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RUARAIDH SOMERVILLE: DIFFERENT DIRECTION

Young Scottish wavesailor Ruaraidh Somerville always wanted to compete on the PWA, he tells us why he’s now happy to take his windsurfing in a different direction!

WORDS  – Ruaraidh Somerville // PHOTOS – John Carter/pwaworldtour.com

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I think the last time I wrote an article for Windsurf Magazine was pre-Covid. It’s been a weird time since then… and in that time, great change (both for society and its members) has been the name of the game. At first all the free time to think was rather nice, but then the words of Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey come to mind (I’m really proving how dark lockdown got for me with this level of period drama knowledge): “No life appears rewarding if you think about it too much.” That sounds rather depressing, but I think it’s a magnificent philosophy. Life is better spent lived than thought about. Although writing about it in long, self-indulgent magazine articles should be entirely encouraged. I think.

Changes

I won’t drag out the details of my lockdown (or anyone else’s), but the two main changes were a realisation that attending an online university to let me windsurf was a poor substitute for actually studying in-person, and that I wanted to take my windsurfing in a different direction. It’ll likely raise a laugh with anyone who knows me, but the truth is that from the moment I realised there was a PWA, until some point in the last few years, I was determined to be on it. I wanted to be a world champion. Two things got in the way of that. One, that I was really, really bad at jumping, and two, that I really didn’t like jumping. These realisations ended that dream and I decided to chase my passion for wave riding instead. The first step on that path was my decision to sign up with Goya Windsurfing. The brand exists at the core of the sport and has a wonderful ethos of making great kit for windsurfers, by windsurfers. There’s no pretence, just passion. Perhaps it’s different if you’re the best in the world, but for me I’ve felt no pressure to do anything other than enjoy the sport since I joined the team. It’s easy to get yourself stuck on certain paths at a young age, so I’ve found being with Goya a very freeing experience. Obviously you have an obligation to promote the gear, but I find that part really easy as I’m a massive kit nerd and I have complete confidence in the gear itself. It’s a win win scenario.

Losing & learning

An oddly frustrating aspect of windsurfing being such a small sport, is that if you don’t like certain aspects of the sport you can’t really compete. I knew I didn’t want to do the whole PWA Pozo thing again as I just don’t enjoy it, but that didn’t change the fact that I’m an incredibly competitive person. I’m not in the fortunate financial situation for the IWT to be a viable option, so it’s events like the Tiree Wave Classic that are truly the highlight of my year. The Tiree event is unique for me in that it’s the only competition I want to win regardless of conditions. I don’t think I would want to win an Aloha Classic if it was an onshore jumping event, but no matter what the conditions, winning Tiree is a goal. The people there have given me so much and I feel like I owe it to everybody who helped me out over the years to bring the sword home. Plus it’s a sword! How cool is that?

In Tiree in 2021, in what would be my last year of amateur UK competition, I won the single elimination in wave riding conditions, only to watch all my hopes get flushed down the drain by my inability to jump in the windy, onshore double elimination. That loss crushed me and finally gave me the motivation to start properly chucking forwards, and as it turned out they were much more fun than they were scary. Flash forward to this year and I’m still not great at jumping, but I’m loving the process and as a result loving windsurfing even more. Turns out you need to make lots of mistakes to learn things. Who would’ve guessed?

Teaching

The timing of dropping out of the Open University and applying to regular uni meant I basically had to take a gap year, so I figured I’d get working in the meantime. I’m a pretty creative fella, so I continued with graphic design work, going freelance for a bunch of people and even the PWA for a stint. So 2021 was pretty quiet with me, just focusing on work and windsurfing until early summer, when I hit a wall and realised working online, even in an industry I loved, just wasn’t my thing. So I got my instructor qualification and headed off to work in Wild Diamond windsurfing school in Tiree to get my head straight. I loved that work more than anything I’d ever done before. Teaching, especially that bracket of intermediate kids who are just stoked on every little bit of windsurfing, is so rewarding. Having to rationalise all the little mechanisms of windsurfing to anyone from complete beginners to adult advanced pupils makes you approach your own sailing in a much more intelligent way, especially when you’ve learned from a young age and don’t necessarily have a particularly conscious relationship with how you windsurf. I also loved the daily “grind” of getting off the 9-5, hopping in my van, and rocking up to the beach to go surf or sail then rinse and repeat the next day. Having a work-windsurf balance is much, much better than having unlimited windsurf time and I’m glad lockdown taught me that.

Listen to your gear

Something I learned during those pre or post work Tiree sessions was that the more I tried to emulate others’ approaches to a spot, the worse I’d sail that spot myself. Sailing with other folk I tend to get caught up in what they’re doing rather than what suits me. Sometimes it’s just as simple as the fact I’ve got a different body shape or maybe their sail has a different centre of effort to mine, but all these factors make directly copying their sailing a bad idea. Sailing with less crowds a lot more this year has helped me gain a better idea of the way I want to sail and the way I do sail, free from that influence. For years I’ve been looking through the fog of an overcrowded pool of inspiration and seeing faint glimmers of what could be when it comes to how I sail the spots I love. It’s been so rewarding listening to my body and my gear and finding my own style in the process. Introspection (although not in excess as Dame Maggie tells us) is helpful.

The last word

I had some time between finishing work in the summer and uni starting, which meant if I skipped freshers’ week, I could head over to Denmark on my summer earnings and have one last blitz at the PWA before I aged out of the junior category. I’m not really sure why I went, I guess I wanted to catch up with my old friends and have a bit of fun before I accepted defeat and started living in the real world. Things turned out a lot better than that. I got to sail float and ride heats in a PWA contest, which was beyond awesome. All of my friends and peers knew I was a wave riding guy and it was a hugely gratifying experience to be able to climb up through the double elimination and show people that I was good at the thing I love. I’ve poured blood, sweat and tears into wave riding over the years, so that was a pretty powerful moment for me. I figured it was all over on the third day of competition because it was back to the usual script of onshore jumping stacked on a 3.4… but somehow my jumping was good enough to scrape my way up to 6th. My first attempt at the PWA had been an embarrassing shambles where I didn’t make a single heat and came last without a single jump on my scorecard. The Denmark event offered me the chance to prove to myself and everybody else that maybe I was good enough to be there, even if I had decided I wanted to do something different with my life. It made me believe I was making a choice not to pursue that route in my life, rather than being forced out by reality and I’m incredibly thankful for that.

From that high the year continued a little quieter, adjusting to uni and getting a decent result in Tiree during my first outing in the Pro fleet. Exploring the east coast of Scotland for surfing and windsurfing has been super fun and I’m excited to do more of that, I really want to make some video projects and show more of Scotland’s windsurfing potential to the world. It’s been a fun year and a good recovery from a few years I think all of us would rather forget. I’m not where I want to be with my windsurfing just yet, but I’m where I want to be right now. You can’t always get what you want, but it turns out (if you take a long and circuitous route) you might just get what you need.