Surfing is great. Surfers, on the other hand, can be not so great. Image: Schwartz
Surfing is just great. Surf communities, however, can sometimes not be so great–this is my experience a few days ago in Peniche, when I was assaulted by three local guys.
I got into surfing a few years back, and it was love at first sight (read: ride). I caught my first waves in Ericeira, Portugal, but at that time I was living in the UK where I went on spending many lovely weekends surfing beautiful breaks in Cornwall.
Fast forward to the beginning of this year, when I decided to take a sabbatical. I chose to move to Peniche, one of the most famous surf destinations in Europe.
I’ve always known that local surfers want to keep some surf spots for themselves; no foreigners allowed. I never agreed with this attitude in the slightest, but I also thought that starting my sabbatical by fighting with my new neighbors wasn’t the greatest idea. Not to mention that there was plenty of room and waves for everyone, so I kept surfing away from the more localized spots.
Needless to say, local surf spots were not invented in Peniche. This extremely anti-social attitude is quite common in surf areas around the world, and you can read many reports about Californian local surfers assaulting outsiders all the time.
I was walking by my place with a Portuguese friend and my dog. My dog saw a cat and briefly managed to escape and run after the cat. Now, even a five year old kid knows that a cat runs ten time faster than any dog. By the time I collected my dog–not even 200 feet away, desperately looking around as the cat had magically disappeared–a Portuguese guy, maybe in his forties, came up to me and my friend. He started insulting both of us in a mix of Portuguese and English. He went on threatening me (and my dog), with the usual crap: “This is my place,” and “Go back to your country or something bad will happen to you,” and so on and so forth.
As it happens, this guy was a quite famous local surfer, and he now runs a guesthouse in Peniche. I am not sure whether telling foreigners “to go back to your country, or something bad will happen to you” would really help his business, but I’m not his marketing consultant.
Not satisfied by having insulted and threatened us, he thought that his best move would be to call a couple of local thugs to have a fight in the middle of the day. No more than three minutes later, two guys (I’m saying guys, but again I’m talking about 40–50 year old grown men here) stopped their car just next to us.
The smarter one, I suspect, come up to me, waving his fist ready to hit me. Telling him: “come on, do it” was enough to make him go away (my lucky day?), but not before throwinga series of racist comments against Italians coming to Portugal at me. He must have attended the same School of Tourism and Hospitality as his very brave friend who called him in.
All this, just for a dog running for 30 seconds after a cat, with no consequences. I can’t imagine how these locals — who, by the way, are trying to make a living out of tourism — would deal with their foreign guests should something slightly more serious happen. Surfing, the way I see it, is a marvelous way to live the sea, blend with it and learn to respect the nature and people around you. Unfortunately, surf communities are often polluted with people who behave way worse than stray dogs (and trust me, there are quite a few of them here in Peniche — local cats, you are warned!).
Let’s not be afraid of the threats coming from local thugs, let’s say loud and clear how they behave, and let’s hope that they will represent an ever smaller part of our surfing communities.
