Cold brutal beauty

Many thanks to Carve magazine for alerting me to these 2 short award-winning surf films that epitomise the new Arty Farty Surf film genre.

'Dark side of the Lens' is shot in Ireland.


'Uncommon Ideals' is shot around the North Sea, including Norway.


Both ably demonstrate that the tropical ideal of surfing often peddled in our mags and in the mainstream media is only one definition of surfing beauty.

What does a surfer smell like?

I doubt the creative luvvies at Chanel are old enough to know they're rehashing the classic 1980s advert for gents aftershave Old Spice. But that's not stopped them using surfing and a hunky surfer to sell perfume to blokes (or more likely, their partners) . The Chanel Allure Homme Sport ad is just the latest example of surfploitation by companies selling their wares, in this case the olfactory essence of surfing (admittedly, it is a nice stall under the lip).

But what DOES a surfer smell like? Chanel think their Allure Homme Sport evokes a' Sparkling and invigorating freshness, a natural and radiant sensibility, heightening the scent of a breeze against bare skin...to create an infinitely seductive allure.'

Bizarrely, when I asked my wife what I smell like after surfing, she said it was more like 'a heady cocktail of decaying neoprene, dilute sewage, crusty saltiness and occasionally stale pee.'

Scariest surf ever?

I sat watching this open-mouthed. I've always been a bit sniffy about the 'purity' of tow-in surfing, but this video has changed my mind.

Does sustainable fishing exist 2?

Tonight was the last of the BBC2 programme - The Fisherman's Apprentice. Monty Halls has taken the lessons he learnt from 8 months living in a small Cornish fishing village, including a spell of deep sea trawling and visiting US East Coast fishermen, to come up with a model of how inshore fishing can survive or even prosper.

Essentially, the fishermen started a 'fish box' scheme like a veg box. Punters don't know what they're going to get but must learn to wean themselves off the 5 species (cod, haddock, tuna, prawn and salmon) that accounts for 60% of fish eaten in the UK.

This can only be a good thing so it reduces the waste of edible fish which gets used as bait or chucked back dead and increases income for fishermen. It must also reduce the pressure on overfished species.

Most beautiful video on the internet?

No, not the latest Reef girls video, but this 3 minute mesmerizing animation of ocean currents, produced by NASA (which has a 20 minute version). It graphically shows how energy, heat, pollution and litter gets transported around the globe.

The Coleman Brothers - surfing's Coen Brothers?

Actually, Jack Coleman and Dominic Coleman aren't brothers (or related to me, for that matter), but both are talented surf filmmakers. Jack makes arty retro (if sexist) films like Happy Beach, Dominic has made one absolutely sublime pisstake of a certain kind of newbie surfer, nicely reviewed by Surfer's Path.

Does sustainable fishing exist?

This is one of several questions that Monty Hall - a telegenic marine biologist - tries to answer on the programme The Fisherman's Apprentice. The BBC filmed his attempt to spend 3 months as an inshore fisherman in south Cornwall. Last night's programme saw him spending a week on a deep sea beam trawler out of Newlyn. Although the boats are old and the work unbelievably hard, the sonar and other kit on board means that fishing is very efficient i.e. not much gets away.

I was stunned by the destruction wreaked on the seabed and the amount of bycatch chucked back dead. His conclusion was that small boats are the only sustainable form of fishing (as well as - presumably - fish you catch to eat yourself). It was difficult to find fault with that conclusion.