I never go surfing in the winter in Nova Scotia if the air temperature is below minus twenty degrees Celsius. A guy has to know his limit. But there are plenty of good days when it’s only maybe a flat zero or ten degrees below zero and the water temperature hovers between zero and minus three degrees. Wave density in cold water surfing is very interesting and I find that those light-water summer waves just don’t have the same punch as a good, heavy, close-to-solid icy winter wave. That, after all, is what winter surfing in Nova Scotia is all about.
Big chundling winter storms out in the North Atlantic conjure up powerful swells that hammer this coast. A couple of years ago, a big winter storm slammed the coast in the middle of the night and sent a couple of unexpected waves right through the patio doors of my neighbour’s house and into the living room. If it had been daylight, I or one of my friends might have been on that wave.
Usually, though, we surf off the tip of the headlands where you can paddle out without having to duck-dive through frigid water. There’s a nice point break a few miles down the road where you can paddle out in deep water, snake over into the line-up of say two or three surfers, and pull into a powerful head-high glassy wall of cold, clean energy. First, though, you have to slip-slide your way across big boulders glazed in ice, some with funky headgear of caked snow, and then slide your board out across frosty rockweed and glistening kelp fronds that welcome you back to the winter sea.
Despite the calm quiet beauty of this place, winter wipe-outs can be cruel as Central Park thugs. Seconds under water can be painful. You come up sucking hard at sub-arctic air and wait for the ice cream headache to arrive. Usually it’s just a sledge hammer to the side of the head and several seconds of wanting to ralph your breakfast. But it goes away.
Do we have ice in the water? you want to know. Yes. Some. Like the time I was riding a cool six-foot wall and ducked low when I noticed it was about to loop in front of me. I went for the head dip only to discover that a chunk of ice the size of a micro-wave oven was lobbing over me and my board. Fortunately, it slammed down into the trough and didn’t ding me or my board.
We’ve had ice pans slip into the break zone too on occasion. You can get off your board and lounge for a bit on your private little island or even try to make the drop on the right size slab of ice if the cold has made you woozy enough.
One of my worst experiences was actually this past January — all alone at sea on a sunny, windless one-degree Fahrenheit day with junior waves. The zipper on the back of my drysuit came completely undone from my overzealous paddling. I kicked out of a nice little blue wave, dense and just a tad slushy with tiny shreds of sea ice (the way I like them), and fell backwards, spread-eagled into the sea. It felt like hot knives stabbing into my shoulder blades. Full on winter North Atlantic filling up my dry suit. The seawater didn’t exactly drag me down but it meant I had to swim super slo mo to shore dragging a fair piece of my frigid friend, the North Atlantic Ocean. Without protection, it was mightily cold. Muscles began to seize. I waddled out of the sea and staggered across a crusty white shoreline of snow and ice-jewelled rocks. And then I had to lay head-down at the foot of the hill with my feet at a 45 degree angle tilting upward to drain the water out of my suit (and over my head) so I could walk the quarter mile to my car.
After that it was home to thaw in front of the wood stove and melt the saltwater icicles left dangling from my hair.

“Like all great fiction, The Republic of Nothing speaks for all time. And like all great dramatists, Lesley Choyce can build a stage on Whalebone Island and bring the whole world to it.“

– Neil Peart

A small island off the coast of Nova Scotia declares its independence to the world. In this Utopian world, the ocean delivers many a curiosity, including a dead circus elephant and a raven-haired woman. When the turbulence of the 1960s draws the island’s inhabitants into politics, the Vietnam War, and the peace movement, and when civilizatino lays siege, an unexpected character comes to the rescue.

Sound impossible? Not on Whalebone Island, a.k.a. the Republic of Nothing. Where else could a psychic castaway, an anarchist-turned-politician, and American refugees cultivate their eccentricities? This new edition of Lesley Choyce’s celebrated novel features an afterword by Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart, leading readers to discover once again that nothing is everything.

The Republic of Nothing is published by Goose Lane.

Available through online bookstores.

Chapters.ca

Amazon.com

By Lesley Choyce

 

The headlands are covered with white, the spruce trees on top of the hills are green and the icy rocks I have to slip and slide over to get myself into the sea are glistening like jewels.

The water is cold (who would have guessed?) – just hovering below freezing. February and March have the coldest water of the year. The air temperature is a semi-tropical minus ten. (I’ll surf down to minus twenty but after that I find that my face muscles freeze and I start talking funny.)

I push off into the blue sea, knee-paddling while above gulls swoop and artic ducks fluff up their wings as they float on the surface.

I take long, deep strokes into the sea and pull clean winter salt air into my lungs. Soon, a couple of friends will join me, but right now, I’m alone in the sea, with a big smile on my face. Even though my journey to the place where the waves are breaking takes eight minutes of paddling, I feel like I’m a million miles from the claustrophobia of mainland North America. The high cliffs of Chebucto Head, far to the west, shimmer on the horizon, bolstered to near triple their height by the mirage effects of the winter sea. A container ship leaving Halifax Harbour also appears magnified like some huge extraterrestrial vessel. I myself am a tiny speck on this immense ocean, overwhelmed by how perfect it feels to be here, now, ready to tap the immaculate energy and grace of the sea.

These waves have travelled hundreds of kilometres from a brutal North Atlantic storm now wreaking havoc on fishermen unlucky enough to be working the tail of the Grand Banks. But here each wave is a work of perfection. I’ve paddled to my take-off point and sit for a minute, watching my breath make small clouds in the clear air.

 

The waves are about two metres high – “head high,” as we’d say. They roll towards me, then arch up into perfect peaks as the offshore wind pushes up the face of the waves, making them steep and smooth until they cascade forward, top to bottom, some creating hollow sections big enough to tuck a surfer into.

I wait, dwelling upon the euphoria of it all. I’ve abandoned the warm inside-world of work and life tied to the continent. Now I am drawn into this other plane of existence. I see my own version of the perfect wave headed my way. Three deep strokes and I’m off, dropping down the smooth, angled hill of water, an easy take-off at first but then the wind pumps hard against me as the wave goes vertical and I pull myself up onto my feet. I’m jamming a bottom turn just as the tip of the overhead wave blocks out the morning sun.

I go left and pull up higher onto the wave as it begins to feather. Then I do the usual: tuck down as the lip of the wave starts to spill forward, a pure two-metre waterfall. I’m shrewd, cunning and all-powerful, a small sea god in my endorphin-charged brain as I speed across the face of this blue-green wall of water.

But for some reason, I discover I’m not as clever as I believed. Sure, I’ve escaped from my office, left the troubled and vexing world of publishing behind me for now, but the sea would like to remind me that I am only a vulnerable guest in this winter domain. I am a player in the game but t have no real control over the rules that can change at any time.

I discover that my speed does not match the speed of the wave collapsing behind me from the peak. I tuck lower, adjust my position on the face of the wave for maximum warp only to discover that I’m too high up and fading too far back into the hollow bowl of the wave.

I realize this just as the lip of the wave connects with the left side of my face. It’s cold, numbing and as powerful as a Mike Tyson punch to the jaw. I’m sure I release a colourful syllable but nothing more as I lose my footing and pitch forward into a thundering mass of whitewater as the collapsing wave throws its salty weight from on high down upon me.

I hit the surface spread-eagled and then get slammed by the impact of a ton of winter water. Just for the record, water is more dense in the winter. When it hits you, it carries more tonnage. If it could get more dense than this, it would be frozen and then it would hurt worse.

Winter wipeouts are not pleasant but they are temporary. The trick to minimizing damage when working your karma through a winter wipeout is to dive deep and then come up quick. The idea is to let the wave go past you while you sink beneath the vector of energy.

The only problem with this is that you have a sudden craving for oxygen and the cold water on your face is causing your brain to seek asylum elsewhere. When you come up gasping for air, your lungs hurt and you feel the first sign of the brain-wrenching ice cream headache that is exploding inside your skull. Evolution has not prepared the unprotected human face for even seconds of immersion in water below the freezing point.

I gulp air, tough out the minute or so of the brain implosion and then get back up on my board and paddle back out towards the sea. I go through the checklist: I’m alive, I’m surfing, I will be a little more cautious on the next wave.

Right about then, a great army of grey clouds advances from the north and I see the squall advancing from the land. The sun is swallowed and it begins to snow. Because of the strength of the wind, the snow does not really fall to earth. This is horizontal snow, blowing straight into the waves, straight into my face.

I can no longer see the headland and can barely discern the next set of waves approaching. I let two slide under me and then paddle for the third. Paddle, stand, drop, bottom turn and then slide up into the pocket again, only this time, going right instead of left. All I can see is snow pelting me in the face. It’s cold, wet and creates a crazy visual kaleidoscope since I can only see about three feet in front. It makes the whole event that much more interesting. I have to feel the wave and use intuition to decide what it will do next. Luke Skywalker on a surfboard. In winter.

–

© 2006 Lesley Choyce

Lesley Choyce is a writer, poet, musician and playwright in Nova Scotia, Canada. He is the author of more than 65 books.

Visit www.LesleyChoyce.com for more.

Driving Minnie’s Piano is published by Pottersfield Press, distributed by Nimbus Publishing. To order with VISA, phone toll free 1-800-NIMBUS9 (1-800-646-2879)

The history of Nova Scotia is an amazing story of a land and people shaped by the waves, the tides, the wind and the wonder of the North Atlantic. Lesley Choyce weaves the legacy of this unique coastal province, piecing together the stories written in the rocks, the wrecks and the record books of human glory and error. In this true-life adventure, he provides a down-to-earth journey through the natural and man-made history that is both refreshing and revealing.

The story begins after the retreat of the glaciers when the first people arrived, and over thousands of years evolved the highly civilized Mi’kmaq culture. The arrival of the Europeans disrupted their life, unleashing tumultuous conflicts that would last centuries. Then came the power struggle between France and England, fought at sea and on land. As England emerged the victor, the Acadians were driven from the land they loved. Once the wars subsided, the pirates and privateers still plundered the seas, but the honest sailors and shipbuilders of Nova Scotia led the province into a flourishing world trade. During the First World War, Nova Scotia was again thrust into military action, resulting in one of the most devastating explosions ever to rip through a city. Decades later, Halifax was torn apart again, this time by military riots.

Here in the new century, it is clear that the way of life along this coast is changing. But while the wealth of the sea has been plundered by human greed, the dreams of life in harmony with the fierce, yet beautiful, North Atlantic live on, even as the restless surge of the waves continues to carve away the coastline.

Penguin Books published the first edition in 1996. Lesley Choyce lives at Lawrencetown Beach and is the author of 65 books including The Coasts of Canada, a history of the country’s shorelines. He has edited a companion volume to Nova Scotia: Shaped by the Sea titled Nova Scotia: A Traveller’s Companion, 300 Years of Travel Writing (also from Pottersfield Press).