Denmark is not known for
its waves, but, as any Copenhagen stroll or disco evening will confirm, its
women are world-class.
“Oh,
yes, our beers are cold and our women are hot,” Mikkel Spellerberg said, smiling as he
yanked beach tents from his van, staging a rare Danish surf contest at the
decayed Klitmøller bunkers. That afternoon, over cold Økologisk Thy Pilsners at
Mikkel’s rented beach house, I questioned two other surfers—Copenhagen’s
Asbjørn and his friend Keld, from Fyn—about this life.
“In
Denmark, we might not have the best waves or the best scenery, but we
definitely have the best-looking women,” Asbjørn said. “Danish surfing—at least
around the Copenhagen area—is pretty international with all the different
people coming in and getting Danish girlfriends. You’re in the lineup and you
have a black surfer, a Hispanic surfer, an Italian surfer…all because of our
women.”
Alas,
the historic and classic Viking female: blonde, textbook beauty features,
independent, intelligent, stylish, sexy, worldly. Viking men were brutally
ruthless, sure, but what about their mates? Cycling in Copenhagen from Point A
(home) to Point B (work or school), flaxen hair flowing in the morning breeze,
dressed to the nines in tasteful Scandinavian garb, these gene-blessed vixens
would likely be quite detrimental to my peripatetic-but-home-loving lifestyle.
None could steal me from California.
“Sometimes
when you’re surfing here,” Asbjørn continues, “there can be a crowd of 20
surfers but half of them are from other parts of the world. A Danish woman will
travel and meet some guy on the beach and bring him back home, so we have guys
from Ecuador, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand…everywhere. We have
contacts around the world, and when we go visit their homes, all of their
friends become our friends.”
Another
beer and Asbjørn adjourns to the sauna; Keld, Steve, and I head back to the
beach for a twilight surf check, viewed from the concrete bunkers half-buried
in sand. Sullen and depleted, the swell had sunk into the tide, remnants of the
morning greatness gracing Mikkel’s event. Now was a gray mood with a wide
horizon in drizzly soft focus—one could almost smell the Germans loitering in
these bunkers during their World War II occupation.
Standing
against colorful graffiti, Keld takes in the scene as darkness falls. His
relaxed expression hid a mindful of intensely frozen winter days at this beach,
when North Atlantic groundswells wove southeast, beneath Norway, to detonate
here as desolate, magic beachbreak barrels.
“During
summer, you can feel the energy we get from the all the light,” he said. “The
sun goes down at 11 p.m. and is back up again at 3 a.m. But in winter, although
it’s dark most of the time, you should bring your 6’4” and give it a go,
because our winter surf gets incredible.”
 |
| Not winter. |
Morning. This couch, stern
and narrow, irks my spine and jacks my neck. Early-morning dreams, however
lucid, belie the whipping flag and sand flurries outside. Sky is blue but the
cold gale shreds the sea—gusting too hard for windsurfing and, following our weeks
in Greenland, this was not a tired hallucination: unsurfable oceans, whitecaps,
parkas, wool sweaters, thermal underwear, dry wetsuits.
The
Løkken hotel was a vacant base for a few speculative days of Danish surfing. A
thick off-season country silence pressed through the walls, heavy architecture
fine-tuned for whims of North Sea chaos—treachery for commercial fishermen,
inconvenience for us. So we sit, read, and view subtitled television while the
weather runs past.
Steve’s
hangover from last night’s run earned him ample sack time in lee of today’s
drab light and windslop. Contrarily, my 6’5” Rocket Sled was unveiled
and the 6/5/4mm hooded fullsuit (brought for Greenland but never used) was
donned. Our Løkken beachbreak was gutless and surfing it was a stretch, yet the
act unfolded, followed by a rustic toast of fiery Aalborg akvavit, never more apropos in its appearance on the coffee table.
Chased with pilsner, akvavit is a “water of life” commonly enjoyed with
traditional Danish fare like herring or smørrebrød
(buttered bread.). I learned of its potent merits from a gruff fisherman in
Greenland, once a Denmark resident, now living and working in Qaqortoq.
The
6-mil wetsuit, pliant and zipperless, boiled in September’s mild North Sea.
Sweaty and stiff from a three-week absence of daily movement, I duck-dove
dozens of small, frail whitewater lines before discerning a potential sandbank
out the back. There in the chop I sat, bobbing like a cork, a curious spectacle
for the lingering German tourists in their cars on the vast, stark beach. Steve
slept on the hire-car’s hood. Clearly, this was not one for the annals of epic
surfdom.
But
then again, yes, it was: we’d surfed
Denmark. Twice.