Child of the Wild Coast by Charles E. Allen

Author:Charles E. Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Charles E. Allen

17

The Precious Present

Snow skiing doesn’t appeal to everyone. Non-skiers watch with amazement as skiers tote heavy boots and skis through airports, rent pricey vans and condos, buy $100 lift tickets, sit in chairlifts while gale-force winds freeze snot-lines across their faces, brave driving blizzards, blunder into double-black-diamond chutes, suffer painful frostbite, endure high-altitude nose bleeds, thrash in bed with mountain sickness, and return home in leg casts. Who needs such fun? Once you get past those first few days on the slopes, however, that cold white stuff on the mountains becomes an addiction. To a skier, nuclear winter sounds like a good thing.

Surfing is the same. Once you keep your balance on that first wave, there’s nothing else you want to do. Well, okay, there’s one other thing, but even that’s a close call. Riding waves is a mix of excitement, exercise, and athleticism immersed in the beauty of nature. On the face of a wave, life is stripped of all regret and concern. Failure, worry, loss—all of these things become meaningless. On the face of a wave, the only thing that matters is now. The problems of yesterday and the worries of tomorrow vanish in a rush of white spray and green water.

For those who find themselves wrapped in surfing’s unyielding embrace, no problem or risk associated with the sport is too great to overcome. And Shannon Ainslie would be the first to tell you that surfing’s risks are plentiful indeed. He’s experienced them all.

Drowning

Surfers occasionally ply their sport in the kind of waves you saw in Perfect Storm, waves that can drop ten tons of water on them and drive them mercilessly into the rocks or coral on the sea bottom...all beyond human help or visibility. Worse, they don’t wear life vests unless they’re challenging ridiculous 15 to 20 meter-high waves in places like Tahiti—and then only because the vest will bring their body to the surface for a remote chance at resuscitation. Normally, a surfer’s only means of flotation is the surfboard, and as Shannon’s Victoria Bay experience revealed, monster waves can reduce a board to popcorn. Even if a surfer’s leg rope holds, the board can become a sea anchor that keel-hauls the surfer over coral or rocks. Surfers’ leg ropes often become entangled in rocks, reefs, and piers with fatal results.

Surprisingly, there’s very little information about the drowning risk associated with surfing, but we can estimate the risk using some arcane data kept in Hawaii in the 1990s.

Sharks are presumably indiscriminate about the ages of their victims, and the average age of all South African surfers attacked by sharks is twenty-one years.49 The youngest victims tend to be about fourteen and most victims are under thirty, so we can surmise that prime surfing years are somewhere in the fourteen to twenty-eight age range. In Hawaii, 260,000 people fall in that age group. About 80 percent of surfers are male, and there are 130,000 males in Hawaii between the ages of fourteen and twenty-eight. We can

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