Seat Of Storms

The battleground between cornish granite and the fearsome fire power of the atlantic has shaped some of our more interesting wave riders. There’s a unique quality to everything ‘out west’. Writer pete geall knows it well, lifeguarding the beaches and surfing its secret corners, read on as he takes a poetic dip into the seat of storms...
 

- Pete Geall

Once every while, a dead Gannet seabird washes up on my local beach, down in this far west corner of Cornwall. Its spinal column severed by the force of colliding with the water at speed, whilst attempting to feed on a specific fish, identified individually out of an entire shoal.

There is something glorious about each of those birds, locked forever in that defining moment: wings tightly clasped around their youthful breast, oily eyes fixated into the unknown depths and onto its quarry. So often the end of things is characterised in decline. But those birds, in the peak of their salad days, meet a most poetic and presumably immediate end. A slender margin for error, a cigarette paper between life and death; their fate sealed by a few degrees or a divine gust of wind - and thus their occasional arrival on my beach is assured.

Yet still, what of the fish? The fish deemed prey in the gannet’s myopia of hunger, whilst the others in the shoal drift mercifully into the periphery. That fish has survived a dive attack that few others do, and yet it can’t contemplate either its luck in surviving or its misfortune in being chosen in the first place. This story, in case you were wondering, is about that fish.

As a surfer growing up in Cornwall you get used to be dive-bombed from a young age. Tourists come to roost during the summer months, before returning to the presumed riches of urban Albion, leaving a vacuum of seasonal unemployment and high property prices in their wake. What is left though, can’t be taken away. Consistently average, occasionally excellent year-round surf that with careful application, can open the doors to a hidden Cornwall. Beneath the summer glam and sham, are fleeting moments of exquisite beauty that will always live on.