Grey Skies, Green Waves Read online

  This is partly due to the fact that the A470, Wales's version of perhaps the English M6, the French A10 or the US's I-90, turns to a winding single-lane plod over hills and farm country about thirty miles north of Cardiff – which often means spending hours at a time in a tractor-related tailback. The knock-on effect of this is the other reason it's such a tough trip: because of the A470's inadequacies, you could probably type the same destination into a satnav and get a different route each time. There is, quite simply, no official quickest way. And this means getting lost. Often.

  Naturally, in our case, that event had befallen us before we'd even covered half of the distance north as the crow flies, which was some time not too long after midday. Not that this mattered much. It was a predicament that delighted me. Only a few hours in to this plan to rediscover the joys of surf-tripping at home and I had been joyfully reassured of something very important: at least you could get lost in Wales!

  'Well, there are three roads heading north,' said Dan Harris, a longboarder from Aberafan and my co-pilot. Pushing a lock of blonde hair behind his right ear and unfolding a corner of his damp road atlas, he turned to the other two in the back for extra approval, 'But I couldn't tell you which one is quickest. The thickest line is the longest but the direct one looks kind of, you know, like a lane.'

  The sun was just starting to peek out from behind a few clouds as we sat in the car park of Sainsbury's in Aberystwyth, all keen to work out whether or not we were making progress.

  In the rear seats – assigning the boards to the roof – were the other two people Carl had booked for this seemingly unorthodox photoshoot. One was Elliot, of course, and the other his girlfriend Nia – a medical student he'd met at uni in Cardiff. Elliot (or 'Smelliot' as he was known to friends) had perhaps the best life imaginable. He was a part-time student and a part-time pro longboarder. He could opt in and out of either role as and when he fancied, or needed. When necessary, he could skip important events on the university calendar (of which there were very few anyway, as he studied French and Spanish) by simply explaining to his lecturers that he had to go to the Maldives, Taiwan, Costa Rica, South Africa, California – wherever his pro-surfer life required. Similarly, though, if a contest or photo trip was somewhere he didn't feel like going, he could play the 'unmissable exam' or 'urgent deadline' card to his sponsors.

  But for some inexplicable reason, North Wales had escaped such excuses.

  'Got to get to know our own country, eh?' he explained. 'And also, I heard from a mate who did something with these guys and he says they're pretty wacky.'

  As our link to Carl, the guy organising the whole thing, Elliot was supposed to be the person in the know. If he was, though, he was keeping tight-lipped about it.

  'All he's told me is it's in Hell's Mouth and there are sheep involved.'

  'And longboards,' I moaned. So far that was my only reservation. Dan, Elliot and Nia were all longboarders – riding boards over nine feet in length – although Dan did have a shortboard on the roof as well, for emergencies. For him, the longboard thing was quite new. He and I used to be rivals as grommets (the nickname for a kid surfer), both on shortboards, and had lined up for the Welsh junior team together. This was in the days before he discovered a knack for longboarding, and since then he had found considerable success. In fact, the only longboarder in Wales more decorated than him was, to his great annoyance, Elliot.

  As for Nia, well, I'd never been on a surf trip of any kind with her before – but as she was also a longboarder there was already a sense that the odd one out on this trip was me. Although I didn't mind that – all it did was add to the feeling I was opening up new horizons; ones broken by the striking mountain ranges of North Wales.

  Bendigedig!

  The last half-hour of those mountains had passed us by at night, but I'd still been able to feel the acute turns and drops in the road.

  Now arrived, the sea air ensured that it was with that comforting feeling of journey's end that we walked out of our B & B in search of Carl and a place to eat.

  Over a curry, we were talked through the details of the shoot – but they were still sketchy.

  'I don't really know what Ivan's got in mind,' he explained, a slightly vacant look on his face. 'I just organise the people. This is what I do. I'm given a list of what they need and then it's off to find the right faces.'

  This, I learned, was what had brought him to the Welsh Nationals.

  'For this ad it was three male surfers and one female, so I figured Fresh West for the National Championships was the best place to find that.'

  'Gosh. You're sharp,' Dan quipped.

  'Yeah. Tell me about it. But it wasn't as straightforward as that. There was another part to this order, which I haven't had to do before. I only specialise in people, see. But they wanted two sheepdogs and nine sheep, too.'

  This was our chance to quiz him on the involvement of sheep. You had to be slightly worried – a London ad agency, Wales, sheep, surfers. Something gave me the feeling a few of the classic stereotypes were going to get wheeled out in the morning.

  'You're not gonna make a bunch of knobs out of us are you?' Dan promptly asked, merely voicing what the rest of us were thinking. He nudged Elliot. 'Smelliot here has got a public image to protect, see. He wants to get into the modelling thing once he's too far over the hill for longboarding.'

  Elliot frowned. 'Shut up, Harris.'

  'Well that's gonna be a while,' I ventured. 'Longboarders over the hill? It's an old man's sport anyway, isn't it?'

  Nia laughed. The others ignored me. Elliot turned back to Carl and asked the same question in a more polite tone, 'Seriously, though, d'you know why they wanted sheep?'

  Carl drained his wine glass and shook his head.

  'Nope. We'll have to wait until the morning. See you at breakfast. We'll need to be at the beach by eight. They need to catch it while the shoreline's backlit. That's the only other thing I know.'

  And with that he paid the bill, and left us to it.

  If a B & B is to be judged by its breakfasts, which in the UK they often are, then this Pwllelli guest house got North Wales off to a great start the next morning.

  Although Elliot, ever the consummate pro, took the continental option, the 'full Welsh' on offer was just perfect to line your stomach the morning after a long drive and a generous curry. In other words it was starchy, heavy and big. To top things off, it came with a gigantic pot of coffee that was so strong you got the shakes only halfway through the first mug. All in all about as inappropriate a start to a day's surfing as you could hope for – but for Dan, Nia and me it was ideal. We still didn't know to what extent the actual act of surfing would be required of us anyway – and when someone else (Carl) is paying, it's rude not to gorge yourself.

  So full that it was hard not to fall back asleep, we set off on the fifteen-minute journey to the nearby beach at Hell's Mouth.

  Hell's Mouth is a vast stretch of white sandy beach on the very tip of the Llyn Peninsula. It reaches out, narrow and bold, from the rest of Wales's landmass, extending tentatively towards Ireland's east coast. Lying at the northernmost extreme of the turbulent Cardigan Bay and able to pick up swells from way out in the Atlantic, it has a reputation for being wild, barren, feisty and, as South Wales marched headlong towards becoming a succession of cities and shopping malls, reassuringly hostile – which is what you'd expect from a place called Hell's Mouth. To the north are a series of deep green headlands that rise sharply out of the sea, a reminder of the mountainous nature of so much of North Wales. With crystal clear water running quickly into a horizon of imposing dark blue, the place is definitely photogenic. It presents itself as commanding and untouched by any significant human development. I could see why we were here.

  On this particular morning, the beach was in receipt of an enormous swell. After shaking hands with Ivan, the cameraman from the ad agency, we trudged over the dunes to discover walls of white water rolling majestically towards the beach.
As each row of churning, pearl-white foam bounced its way through the line-up it would simply be replaced by another. Here and there, across the four-mile-long beach, you could make out wave sections that would be incredible to surf – if you could get out there and put yourself in place for one.

  That, however, would be a huge test.

  With nothing but a long stretch of featureless beach each side of us, there were no rip-currents to help a surfer paddle out, and no defined sandbanks to hold peaks in place. And yet the light onshore winds were crumbling the wave faces, causing them to chop up and break with no real sequence. The waves weren't closing out (meaning they were breaking across the beach without peeling properly), and putting together any sort of show for Ivan, who was eagerly loading his camera gear onto his back, would require submitting ourselves to a workout not dissimilar to that of a heavyweight boxer in the run-up to a world-title fight. Man, or woman, against ocean.

  Despite this, Elliot, feeling the carbs from his own high-and-mighty breakfast choice (which was now clearly an example of the wise decision-making that had helped him to the top), was mad for it. Eyes wide with the thrill of the challenge, he approached Ivan.

  'What's the plan then? Are we in there?'

  'Oh, yes, yes. Definitely,' came the reply the rest of us were dreading. 'How long does it take you to assemble your equipment for surfing?'

  'Er, not long, like…'

  'Half an hour?'

  'Nah. We could be in there in five or ten minutes.'

  Speak for yourself, I wanted to cut in, dopey with the weight of my breakfast.

  'Oh, OK. Maybe wait a few minutes then. There's been a delay with the sheep.'

  Trying to hide my relief, I wondered if Ivan could finally be the one to explain to us the nature of this project we had signed up for.

  He could.

  'Well, what we've got is a concept from copywriting and a bit of a sketch. It's part of that ad campaign – you know it? "Wales: The Big Country"?'

  'Yeah, I know it.'

  'This one's the last of the series now – we've done the other ones.' He sat against the open boot of his Volvo estate and pulled out a small plastic portfolio. 'Have a look.'

  He opened it up and started flicking through, settling on a page somewhere towards the back. A collection of 'great outdoors'-type shots had been coupled with slogans befitting the front page of the Mirror – which was a style of writing I'd always had great reverence for. Snappy, witty, filled with puns and triple- or even quadruple meanings.

  A photo showed two hikers at the foot of Snowdon looking upwards, with the caption 'Area of outstandingly bad mobile reception'.

  There were other ads in there too: one of an ice cream van marooned in the middle of a beach, without a slogan as yet, and another of an aerial shot of a coastal golf course being buffeted by wind, with a scorecard containing stupidly high shot-counts – 9, 8, 9, 10, 7, 8 – and a handwritten note saying 'but loving it'.

  And then he showed us the very back of the folder, which had the same ads but in sketch form – in light pencil, with crude pastel lines over the top. They were surprisingly accurate to the finished image – even though the sketches had obviously come first. I knew that was the mark of a great photographer; to imagine a picture and then be able to source its setting and take it as a real-life image with little change from the original plan.

  But he was going to have his work cut out here.

  He pulled out the sketch that was today's blueprint. For a start, the waves in his image were much smaller than the great barriers of water we'd be squaring up to today. Their idea was neat, though. A sheep was standing in the foreground, looking out to sea, while in the centre of the image a surfer raced their way across the bay. The detail was as tight as in the others. The beach was clearly Hell's Mouth. The perspectives were rigidly numbered with even lighter pencil, explaining at exactly what depth of focus each layer was to be shot. And the slogan?

  Oh dear.

  It read: 'Beware! The Great Woolly Whites.'

  Nice.

  But, unfortunately, as is the perennial problem when you marry surfing and the mainstream media, the artist's concept of the act of wave riding was skewed to the point of insult. The surfer had obviously been drawn by someone who knew nothing about it. Standing in some kind of ninja pose about a foot from the nose of a water craft resembling an ironing board, he was hanging coolly in the curl – essentially pulling what looked like a never-ending floater (a manoeuvre that involved sliding along the roof of the breaking wave – and one you'd be lucky to hold for more than a second or two). The predicament indicated in Ivan's picture was gravitationally impossible – and that's being kind. It was the kind of misconception that often happens in kids' cartoons, where SpongeBob, Lilo and Stitch, Scooby Doo et al suddenly find themselves poised perfectly in the most deadly part of a stationary wave, whooping as it moved nowhere, simply throbbing on the spot. At least they weren't hoping for any wipeouts.

  I looked out to sea as another mountain of water burst and bludgeoned its way across the bay. I realised how small surfing's vocabulary was. I'd have just called it big and blown out. But woolly whites seemed a pretty good description – if not a little happy-go-lucky – to capture the exact nature of the ordeal we were about to go through to create an idyllic snapshot of the great Welsh outdoors. Still, I logged the term. Woolly whites. I had to try and use it again some time. 'What's the surf like, mate?' 'Two foot. Lined up. Woolly whites for sure, man.'

  It crossed my mind for a moment that Ivan had probably never really watched the sea before. Knowing its movements and patterns was something I'd always taken for granted – having spent most of my life not much further than a few miles from a shoreline.

  Carl's phone rang and he answered it loudly, interrupting my train of thought.

  'Hello? Yeah. Yeah it is, mate. Yeah I know. Yeah they are. Right here. Yeah we're all ready. OK. See you in a minute.'

  He clipped his phone shut and turned to us, shoving his hands in his pockets.

  'They're about two minutes away. Director's worrying about the light. Wants to get as much shooting time as possible, so he's wondering if you can get ready. If you were in the water when he got here that'd be ideal. Apparently the sheep are a bit wound up, and the sheepdogs, too. They'll have never been to the beach before. They live on a farm in mid-Wales, see. Anyway, he reckons they won't have that long and if they can just release the sheep straight away with you guys in there it'd be pretty helpful.'

  The sheep and dogs had been driven up overnight. Apparently it would minimise disruption to their owner if they could go straight onto the beach and then back in the trailer to head home again.

  'The nearest place we could hire this kind of sheep for the shoot was St Clears in Pembroke, see,' Carl explained.

  'What? That's by Fresh West,' I noted.

  'Yeah, that's right. It had to be one type of sheep in particular, though. The Lleyn it's called. They're local to around here, which makes it kind of annoying that we have to bring them up from bloody south-west Wales. But that's the kind of thing that happens when you do my job. Had to be Lleyns, though. It's the one Dom had in mind when he thought of the concept.'

  'Dom?'

  'The director,' Ivan cut in. 'He's not here yet. He's a genius, man. Quiet guy. Won't have a lot to say himself. Leaves that to us. I'll tell you what to do.'

  The thought of Ivan telling us how to surf made even Elliot, now halfway into his wetsuit, chuckle quietly.

  'Did Dom come up with "woolly whites" then?' I asked.

  'Of course, man,' Ivan beamed. 'Great, innit.'

  Trying to ignore the kilo of egg, sausage and bacon sloshing around in my belly, I reached for my wetsuit, which was still damp as it was used far too often to dry out properly, and started getting in the mood for a real battle. This surf was going to need a lot of energy.

  Dan was debating whether to ride his short or longboard, and decided to solicit Ivan's advice.

&nb
sp; 'The long one will show up better on the picture,' the now ready photographer mumbled, obviously not really having an opinion on the matter.

  As we set off over the dunes to the desolate stretch of beach, the only surfers in sight (which with a good swell running was a clear sign that somewhere else was probably firing right now), I heard the sound of a clunking engine and barking dogs. The sheep and their entourage were arriving. This was how I imagined it to be when you are working on a film set with a demanding and tardy movie star that suddenly shows up and steals everyone's attention. Suddenly Carl, who had been walking with us, turned and ran back – instantly diverting his fickle energy to the real stars of the show. I wondered if the sheep were actually aware of how important they were today. Wales's frontline fight for tourists' cash was in their hands – sorry – hooves.

  From their point of view, however, it was just a scary day out, getting chased around by snarling sheepdogs in a landscape of sand and salt air that might as well be the surface of Mars for all they knew.