“I have brown hair and a bubbly, outgoing personality. I love to travel and chase dirty storms. I am looking for a big, fat, friendly storm, possibly of Caribbean origin, for fun and frolics in Europe. Strong winds and big waves a must.” This was the online appeal that a British professional windsurfer, Ben Proffitt, posted in July on a new website to garner votes to participate in the biggest and most extreme event in his sport’s history.
Two months before, in May, the Red Bull Storm Chase organisation had issued an un-precedented challenge to windsurfers from nine countries across Northern Europe. It invited them to register for the chance to take on the waves in one of the storms that would be hitting Europe this winter, taking windsurfing to its extreme.
“Stormchasing is what wavesailors, windsurfers who ride big waves and do jumps and aerial twists off the waves, have always done,” says Proffitt. The idea was that, which ever country they were in, the windsurfers would all take to the waves at the same time. And the challenge wasn’t just restricted to pros either, amateurs too — male and female — had a chance. All they had to do was apply online for a ticket and then the windsurfing community were invited to vote for candidates to represent their country.
The 60,000 votes, which whittled the final line-up from 280 hopeful pros and amateurs down to 22, came in from 95 countries. Windsurfers all over the world were galvanised into action, says John Hibbard, another British pro, who made the cut, by “weeks of obsessive e-mail spamming”. By August the riders had been selected and put on standby, while Storm Chase’s teams of weather experts scanned seas and skies for symptoms of a storm epic enough to rock all nine countries’ respective coastlines (a minimum requirement was winds hitting ten on the Beaufort scale). Beach, jetski and helicopter-borne camera crews were put on alert, ready to catch the action when it finally happened for an adrenalin-dripping DVD.
“Storm-chasing is what excites most windsurfers, at least those who are into wavesailing,” says Proffitt. “Usually events have to be on a specific date, so there’s no guarantee of the right conditions. Storm Chase is the first time an organised event has been created around the idea.”
The first alert from Storm Chase mission control wasn’t posted until October 24, a false alarm, and not the last. “I covered 2,500 miles in one week just storm-chasing,” says Hibbard. “There would be a 24-hour warning, then a six-hour deadline, by which time if it was cancelled I would often be in the place where the storm was expected to hit. Often I’d return home to my house in Farnham, Surrey, sleep, get a call and then get back in the van.”
Falling on November 1, “Day X” was the real thing. The heaviest Atlantic low of the year rolled in from the west across North Europe’s coastlines, ripping an oil rig in the North Sea from its moorings, suspending ferry services and sending out rescue teams to ships in distress. Hibbard and James Cox, the day’s other rider for Scotland, reached the Scottish east coast late on Hallowe’en with a Storm Chase camera crew in tow. They followed the bending treetops and roaring surf to a hotel in Coldingham Bay, near Dunbar, and spent a restless night listening to the howling wind.
Morning, however, revealed flat water. “For a couple of hours we chased the storm north, checking out beach after beach,” Hibbard says. “Morale in the van was really slipping. It was down to the riders to choose their spot and James and I were getting scared of coming away with nothing. Even though I’d called local surf shops and everyone I knew in the area, and they all told me the east coast beaches were too sheltered, I couldn’t help being convinced from looking at the maps and forecasts that conditions would be firing there. But it started to look like they had been right.
“Then suddenly we pulled round a corner to a place called Thornton Loch, a completely unknown beach. The sky was gloomy and low and imposing, the winds were absolutely nuking, about 50mph, ripping up white horses all over the water. The waves, 10ft high, were perfect.”
In winds so fierce Hibbard and Cox could barely hear each other yell as they pulled on winter wetsuits, checking and double-checking their ropes and sails. And with horizontal rain nailing their faces, they pushed their boards through crashing breakers and on to open water. The waves offered the Storm Chasers a supercharged extreme playground, setting up rows and rows of perfect ramps of steel-grey water and launching the riders 20ft into the air in edgy flips and jumps.
“My favourite manoeuvre is a jump called a push loop,” Hibbard says. “It gives you the most freefall time. It’s like a back flip on your board as you take off from a wave. You fly up, flip over the back of your sail, and kind of parachute down on it, in good conditions reaching about 40ft in the air. But the winds were so extreme, even though we might have been travelling through the water at 25mph, as soon as you got air-borne, 50mph side winds would just swat you sideways. It was anyone’s guess where you’d land.”
It was clear, too, from the way the waves broke and seethed that the water was hiding a reef, although the riders didn’t find out just how sharp the rocks were until the tide went out at the end of their session. “The worst thing that could happen, apart from your sail being ripped from your hands in mid-air and carried way out, was that you’d get munched by a wave, and washed on to the reef,” says Hibbard. “I was completely flattened by one huge wave I was taking on, and had a scary moment wondering how long it would keep me pinned under, but I was fine.”
The day’s worst beating went to Hibbard’s mast, which snapped when a wave smashed it on to the reef, as did most windsurf masts all over Northern Europe that day. In the heaviest storm in the region in 15 years, Storm Chasers in the Netherlands battled 20ft waves, Danes sailed in snow and off-the-scale wind chill, while German riders braving the North and Baltic seas experienced almost biblical conditions, tossed around by 60mph winds.
“It was the strongest wind I have ever sailed,” says Steffi Wahl, one of two female Storm Chasers, and a veteran of the waters off Gran Canaria, a mecca for surfers seeking big waves. “It was more survival than showing big action, but I was super-stoked to take part in it.” And while several of the wavesailors rated the day as the toughest challenge of their lives, virtually all of them barely caught their breath before asking whether they could take part again next year? (Red Bull has not yet announced whether this one-off event has a future as a regular fixture.) As for Proffitt, he’s still on the lookout.
“We didn’t get the best of it,” he says of his experience in the Storm Chase surfing at Rhosneigr, in Wales. “There had been better storms at the same spot in the weeks before Day X,” he says. “But we had it pretty good for three hours. And it was awesome to be part of the event. It was a great idea, simply to send out riders to do what we do best — no judges, no rules, no prizes, no competitiveness — just for the glory of the sport.”
For the record, if any big, fat, friendly storms are reading this, Mr Profitt, brown-haired, bubbly, is still very much available.
The DVD of the Red Bull Storm Chase (£24) is released on Wednesday. To pre-order or to see the trailer, visit www.redbullstormchase.com
Fancy it?
Training If you feel inspired but have no windsurfing experience, a number of centres across the UK offer Royal Yachting Association-approved courses from March to October. These cater for all levels. Lessons start at £20 an hour.
Equipment You will need a board, rig, wetsuit, shoes or boots, all of which can be hired from windsurfing centres for a small fee.
Need to know A basic level of fitness is required, as is confidence in the water. Children as young as 7 can learn.
Windsurfing basics can be mastered in a few hours and the Royal Yachting Association offers five levels of training, from beginner to advanced. The UK Windsurfing Association holds events that are open to all, regardless of age or ability.
Contact Further information and advice on training and jargon busters are all available from www.rya.org.uk and www.ukwindsurfing.com.
Entry to Storm Chase 2007 is open to all windsurfers, pro or amateur. Stay tuned to redbullstormchase.com for further details on if and when the event will take place.
