SOCIALLY CONNECTED
My first sojourn to the Canary Islands was nearly thirty years ago, way back in 1990! Before I first travelled there, I will always remember drooling at the images in Windsurf of the early pioneers such as Gary Gibson, Farrell O’Shea, Nigel Howell and Scott Poulter ripping it up in the turquoise waters and all captured by the legendary surf photographer Alex Williams! Those guys were legends back then, living this enviable lifestyle out in the Canary Islands, strutting around in fluorescent surf gear, custom Lodey’s and most likely with hot girls in tow! To us mere mortals it seemed like they were living the dream!
It was during that time that out of the blue I received a hand written letter through the post from Rich Foster, an upcoming sailor back in the day, asking if I was up for a two week trip to Fuerteventura, all expenses paid. As a totally inexperienced and naive photographer this offer seemed amazing back then and I literally jumped at the chance and of course replied by return of post! Little did I know I would be sleeping on the floor (or in a board bag on the beach), living on lentils and also spending half the week in the back of a car crammed full of windsurf equipment and smelly wetsuits. But that was all part of the experience back then and the misery was the most memorable aspect of that early trip abroad.
Back in the 90s obviously there was no internet, no real forecasts and if you wanted to book a flight you had to go to a travel agent and do it in person. Trips to the Canary Islands were reserved for the bold and adventurous windsurfers who came back at the end of winter ridiculously suntanned with crusted faces and bleached blond hair! For us stuck back at home in the UK we would only find out if these guys scored months down the line when the magazines hit the shelves! In those days you just went. Each day you would wake up and see what the weather would bring. Nobody had any idea if a swell was coming or what time the wind would blow. A trip to the Canary Islands was a big deal; the islands were our version of Hawaii!
Looking back on my first trip, there was barely a breath of wind on the north shore and we ended up down south in Sotavento after a chance meeting with Dave White who informed us it had been nuking every day while we had been twiddling our thumbs up in Corralejo! I headed down with Rich Foster and his roommate Corky Kirkham who had also headed out to Fuerteventura from Newcastle following a similar path hoping to become a professional windsurfer! The wind howled and we slept in board bags under the stars at Sotavento. There was never a dull moment on the trip, it was all new and exciting and I guess you could say we were then living the dream ourselves!
Fast forward to 2018 and oh how times have changed! We have forecasts galore, accessible with hourly updates, flights virtually every day at bargain prices and all available to book by laptop or phone at the click of a few buttons. Whatever you get up to will most probably be on some sort of social media within a matter of hours or minutes for the world to see! You don’t have to move off your sofa to check the forecast or book a flight and can even see the beaches via web cameras just to make sure what conditions are like! Yep we know when and where it is going to blow, how big the waves will be, the best tides and can time it to be there without wasting any days waiting around for the conditions to pick up! I have now been to the Canary islands more than sixty times, so to a certain extent gone is the excitement of the old days, but on the other hand the game of scoring the best possible windsurf sessions has become way more efficient. Welcome to the modern world I suppose, now we live it, share it and everybody gets to see it, but even then I still get excited when I head to the Canary Islands especially when waves are involved.