The Glide

This week, I'm reposting an article I wrote back in 2016 about the feeling at the centre of this whole circus, and why it gets us all hooked in the first place.

Me, mid-glide, Niseko, January 2020. Photo: Owen

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An etching made by one of the Cook expedition’s artists.

One evening during the summer of 1777, William Anderson sat down at his desk to record his daily observations.

Anderson was the surgeon aboard HMS Resolution, Captain James Cook’s flagship command on his third Pacific voyage. That night, the fleet was at anchor at what the expedition called The Society Islands – Hawaii, to us.

It had been an unusually stimulating day. Anderson had witnessed some uniquely strange behaviour from one local inhabitant that had left quite an impression, and he set about recording it for posterity.

“He went out from the shore till he was near the place where the swell begins to take its rise; and, watching its first motion very attentively, paddled before it with great quickness, till [it] had acquired sufficient force to carry his canoe before it without passing underneath. He sat motionless, and was carried along at the same swift rate as the wave, till it landed him on the beach. Then he started out … and went in search of another swell”.

What Anderson had witnessed was, of course, a form of surfing.

But as his next sentence reveals, what he was really recording for the first time was that unique phenomenon known to all board riders, where sensory pleasure is derived from effortless, friction-free sideways motion.

“I could not help concluding that this man felt the most supreme pleasure while he was driven so fast and smoothly by the sea”.

Almost 250 years later, this meeting of two foreign cultures remains one of the most culturally significant events in recent human history.

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One of today’s foremost glide practitioners Mikey February, channeling that 1777 Society Islands vibe. Photo: Jimmicane

Don’t laugh. It’s true. According to Simon Sheffer, Professor of the History of Science at Cambridge University, the significance of the Cook voyages is that this “encounter between two of the really great maritime civilisations of our planet, that of the North Atlantic and that of Polynesia, caused … an extraordinarily dramatic change in our knowledge of the world”.

How then can the western world’s first recorded encounter with the Polynesian subculture of surfing – a man using the power of the waves for his own pleasure, no less – be viewed as any less significant?

Just consider the evidence. Back in 2013, the European Surf Industry Manufacturers’ Association valued the global board sports market at a whopping €37.2 billion – 15% of the entire global sports market. That’s a lot of people buying a lot of boards, clothing and trainers.

And the actual sensation at the heart of this enormous industry? The same feeling that compelled this nameless Hawaiian local to catch waves and which, over 200 years later, hooks modern day board riders in their many thousands every year.

A feeling which Thomas Campbell referred to as ‘the glider feeling’ in his recent Waterpeople Podcast chat with Lauren Hill and Dave Rastovich. And which, for the purposes of this article, I’m going to call ‘the glide’…