Ten Minutes Walk

A coffee with Gony

Why competing? Why becoming a migratory bird? Chasing waves, looking perfection in the middle of a perfect ocean in which we do not belong to.

Gony is a pro since he was eleven. He is from Vigo, Galiza and he is twenty eight. And if he can say he lives somewhere it is Ericeira.

But does he really live here? His oceanic blue eyes say that not exactly. And a melancholy collects itself behind him as if it was a throbbing shadow.

Where was he last week? This misty uncertainty just before awakening. Which place, what time is it?

Worse, an uncertainty that elongates in time and in unending travel. A clock that hammers questions. What about the family? Friends? Couple?

The buzz stops when he remembers all the places he has seen, all the people he has known. And above all, the pleasure and the craving for perfection. Desires so human that have become true for him so many times. Because surfing is the quintessence of this impossible thing of walking over the waters. And there is nothing more pleasurable than achieving the impossible.

Gony did his first contest when he was eleven. He cried because he did not want to participate, he was scared.  Only salt remain of those tears. Because now it is his job. He did not need to study anything else. His brother is a musician and a painter. It could be said that both are artists although Gony’s art only lasts the time it takes to ride a wave. It is in this temporal fragility that maybe lays the reason of everything and not in the desire of winning someone else: the infinite pleasure of doing something well in twenty minutes, taking what the ocean brings to you, that will be the same for the other competitors.

Personal satisfaction is called. But it is very difficult to achieve. The probabilities to win are remote. There are many competitors and they are all good. Luckly there are the videos and the photo sessions… where all that is limited by time and luck in a competition explode free.

A surfer does not need to demonstrate anything because as long as is having fun is enough. Not for a competitor. Their quest goes further than enjoyment, it is an obsessed search of perfection marked by the chronometer in between the surfer and the wave. A pursuit limited by the surfboards they have to use and how, by the places and even by the time they are in each of them. The current surfer  worries about other things but is free to choose the spot and the equipment.

Gony’s eyes shine when he speaks about shaping by himself a single fin. When he says he would like to have more time for surfing surfboards with crazy shapes and sizes. Because he wants to feel the flow of the ocean without worrying about doing anything else that drawing lines that roll with the wave instead of destroying it. It is the most difficult surfing, he says, and the one he admires the most.

Feeling this flow and forgetting about all the details is the  way to be closer to perfection in this ephemeral art. Because it will be as dancing with someone while our steps fit and the circles we draw become infinite without any stomp encountering us.

And for a dance like that perhaps it is worth to risk a stable life and give it all for a few perfect waves.