Roger Cox: ‘The first wave of Scottish surfers were over a barrel to meet fellow members of the board’

Welcome to the second instalment of a two-part special on the life and times of Scottish surfing pioneer Andy Bennetts. If you tuned in last week, you’ll remember that Part One dealt mostly with the discoveries Bennetts and his friends made in south-east Scotland in the late 1960s, notably their realisation of the surfing potential of Pease Bay. If you missed last week’s episode you should be able to find it at www.scotsman.com/roger-cox

As discussed last time, the discoveries Bennetts and Co made along the coasts of East Lothian and the Borders are noteworthy by any measure, but by the time he first paddled out at Pease in the summer of 1969, Bennetts was already a seasoned surf explorer, having made history 150 miles further up the coast at Aberdeen in 1968.

Bennetts was born in Devon in 1950 but his family moved to the Granite City when he was one and lived there until 1966, when his father was offered a job in Edinburgh. His first waveriding experiences were on summer holidays to Newquay in Cornwall in the mid-Sixties, and in 1968, inspired by the surfing he’d seen down south, he bought his first board.

“I tried surfing a couple of times down in Cornwall,” he says, “and I thought, ‘Well, there are waves in Aberdeen cos I’ve seen them,’ so I decided to get a board. It was a Bilbo 9’6” moulded thing – it weighed a ton – and I got it sent up to Edinburgh.”

Unaware of the array of surf spots on their doorstep, Bennetts, Stuart Crichton and Ian Wishart first took the board up to Aberdeen on the train. Not only did they have to lug the hefty Bilbo from the station to the beach, attracting quizzical looks on the way, when they finally arrived the waves were far from ideal for a trial run.

“You’ve got to bear in mind that we were all learning,” says Bennetts, “and the waves were probably about 6 or 7ft, which is big enough. We weren’t paddling out the back – we were just in the white water.”

Were there a lot of people watching from the shore?

“I don’t really remember, to be honest, but it was Baltic – September in Aberdeen without a wetsuit. We went in for about ten minutes and then ran out and got a towel and dried off while somebody else had a shot.”

As far as they knew, Bennetts, Crichton and Wishart were the first people ever to surf in Aberdeen – or, indeed, in Scotland – but later that day, when they were looking for somewhere to store their board, a friendly man at the beach pavilion said they could leave it with the other surfboard he looked after – a classic longboard which turned out to belong to Aberdeen surfer George Law, who first took to the waves in 1967.

Far from reacting like Scott and his men when they discovered they had been beaten to the Pole by Amundsen, the Edinburgh trio made friends with Law and went surfing with him every day of their trip. Law has long-since moved to Canada, but as far as anyone knows (and more on this in a later column) it seems likely that he was the first person ever to surf in Scotland.

Back in Edinburgh, Bennetts and his fellow surfers soon discovered waves much closer to home, but thanks to subscriptions to American magazine Surfer they realised their boards were becoming outdated. The shortboard revolution was getting going and shorter, nimbler craft were the order of the day. New boards were expensive, but Bennetts struck gold when he was offered the raw materials to start building his own by a friend’s father who ran a fibreglass company in Dalkeith.

“We blew our own foam blanks and shaped the boards, all very much experimental stuff. It was costing us seven quid per board, when new boards were about £50.”

After his friend Bill Batten saw “waves all over the place” while attending a wedding at Armadale, it didn’t take Bennetts long to make the pilgrimage to the North Coast. Initially he surfed the beachbreaks around Bettyhill, and in 1977 he took on the recently discovered reefbreak, Thurso East.

Bennetts has since ridden waves all over the world, but he remains passionate about exploring Scotland. Only a couple of months ago he found a spot he’d never surfed before somewhere between North Berwick and Gullane. Perhaps that’s the best thing about the Andy Bennetts story: it’s still a work in progress.