For a tiny country located at the northwestern tip of the European continent, the Netherlands has had a surprisingly large impact on the history of Australia. The Dutch were the first recorded Europeans to reach the wide brown land, with navigator Willem Janszoon landing at Cape York Peninsula in 1606. Abel Tasman, the first recorded European to sight Tasmania (this author’s island home) in 1642, was Dutch. Most early European maps referred to the great southern land as ‘New Holland’ before Captain James Cook claimed the East coast of the country for the British Crown.
When it comes to surfing, though, you might be surprised to learn that the Netherlands boasts as proud a surfing culture as Australia. OK, maybe not as proud, but strong and thriving in its own way. You won’t find peeling azure sub-tropical point breaks here, more the mushy brown frigid North Sea variety, but Dutch surf culture is alive and well.
I had spent the last two decades living abroad, having left Australia in the mid-naughties when John Howard was still prime minister, when Double J was still Triple J and when you could still buy a pot of Carlton Draught with the spare change in your pocket. The Aussie youth rite-of-passage had brought me to the UK by way of a post-grad degree in journalism in Japan. Like many Aussies in London I had woken up one day and realised, as WA band The Waifs put it so aptly, I was in London still.
Fast forward 15-odd years and two kids later, and the wife and I had called time on our London experience and decided to up and move across the English Channel to the Netherlands. Partly it was work-related, partly it was in search of a new adventure. London is one of the world’s most incredible cities, but save for a wave pool around three hours’ drive west in a different part of the country entirely, and it’s hard for surfing to be a part of your everyday life. For someone who grew up surfing the breaks around Hobart, living away from the ocean was a painful but necessary evil.
So, one August, two little kids in tow, we left London and took ‘Le Shuttle’ – the train that goes under the English Channel onto which you can drive your car – across to France. From there, it was a four hour drive via Belgium to The Hague in the Netherlands where we would start our new lives.
Most Australians will likely associate The Hague with two things: the location of the International Criminal Courts and the site where Slobodan Milošević, the former Yugoslavian president, was tried for war crimes and died in 2006. But The Hague is also famous for being the surfing capital of the Netherlands (now there’s a sentence I bet you never thought you’d read). More specifically, it’s famed for a city beach break called Scheveningen which is around a 15-minute cycle from the centre of the city. Fun apocryphal fact: in World War II, Dutch resistance fighters were said to have outed German spies by asking them to say ‘Scheveningen’ (the word is notoriously difficult to pronounce for non-Dutch natives).
Dutch surfers are a funny lot. They have an uncanny ability to ignore whatever weather pattern happens to have set itself loose upon the country that day and go surfing regardless. It could be 1-foot, 8 degrees, onshore with squall-like conditions and a handful of Dutchies dressed head to toe in 5/4s will be sitting out in the line-up with smiles on their faces. It took me a while to figure out why the Dutch are so indignant when it comes to the weather. As opposed to the UK, where the slightest drop of precipitation will send Brits indoors, in the Netherlands, attitudes towards the weather are best described as nonchalant. It could be pissing it down and the Dutch will be cycling or walking their dogs sans umbrella as if it were a fine spring’s day. Outside of the summer months, the weather is pretty miserable and the Dutch approach appears to be: if we let the weather dictate our lives, we’ll never get anything done. So they don’t let it. The Dutch even have a word for going for a walk in the rain – uitwaaien – which literally translates as “out-blowing.” The concept is about walking in windy, rainy, or cold weather to refresh oneself and de-stress.
Surfers in the Netherlands appear to take this concept of uitwaaien to another level. As winter descends and the truly dark depths of the Northern European winter begin to take hold, the weather does little to dampen locals’ spirits. I remember one December morning going for a jog along the beach with snow having fallen overnight and the entire beach looking like a Christmas wonderland. Out in the line-up I saw three black figures bobbing in the brown North Sea. Crazy Dutch, I remember thinking to myself, wondering what it would take for a Dutch surfer to decide it was too cold to go out.
One morning, having had enough of watching from afar, I decided to join them. The outside air temperature was 12 degrees and the water temperature was a balmy 8 degrees. There was no wind. A consistent 2-foot swell was rolling in from the northwest – the only direction from which swell is guaranteed to form in any sort of rideable way hitting the Dutch coastline and making things interesting.
If you ever find yourself at Scheveningen Beach under such conditions and in need of a surf, there are two main spots to hire a board: Hart Beach Surf Club and Aloha Beach Club. Neither would look out of place on the Kamehameha Highway. Both sport restaurants where you can grab a post-surf burger and a smoothie.
Bob, the 25-year-old 6-ft-2 blonde local manning the rental section at Hart Beach hooked me up with a board. “Where are you from, man?” he asked. I told him I was from Australia and that I’d previously had no idea that Dutch people surfed. “Yeah, we do,” Bob said. “It’s not as good as in Australia I’m sure but you can have a lot of fun.”
Out in the line-up, I was glad I had made the decision to rent a hoodie and gloves. Each wave that I paddled over felt like I was taking an ice bath to the exposed area of my face. My 4/3 wettie did the job good enough but after about 15 minutes when the North Sea cold had seeped in it began to feel like someone was pushing ice cubes up my anus. They say there is nothing more satisfying than peeing in a wetsuit. To that I would add: there is nothing more satisfying than peeing in a wetsuit whilst surfing in the Netherlands in the middle of winter.
I caught three waves that day. There is only so much stoke one can derive from one-foot onshore mush. Yet, looking out at the sea I could see the offshore wind turbine farms in the distance; to the north I could see the ferris wheel at the end of Scheveningen Pier, while to the south I could see the faint outline of the industrial area of the Hook of Holland where the giant shipping containers unload their cargos for transport to the rest of Europe. For a country best known for tulips, canals, wooden clogs, windmills and lax cannabis laws, a thriving surfing culture was the last thing I was expecting to find. And yet, Dutch surfers, like anywhere on earth, will do anything for a 5-second ride on energy that’s made its way all the way across the seas to break on your shore. I am not sure whether the Dutch have a word for describing the cozy feeling of drinking a hot cup of coffee at home post-mid-winter surf. If they don’t, they should probably invent one.
