Roger Cox: Oil on troubled waters puts a dampener on surfing, though the truth is it’s quite a slippery subject

I half-expected to see oil-soaked seabirds flapping helplessly

After last month’s oil spill at Shell’s unfortunately-named Gannet Alpha platform (on reflection, perhaps “Gannet Slayer” would have been more appropriate), I stayed out of the North Sea for about a fortnight. Didn’t dip in so much as a toe. Partly this was because I was caught up in the heaving, sweaty and at times downright monsoonal bosom of the Edinburgh Festival and didn’t have time to go to the beach; partly it was due to a chronic lack of swell – there’s no point going surfing if there are no waves to surf. In the end, though, it all boiled down to trust, or rather, a lack of it.

If it took Shell more than 48 hours to inform Joe Public that they’d accidentally released hundreds of tonnes of oil into the North Sea, I reasoned, how long would it take them to tell us, “Oops, sorry folks, we’ve gone and done it again, only this time it’s about a million times worse and the east coast of Scotland is now as toxic as Shane MacGowan’s liver”?

I wasn’t sure what the health risks of swimming in an oil slick were, exactly, but I’d seen what happened to the pelicans in the Gulf of Mexico after the BP spill in 2010 (BP were at least smart enough to call their rig Deepwater Horizon, not Lovely Pelican IV) and I had no desire to end up being scrubbed all over by well-meaning environmentalists wearing white overalls, rubber gloves and face masks – although I understand that some people pay good money for that sort of thing and, of course, that’s absolutely fine by me. Each to their own.

For all these reasons, then, when the surf did come up – briefly, feebly – and I found myself with a few precious hours to spare, instead of bolting for the coast as usual I made excuses and stayed away.

By the end of August, though, with the Festival fizzling out and the North Sea wave machine working properly again, I finally decided to risk it. What’s the worst that can happen? I said to myself. A bit of light nausea. Perhaps some vigorous scrubbing. Who knows? Might even be fun.

Before leaving the house, I performed the usual paranoid last-minute surf check on my laptop, just to make sure the promised swell hadn’t suddenly disappeared into thin air, and it struck me that I owed this miraculous gadget’s very existence, from its keys to its power cable, to the good ol’ petrochemical industry. Hmm. Thanks Big Oil, I thought.

The waves were still looking good, so I grabbed my neoprene wetsuit and super-strong, epoxy surfboard (er, thanks again Big Oil) and headed out to the car. Ah yes, the car. Forget the fact that many of its components are made of oil derivatives – if it wasn’t for Mr Shell and his ilk I’d have to push it everywhere which, frankly, would be something of an inconvenience, particularly when the nearest surfable bit of coast is 26 miles away.

So there I was, with my oil-based toys, my belly full of food planted and harvested using oil-hungry machinery, driving along an oil-based road surface in a vehicle both lubricated and powered by oil – and every mile of the way I was fretting about what kind of oily apocalypse I might find when I arrived at my destination.

As it was a weekend, and I didn’t have to race against the dying light for once, I decided to drive all the way down to Coldingham, the pretty little cove in the Borders that marks the southernmost extent of the Surf Kingdom of Southeast Scotland. Of course, there are surf spots aplenty between here and the northern reaches of the Surf Kingdom of Northeast England, but maps of this mystical domain tend to be hand-drawn and hard to come by. And anyway, Coldingham’s a great wave when it’s working, which it was on this particular afternoon, thanks to a slightly lumpy NE swell knocked into some semblance of order by a hint of an offshore breeze.

As I wandered down to the water I half-expected to see oil-soaked seabirds flapping helplessly along the high tide line, but of course everything looked the same as it always did. A handful of late-season holidaymakers splashed around in the shorebreak while, further outside, a small group of surfers sat waiting for waves. I paddled out to join them, keeping an eye out for little blobs of oil in the water – and then I realised, as I sat there, that the only blobs of oil in the water were us.