THE CORNISH CONUNDRUM

GWITHIAN

GAMBLE

After pitching battle trying to call the shots on the forecast for Cornwall, John Carter and Timo Mullen eventually struck liquid gold at Gwithian with all the elements aligning. However, the trip packed a punch in more ways than one…

Words: John Carter.

Photos: John Carter.

CONUNDRUM

Sitting outside A&E at Newquay Hospital was not quite how I had planned this last-minute mission down to Cornwall panning out, but that is the way it can roll when you take on big waves and gusty winds at Gwithian.

WEIGHING UP THE FORECAST / ON THE FENCE

Rewind about sixteen hours and I am happily sat at home sipping on a mug of tea watching Saturday night TV when the phone pings with a message from Timo Mullen… ‘Headed to Cornwall at 5am, should be big!’. Now that might seem a normal text to most folk, but this message was coming from Ireland where Timo had just been sailing huge waves for the past few days. He was somewhere between the west coast of Ireland and Dublin Airport and still hungry for more. Surely he must have had his fix by now? But we are talking about Timo Mullen here – meaning that even at the slightest sniff of wind and quality wave sailing – he’s on it. What puzzled me was that the forecast didn’t look that special on paper. The swell was 1.9m at 14 seconds, slowly dropping throughout the day, along with gusty southerly winds blowing anywhere between 15-30 knots. Plus the forecast I was looking at was saying it was going to be overcast, while the chap on BBC Weather also mentioned that a cloud of Sahara dust was also bound for the UK due to some unusual circumstances. Hmmm, this was a tough call, and the evidence was looking weak to me that Cornwall was going to be epic. There would be waves for sure, but possibly just head high with cloudy weather, so I wasn’t totally convinced, to say the least!

LEAP OF FAITH

Breaking down the facts… maybe Timo was onto something since Surfline was promising a window of sunshine between 9am and 11am, and the long period swell was due to be hitting from the northwest, so that should pump into Gwithian without being blocked. My wife had plans for Sunday, so she encouraged me to do something exciting and take a chance! It is not often I am granted her permission to go on a windsurf trip at such short notice, so something was telling me to take the chance. With this rare green light up for grabs, I decided to pull the trigger and take a chance on this Cornish puzzle and hope that Timo had figured out all the clues correctly come the morning. As the best tides were early doors, we had to commit to leaving for Cornwall at 5am with no prior chance to check the waves etc on the webcams. This was an act of faith, which would hopefully pay off.

I made it to Poole on the last train on Saturday night around 11.30pm, which was the exact time that Timo made it back after flying in from Dublin to Bristol and then driving back home. The alarms were set for 5am and then we were in for a bleary-eyed 4-hour drive down to Gwithian. Our commitment here was pretty big compared to the locals who could just rock up check the conditions and if it was not on, just turn around and simply go to bed in the comforts of their own homes. I would be nine hours away from my Sunday roast, which would mean eighteen hours of total travel both ways. That’s almost a whole day on the road! I could probably make it to the Canary Islands, if not the other side of the world, in the same time!

MILITARY PRECISION

By 7.30am we were about an hour away from Gwithian, working our way through diversions as they continue to build the new A30, which will hopefully cut down the travel time to Cornwall once the roadworks are complete. By now we could grab a glimpse of the webcams pre-dawn and I could definitely make out waves in front of the lifeguard hut at Gwithian. An hour later we were finally there for the real live view and thankfully Timo’s theory of solving this weather puzzle was much more accurate than mine. The waves were pumping and easily mast high in the sets. We were just in time to see ‘Chucky’ AKA Ian Ross coming off the water. He looked gutted. “Is there no wind?”, we asked. “No, I’ve got a bloody family meal today on my day off, the wind is just kicking in and it is going to be epic…”. He was definitely not a happy man!

DANGER ZONE

Timo reckons the dropping high tide provides the primo conditions at Gwithian and that is why we had left at 5am to be here for the early session. The dilemma now was what equipment to choose. The wind on the inside had some glassy patches, but the gusts on the outside looked much stronger. With the wind being light on the inside, this was exactly where the danger zone was as there were plenty of big sets detonating on the sand bar. If you are underpowered and drifting through here, you are pretty much a sitting duck, and it would be like crossing ‘no man’s land’ with waves firing at you. After toying with the idea of taking his 5.3m and his 107L Grip 4, Timo finally decided to take the same sail, but with the 99L instead. The trade-off would make him more vulnerable when heading out, but offer him greater manoeuvrability when on the wave… I left that decision to him!

DOWN THE GOAT TRACK

To get down to the beach at Gwithian at high tide, you basically have to gather your equipment and clamber down a tiny goat track, which is made even trickier thanks to it usually being damp and slippery underfoot. There have been plenty of sailors who have come a cropper navigating this trek and a lot of guys prefer to split their gear and do two trips. It is another decision that needs to be made, and of course, there was only one option for Timo… down in one! Despite logo to mast high waves and sketchy wind on the inside, there were still four or five sailors, plus a couple of kiters, who were also up for the challenge.

A TRICKY START

On his first run out, Timo launched upwind close to a small outcrop of rocks where there was a rip to help him drift through the impact zone. He got lucky and crawled over a couple of sets and was out the back ready to pick off his first wave. It wasn’t long before a big set started looming and Timo lined up on what he thought would be the primo wave of the set. Moments later he was gunning down the line on a mast high bomb looking to launch a monster aerial, but the wave just didn’t offer the right section and there was no moment of glory. So now he was back on the inside having to navigate his way back out again. I swear for the next hour he took about ten different poundings dealing with the tricky current and light winds on the inside. The reward once out the back were beautiful clean waves that were offering multiple turns and a massive aerial section – if you were bold enough to hit it. The sailing was as tricky as it comes and definitely hard work, not to mention tiring.

SLICE AND DICE

Midway through the session, Timo came back to the beach and I could see another sailor looking at his head, which didn’t look good… had he bashed it? However, a few minutes later he was heading back out again on yet another mission to navigate ‘no man’s land’, so I assumed the knock on the head couldn’t have been that bad!

As for the weather, there was no sign of the Sahara dust I had seen on the news and once again Timo had called the shots correctly, as at around 11am the sun briefly appeared from behind the clouds. All of a sudden Gwithian lit up in glorious wintery light. I could tell Timo had clocked this and knew that this was his moment to go big or go home. By this time the wind was howling and it must have been 30 knots out the back. I was struggling to hold my camera down from my position perched on the rocks down in front of the car park.

ALL OR NOTHING

Right on cue a flawless set presented itself downwind and I could see Timo flying down towards the lighthouse in search of glory. Moments later he was driving up into a huge barrelling lip for a manoeuvre that was either going to go incredibly right or incredibly wrong. It was one of those moments as a photographer that I was praying my camera would not do something silly, lose focus, a battery dies or be on the wrong settings. Fortunately, Timo hit the lip with perfect timing, my camera managed to fire away and capture the moment, and I managed to hold everything down while being hit by a 30-knot gust. That was an exceptional aerial and I was pretty sure we were not going to outdo that anytime soon, especially when a new wave of grey cloud rolled in from the west.

NO PAIN, NO GAIN

Ten minutes later I made my way down to the water’s edge to catch up with Timo as he was walking his rig back upwind. On closer inspection, I now got to see what had happened to his head. He had a nasty inch long slice from a fin, but at least it wasn’t bleeding. We decided that we should head to the nearest hospital just to be safe, but in true Timo fashion, he still wanted to catch a few more waves before packing up. As he turned around, I noticed a huge slice in the back of his wetsuit, and I could make out a huge bruise on his back underneath. There is not a lot that can stop Timo from windsurfing when the conditions are firing. Enough said!

An hour later, it was just about time to call it a day. The wind was now nuking and Timo was done and dusted after so many swims and altercations in the waves. Out on the water, the likes of Ian Black, Steve Thorp and a few locals got their just rewards for bracing the conditions as they tucked into some epic rides. However, with the tide now at dead low and the waves becoming increasingly hollow, it was game over. Before leaving, I was desperate to fly my drone, which almost proved to be a costly error, as my case with all my spares was blown over in the sand. Meanwhile, I was trying desperately to get the drone to return home in the nuking winds. Luckily, I managed to get it back otherwise that would have been a sour note to end an otherwise epic day.

DOCTOR, DOCTOR

Around 2pm we arrived at Newquay Hospital to have Timo’s head checked. Funnily enough, the nurse recognised him from a previous Motley Crew trip where he had sliced open his foot at Mexico’s, which required several stitches. This time round, they managed to glue his head wound, which looked worse than it actually was, fortunately.

COMMITTED TO THE CAUSE

So that was that. It turned out that Timo had managed to solve the riddle of the weather far more successfully than any of my own analyses. Gwithian was firing on all cylinders and there was no sign of the Sahara dust whatsoever. With the early start, that also meant an early finish and even factoring in the hour stop in Newquay I was home by 9pm, which included a four-hour drive, an hour on a train, a thirty-minute boat ride, and finally, a thirty-minute drive home! Not too bad!

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