Smorgasboarder_12_July-2012

A North Island Kiwi lets us in on his summer job.
WORDS AND PHOTOS: SIMON EGGINTON
MAIN: Simon getting his
surfing fix on land on his
Smoothstar skateboard.
ABOVE: Hard at work back
home in Tutukaka NZ.
LEFT AND BELOW: The
smiles and thrill of learning.
It’s been a very busy few months leading up to this point but as the New
Zealand winter sets in, my surf school in Tutukaka slows down to only a few
lessons every couple of weeks.
With the onset of colder weather, my brother and I board a flight in pursuit of the
sun – destination, Holland, with a slight detour to Hong Kong. We planned a few
days in the ridiculous humidity of the city for a bit of sight seeing and skating.
This will be my ninth trip to Holland since first coming here in 1985 as a snotnosed
four-year-old to visit my mother’s side of the family. Following that trip,
it was another ten years before I returned in 1995. At that stage I was fourteen
and being a mad-keen little grommet from Sandy Bay on the Tutukaka Coast of
NZ, I always had surf on my mind.
It was during this trip that we went on a family outing to a place called
Scheveningen and sat on the harbour wall eating Haring and Parling (sprats - a
species of herring - and eels), which is traditional Dutch seafood fare. It sounds
gross, but in actual fact is pretty good and must be tried. It was there I noticed a
few little waves peeling down the beach. There were only a few guys. It had me
thinking: “If only I had my board, I would so be out there.”
Holland may not particularly known as a surf destination, but seeing surfers
there that time always stuck with me. After another short trip there for the
millennium, I moved to Holland in 2001 and stayed until 2006. I saw the
popularity of surfing grow during those five years.
Now I’m back again. Having returned for the summer months, working on the
beach as a surf coach at Surfles.nl run by Hans van den Broek, it’s amazing to
see how busy the surf schools are here now. The swell might not be as big or
good as back home in NZ, but the stoke the students get from learning to stand
up for the first time is exactly the same. It goes to show that it doesn’t matter
where in the world you are, all you need is a few fun waves to get hooked by
the bug that is surfing.
In fact, just before I wrote this story, I was surfing down at Scheveningen for the
last four hours in some very fun little two foot, clean waves. Walking back up
the beach to Surfles.nl
the surf classes were getting ready to hit the waves and
there were so many huge smiles on the faces of the people returning for their
next lesson.
Holland and New Zealand in a geographic sense couldn’t be further apart, and
the lifestyle is quite different, but I still get the same stoke surfing here as I do
back at Sandy Bay. That is, apart from when I take a surf trip to Shipwreck Bay,
but that’s another story...
Simon Egginton has his own surf school called Tutukaka Surf Experience
near
the top end of the New Zealand North Island, not far from the Bay of Islands.
www.tutukakasurf.co.nz
88 jul/aug 2012