![]() ![]() They planned to explore waves along Scotland’s rugged, slab-laden coastline for the next week before driving across southern Europe, down through Morocco and finishing, hopefully, along the shores of Senegal. This would be Martyn and Folkwell’s home for the foreseeable future. Photo Credit: Ted Grambeau Martyn and Folkwell, somewhere along the coast of Morocco “We’ve basically got a lemon on our hands,” Martyn had told me earlier. It broke down en route to the mechanic, who informed the two that it would need a new clutch, a new timing chain, a new water pump and the removal of a huge panel of rust. It had looked road worthy enough, but after doing a closer inspection post-purchase, they realized their chariot wasn’t exactly ready to cross continents. They purchased the van, a 2008 Ford Transit, on the cheap in England and retrofitted it into a makeshift home-on-wheels. I’d only just joined Martyn in Scotland the night before, but he and his best friend and videographer, Ishka Folkwell, had been wandering Europe in search of waves for a month already. “I’ll be super bummed if something happens to this one,” he said. He looked at the beautifully-crafted board, then back at the snarling slab out at sea, doing a quick risk/reward calculation. “Ahhh, I’m so bummed!” he said, before rifling through his big white van in search of a 6’6″ with a triple stringer, also a twin. Martyn ran back up the cliff, shaking his neoprene-covered head. When he surfaced, his board-an elegant 6’4″ twin fin-was severed in half. After getting to his feet, he caught a rail and went down hard. Standing atop the cliff overlooking the slab, I could see Martyn take off on a particularly diabolical-looking wave. Martyn had been tucking his long-limbed, 6’1″ frame into tube after tube for about 45 minutes-then things went a little sideways. Waves traveling from the northwest would hit a low shelf and furl over into cavernous shapes before closing out in the shallows on the inside. Beneath this sort of low-lit amphitheater of rugged cliffs and endless farmsteads on a cold, windy morning this past December, Byron Bay native Torren Martyn sat in the water alone over a shallow slab. The sun, after it rises at nearly 9 a.m., spends the rest of the day hovering low in the southern sky, casting a warm glow over rolling green farmlands dotted with sheep and the occasional tractor. DURING the winter in the Scottish Highlands, daylight hours are limited. ![]()
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