The world was different back then. Well, the surfing world in Nova Scotia, anyway.
I had first surfed in Nova Scotia shortly after high school in the mid-1970s, having driven up here from New Jersey with my buddy, Jack Parry. We surfed some small but pristine waves on remote beaches on the Eastern Shore and were completely stoked.
I had a university education and some graduate school in New York City to put behind me before I could make a more solid commitment to this idyllic province. At first, I could only live here three months of the year, in a rundown shack in West Chezzetcook (no plumbing, no electricity) that I bought for $1,500. During those summers, I got to know the handful of surfers who had been drawn to this surfing mecca the same way those folks in Close Encounters of the Third Kind found their way to Devil’s Tower to meet the aliens.
But I was the alien here, not from space but an outsider from the U.S., seeking asylum from American madness at the time. My first true surf buddy during those years was John Brannen from New Brunswick, who had grown tired of trying to catch small sloppy surf at Parlee Beach on the Northumberland Strait. He showed me where to surf and how to walk on slippery algae-covered rocks without breaking my neck. “Step only on the light-coloured stones,” was his mantra. I’d only surfed sand beaches before on the Jersey Shore and, despite the danger, a boulder covered shoreline leading out to a perfection point break was my idea of exotic.
Once I was through with graduate school in New York, I was ready to commit to Nova Scotia full time and was determined to harass the consulate office in Manhattan until they let me immigrate. (They turned me down four times before the head guy grew weary and just signed the document for my promise not to bother him again.)
I had a short stint living in Joe Murphy’s house in Seaforth before buying an old farmhouse at Lawrencetown Beach for $14,900. I felt like I had truly arrived and staked my claim to some sacred turf near the surf in my version of Surfer’s Paradise.
In those days, I did a lot of solo surfing but also called around on a party-line phone to the handful of keeners I had gotten to know, anxious to fi nd some company to other than just the curious (but beautiful) seals.
The initial cadre of surfers back then in the late 1970s were all men. John Brannen remained my personal guru/kahuna, advising me on cold water, ding repair, sea urchin wound treatment, and surf etiquette. “For me, gear was mostly handmade (surfboards, even wet suit gloves and boots) or sourced from scuba shops,” recalls John.
Despite the poor equipment, he remembers that surfing was “new and undiscovered. Exciting to surf new spots with friends. Even now it is preserved in my memory as the best of times.” Waxing a bit more poetic, he pauses before paraphrasing The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:“We were the first that burst upon that silent sea.”
Jim Leadbetter was a local who had a penchant for sitting as far out to sea as possible to snag the largest waves. He’d paddle to mid-Atlantic if he thought that would do the job.
He remembers the crappy wetsuits. “They can best be described as ranging from bad to horrible,” he says. “In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the only option locally was war-surplus Canadian navy wetsuits.”
But he notes the upside of it all: “The surf culture in Nova Scotia was centred on Lawrencetown Beach, Seaforth, and West Chezzetcook, and made up of young people drawn to the surf and the untouched nature of the communities.
The surfing community developed into a close-knit, friendly family-oriented group, which formed close bonds that have endured to this day.”
Paul Camilleri was an Australian who had married a woman from Dartmouth and brought a bit of Aussie surf culture to the local scene of wave riding. Bob and Dave Doucette shared some fine waves and stories with me as did the two Ians — McLeod and Mcdougall, both following the siren call of surf all the way from Thunder Bay, Ont., to the Eastern Shore.
I remember bluesman Joe Murphy in the water with a curious cat-like pose of nonchalance on an overhead wall of water. Donnie Bruce surfed with a kind of aggressive passion transposed from his hockey practice and Ronnie Ballem, known as the Reverend because of his preachy sermons about where to surf, was often on hand to steer any true-believers further down the shore where the waves — in his mind — would always be a bit bigger and a bit cleaner. And then there was Joe Reardon, also pontifical, a bit of a loner and self-styled prophet, who might well have understood the ways of the sea better than any of us.
A young classics scholar named John March was a lifeguard at Lawrencetown. He tried to teach me Latin while sitting on our boards between waves, so I could fi nish my PhD. But I was a dismal student of the dead language. “Sub aqua means under water, right?”
There were a few others who made it into the water on weekends or took up surfing only to move away for jobs or marriage or schooling. But nothing quite compares to the camaraderie and cosmic saltwater vibe that existed in the line-up in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. On rare occasions, travelling surfers from Maine or further south would come through in search of uncrowded waves, saying things like, “Man, this is like California was in the 1950s.” They meant that in a good way.
Anytime someone told me that Nova Scotia then was like the rest of the continent only 20 or 30 years behind, I thanked them for the compliment and grinned ear to ear.
Vic Ruzgys arrived later. “I started surfi ng in Nova Scotia in August 1985 when I arrived to my posting after completing military flying training,” he says. “It was a regular, far more experienced crew that surfed the Point, most of whom were quite welcoming, with a few exceptions. I remember the surf scene being fairly low key, especially in the winter, but there were still the odd days in the warmer months when you could have it to yourself.”
The Point at Lawrencetown Beach was the go-to place most days. It’s crowded now on most any swell; I long for the good old days, but realize that Nova Scotia has found its way into the contemporary surf world with Magicseaweed.com providing way too much easy information for surfers in the city to fi nd their way to my local break. Before the internet, we’d check marine weather and buoy reports for swell height or, better yet, drive to the ocean and see what the surf gods offered. My favourite days now are the ones where Magicseaweed is wrong and surreptitious swells roll through to be ridden alone in the fog, sun, or snow.
Nostalgia, I realize is a heady drug. Yes, there were glory days for those of us back then in our twenties, soon to be lured from the full-time surf life by family, jobs, financial responsibilities, and more. We had to get our surfboards from the U.S. or make them in our sheds. Wetsuits were crude and uncomfortable, many of us still wearing old stiff diving suits with metal beaver-tail snaps that would ding the heck out of your board and give you a pain in the neck.
If my first full-time summer in Nova Scotia was a watery Zen nirvana, my first Maritime winter of surfing was a revelation.
Those leaky crude wetsuits led to painful cold on the most delicate parts of the anatomy. But my buddies told me winter was best. I was stoked and ready pay the price for winter waves.
I woke up one morning for my first true snowfall in this dear province, looking out at my driveway thinking someone stole my old rusty Toyota, only to discover it buried under drifting snow. Only the antenna revealed it was still in the driveway.
Not long after that, I got a phone call telling me that one of the better local point breaks was “going off.” Great! But first I had to excavate my surfboard from a mountain of snow in the yard, then dig out the car, anchor the board to the roof, and jam my shivering body into the neoprene straitjacket that was my wetsuit.
It was all worth it. The waves were legendary, like nothing I’d ever experienced. Clean, crisp, steep, and fast. Sure, the north wind shot bullets of frozen ice into my face as I dropped down the glorious face of a head-high North Atlantic wave.
But, as I slipped further back into the tube, the lip now just cascading over my wetsuit hood, I knew I’d found my own version of the legendary perfect wave.
Well, not exactly perfect. The wonder of it all stole my focus. That glistening lip of seawater above my head smacked me hard on the cheek and knocked me from my board into a washing-machine-on-overdrive maelstrom of winter madness. It held me under briefly, which seems like a very long time in winter. and I came up gasping. I retrieved my board just as another wave zonked me, then another. Soon the ice-cream headache set in. I believe John Brannen paddled over to see if I was OK. Once the pain in the skull and the desire to vomit passed, I indicated that I was.
I paddled out for another wave, winded but wiser.
Winters were colder back then. They really were. It was not uncommon to be surfing in slushy ice, small hard pieces pinging against your board as you cruised across the face of the semi-solid structures of seawater. Shore rocks sported shiny headgear of ice making it tough to get in or out of the ocean. I had long hair in those days and any of my locks sticking out of the hood would collect seawater and freeze, giving me long dangling icicles tapping my cheeks.
Sure, your face would go numb and your fingers find it hard to function, but those waves were worth it. The Nova Scotian sea would keep on pumping waves to our shores for generations to come but there was something magic in the world of waves for me back then, back in the day when the sea wind itself told me I had finally found my place to feel fully at home on this planet.
And, as Jim Leadbetter reminds me, “The two things most unique about the early days are of course the totally uncrowded waves and the easy going and friendly attitude of the majority of surfers. The waves seemed bigger and cleaner. But that may just be my recollection.”
“No, Jim,” I reply. “That’s exactly the way it was.”
