Loose Lips Give Surf Spots Crap Names...

Irish Teahupoo? Welsh Box? Coldwater Nias? Yorkshire G-land? Really?
These things invariably start in a surfing magazine- these wild assertions. They may start on the beach but they become concrete when they get committed to paper. Sometimes, people should just know when to press the delete key...
Joe Curren’s off the cuff remark that Thurso was ‘like a Coldwater Nias’ appeared in Surfer magazine several years ago, it was banter. It is now one of the most quoted phrases around, the guidebooks love it.

If you’ve been to Nias & Thurso you’ll know the similarities are pretty thin on the ground. Yes they are both rights, and yes they have barrel sections but the whole dynamic, the whole set up of the wave and the way you surf it are poles apart. Suffice to say if anyone’s ever been surfing Nias, got out and stood on the reef in the boardies with the tropical sun flaying their back, nothing but banana jaffles on their mind and perhaps a cold beer and said, ‘Hey, you know something? I reckon that right there is the warm water Thurso East...’ I will eat my own poop.

These little exchanges, these comparisons, often stem from sources that really shouldn’t be spouting them. The Welsh Box... Y Boc. A fabricated name, made up for a spurious newspaper article (claiming 40ft waves!) which was more about generating freelance income for the writer/photographer than anything else, the wave is called The Pole, it is not a secret spot, you can see it plain as day from the road at Freshwater and it can protect itself thank you very much by:
a) Generally raping anyone that tries to surf it, there are not many places in these islands that will actually tear the arse out of your wetsuit and give your proper bone snapping beating.
b) Being in an MOD firing range, which is off limits 90% of the time.
c) Having an appallingly long paddle there and back, and on the way back you’re up against the famous Freshie rip.
It doesn’t need an alter-ego. It isn’t like the original Box in West Oz anyway, that’s way more of a bowl which you can backdoor. The Pole is probably a harder and nastier place to surf, with the exception that there are a lot more sharks in W.A.
As for the ‘Box’ in Cornwall... Jeeeeez. How do peoples minds work? ‘Oh it’s got a bit of a square chunky barrel... I know, I shall call him- Box!’ how about some originality? The Box in Cornwall is a sodding left as well and nothing like the original.
The naming of surf spots is a mysterious thing, someone calls it something, the crew that first surfed it adopt it and on it goes. Unless someone wants to change it, for secrecy or political reasons, hence Lance’s Right/Hollow Trees/HT’s all being the same place, much to the confusion of Indo first timers... Back to home, if the Box is a favourite for name dropping then Pipe is the king hit, the real insult that would make any Hawaiian laugh so hard they would probably seep a little pee. The Scottish Pipeline- Bagpipe, a fresh one from the last few years, errrr, well yes it is a left barrel... and that is as far as similarities go. Pipeline is a massive A-frame, Pipe one way, Backdoor the other, the pounding, ferocious heart of the surfing world, the ultimate test of a surfers ability. At four foot its fun as hell, over six-foot it will kill you. The Scottish Pipeline? Give me strength. Now I don’t deny this wave is a good, heavy, hollow wave, there was no consensus as to what to call it as it’s hardly ever been surfed until the last few years of media darlinghood and now things have settled on Baggies, leaving out the Pipe bit thank gawd. The other waves in the area had equally unimaginative names, one is called ‘Backdoor’ well, it is in one guidebook, (cos it’s a hollow right, although it doesn’t handle anything over 4ft unlike the real one) the locals never surfed it. It’s now known as the ‘Dump’ due to, like Red Indian names, it being called the first thing that you see... The farmer likes to dump his farm crap and dead sheep down the cliff there so Dump is a good name. Macaronis in Indo was named cos they had it for tea the night it was first surfed, so the story goes.
All these comparisons don’t do anyone any favours. Our waves are our waves, we should celebrate them, name them for what they are, not adopt foreign names which to an outsider look kinda gay...
This article was inspired by a photo being posted on the internet of the ‘Irish Teahupoo’ a name which made blood pore out of my ears and steam vent from my anus. Batty has surfed both and trust him, there is no comparison. It’s much more like the Irish Mundaka, ‘cept its over rocks not a sandbar........

*Picture caption- this is the wave that got dubbed ‘Irish Teahupoo’, it is commonly known as the G-Spot, and to all intensive purposes that is its name, its not its real name cos like most of the waves in Ireland it has no surfy name, just a geographical one... Funny thing is, the name that all the locals know it by, the name the local fisho types call it, is wrong. On the Irish nautical charts its different by one letter. So it shoulda been called the M-Spot... But that’s not funny and the entire reason this writer called it the G-Spot in the first place three years ago was so the article could be called ‘Searching for the G-Spot’ it was a little joke. So there you go, be careful cos names stick. Oh and this is Batty paddling in back in ‘04... Photo: Sharpy

These little exchanges, these comparisons, often stem from sources that really shouldn’t be spouting them. The Welsh Box... Y Boc. A fabricated name, made up for a spurious newspaper article (claiming 40ft waves!) which was more about generating freelance income for the writer/photographer than anything else, the wave is called The Pole, it is not a secret spot, you can see it plain as day from the road at Freshwater and it can protect itself thank you very much by:
a) Generally raping anyone that tries to surf it, there are not many places in these islands that will actually tear the arse out of your wetsuit and give your proper bone snapping beating.
b) Being in an MOD firing range, which is off limits 90% of the time.
c) Having an appallingly long paddle there and back, and on the way back you’re up against the famous Freshie rip.
It doesn’t need an alter-ego. It isn’t like the original Box in West Oz anyway, that’s way more of a bowl which you can backdoor. The Pole is probably a harder and nastier place to surf, with the exception that there are a lot more sharks in W.A.
As for the ‘Box’ in Cornwall... Jeeeeez. How do peoples minds work? ‘Oh it’s got a bit of a square chunky barrel... I know, I shall call him- Box!’ how about some originality? The Box in Cornwall is a sodding left as well and nothing like the original.
The naming of surf spots is a mysterious thing, someone calls it something, the crew that first surfed it adopt it and on it goes. Unless someone wants to change it, for secrecy or political reasons, hence Lance’s Right/Hollow Trees/HT’s all being the same place, much to the confusion of Indo first timers... Back to home, if the Box is a favourite for name dropping then Pipe is the king hit, the real insult that would make any Hawaiian laugh so hard they would probably seep a little pee. The Scottish Pipeline- Bagpipe, a fresh one from the last few years, errrr, well yes it is a left barrel... and that is as far as similarities go. Pipeline is a massive A-frame, Pipe one way, Backdoor the other, the pounding, ferocious heart of the surfing world, the ultimate test of a surfers ability. At four foot its fun as hell, over six-foot it will kill you. The Scottish Pipeline? Give me strength. Now I don’t deny this wave is a good, heavy, hollow wave, there was no consensus as to what to call it as it’s hardly ever been surfed until the last few years of media darlinghood and now things have settled on Baggies, leaving out the Pipe bit thank gawd. The other waves in the area had equally unimaginative names, one is called ‘Backdoor’ well, it is in one guidebook, (cos it’s a hollow right, although it doesn’t handle anything over 4ft unlike the real one) the locals never surfed it. It’s now known as the ‘Dump’ due to, like Red Indian names, it being called the first thing that you see... The farmer likes to dump his farm crap and dead sheep down the cliff there so Dump is a good name. Macaronis in Indo was named cos they had it for tea the night it was first surfed, so the story goes.
All these comparisons don’t do anyone any favours. Our waves are our waves, we should celebrate them, name them for what they are, not adopt foreign names which to an outsider look kinda gay...
This article was inspired by a photo being posted on the internet of the ‘Irish Teahupoo’ a name which made blood pore out of my ears and steam vent from my anus. Batty has surfed both and trust him, there is no comparison. It’s much more like the Irish Mundaka, ‘cept its over rocks not a sandbar........

*Picture caption- this is the wave that got dubbed ‘Irish Teahupoo’, it is commonly known as the G-Spot, and to all intensive purposes that is its name, its not its real name cos like most of the waves in Ireland it has no surfy name, just a geographical one... Funny thing is, the name that all the locals know it by, the name the local fisho types call it, is wrong. On the Irish nautical charts its different by one letter. So it shoulda been called the M-Spot... But that’s not funny and the entire reason this writer called it the G-Spot in the first place three years ago was so the article could be called ‘Searching for the G-Spot’ it was a little joke. So there you go, be careful cos names stick. Oh and this is Batty paddling in back in ‘04... Photo: Sharpy