.
Some regions have soft, smooth shorelines while others are hard and rugged, with sharp rocks slicing through the waves. Then there’s the underwater landscape, known as bathymetry, which has a profound effect on how the wind and water swish and swirl around the region.
The combination of these elements means that each region is unique; some are windy, others and wavy, some have strong currents and others have big tides. When I was studying architecture at Newcastle University, we were in the Tyne Shipping Forecast region and life was governed by the surf.
Longsands Beach in Tynemouth was the place to go – a long sandy beachbreak with a disused tidal pool at the southern end from which we would jump off to get out beyond the waves. You could only do it on certain tides, but it saved an exhausting paddle through relentless walls of whitewater.
Coming from the waveless Dover region, it took a while to develop my wavecraft. On one particular session in the early days, before learning about the tidal pool shortcut, I spent the whole time trying unsuccessfully to paddle through the surf zone, only to get pushed back by consecutively bigger waves.
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With every attempt I became more exhausted and made less headway until, depleted and rejected, I gave up and went home. It was a hard lesson teaching me that the sea has no mercy and doesn’t care how tired you are.
So I did my homework, learnt about the rhythm of the ocean and tried a different tactic. Rather than just paddling straight out, I waded into waist deep water and waited like a panther stalking its prey, waiting for a lull between sets. When that moment came I pounced with all the power I had, paddling towards the horizon before the next set of monstrous waves crashed on the shallow sand. And it worked! In just a few minutes I was bobbing in deep water, in the perfect spot to catch an unbroken wave and ride it into the beach.
For three years I repeated this cycle hundreds of times. Surf became my identity, the most important thing in my life. As anyone who rides waves knows well, it grows your confidence, resilience, fitness, relationships and overall happiness. But then my degree came to an end and I moved back to Deal in the Dover
