The 2nd annual luis aldaco surf classic

Surfing: university of the waves
Translation: Heido Sundstrom

“The fact is that until I fall asleep,
in some magnetic way I move in
the university of the waves.”
- Pablo Neruda

It is a poetic sport because it is performed over the waves, with all of the attributes of poetry but that tends to concentrate on rhythm and rhyme. For the verse and a whole stanza, surfers are tasked with choreographies performed over animated surfaces; the equivalent of a poet’s writing and the stroke of an artist create literal marine calligraphy.

They inquire, in these gusts of saltwater of poetic elements. Each rise on the board means the beginning of their search. The better ones discover and then stick with it, with the mastery of their own physicality, rhythm and rhyme that the intrinsic wave carries, closer to art in its execution.

The tide and waves are the art to which the water-rider looks to find shapes, consistency, provide order. But as expressing form and substance is fallacy, then both components comprise a natural pair, creating full unity thus making them inseparable. Cavalier for excellence of the waves, like an elemental synthesis, a metaphor of the fusion between chaos and the chain of hidden marine messages. This rhyme and rhythm that the surfer discovers incorporates and then emulates those on the surface with their figure in contortion.

The movements of the surfer are then marine correspondents of the verse and those same movements are multiplied during the period of their performance. Acting as a comparison of all the stanzas that comprise the poem.

If we want to look into the process, perhaps at the technique, of how they approach this marine dance, then you could say that it’s a debate between their own skill and luck brought by the multitude of valleys and ridges that break the wind, the breeze, the deep currents and the mysterious workings of the sea; between its intervention capabilities in the realm of Poseidon and the untamed and unpredictable waves movements. The supreme quality of the surfer is then the right balance of his swagger.

“The surfers don’t go to heaven, they stay in the sea”. And then, as so often happens, a poet of the water acquires this status forever, as they no longer inhabit this earthly and finite perimeter. They from their own marine tomb to their peers from here on this side who gather in solidarity to pay tribute to their memory and create a play on water that lasts over 48 hours.

They have baptized one such contest with the name of Luis Aldaco, whose ashes were scattered into the sea two years ago.

The recent congregation was comprised of over 130 participants, over 130 figures that one saw for three days wandering here and there, hovering, entering and exiting, rising and falling, getting wet and drying off... All clad in their second skins; cross-shaped silhouettes perpendicular to their thinness and impeccably adhered to their boards, extensions of themselves.

This year marks the second year of the memorial and the waves appeared larger than the year before. The contest coincided, like a divine commandment, with a big swell, bringing flocks of frequent and excellent sized waves that cut through the water like a train and arrived at the shore like gifts for the surfers.

Swell, rhyme and marine rhythms are naturally inseparable and act as the sea's poetic tribute to the riders of the water.