LO MEIN LEFTS: A Chinese Surf Adventure

Moving forward with the past kept close.

The first sight of the bore the next day at noon was not particularly encouraging. A long wave arrived with a distant roar, and completely closed out across the entire river. The waist-high sections forming on the banks were littered with garbage, mud, and more than a little human sewage. We followed the bore upstream, and the banks were mined with jetties, groins, rocks, broken concrete, and steel protrusions, placed over the decades to break the power of the wave. The current version of the Siilver Dragon is a far cry from written accounts of ancient times, when specially trained imperial bodysurfers rode the river bore with wicker baskets on their backs, skilfully catching panicked fish and tossing them into the baskets as they bodysurfed the bore for miles upstream.

There was also a problem with the local Police. Marshals with radios patrol the banks of the Quiantang at the arrival times of the Silver Dragon, as thousands of Chinese turn out on the biggest tides of the year to watch the phenomenon. Fuelled by alcohol and bravado, with video cameras or cell phones in hand, hundreds of clueless Chinese with zero water sense have been swept off the crowded banks in recent years by the powerful surge, many of them to their deaths.

The police have good reason to keep people away from the banks of the river during the bore; and without our presenting written permission from higher authorities with more power than themselves, they were in no mood to entertain the aspirations of foreigners, regardless of their bore knowledge, water sense, or surfing skills. After all our surfers rode the bore again on the afternoon of the second day, the police detained the entire group, releasing us with the understanding there would be a meeting at our hotel that evening. They came with photocopies of the specific law, and said we had been formally warned: no one would be permitted to enter the river to ride the Silver Dragon again, or they would be arrested.

Our group and Antony did make the front page of the local newspaper, with the headline translated as “Foreigners Break Law and Set New World Record”, after Patrick Audoy on a stand-up paddleboard and Eduardo Bage on a standard longboard had ridden a single wave for more than one hour, travelling some 17 kilometers upriver. It was great publicity for Hangzhou and the Silver Dragon, and as the Hangzhou authorities already have a massive bore-watching festival on the highest tides of the year in spring and autumn, a surfing division is a natural fit to the festivities. Especially if it features exotic foreigners on surfboards doing crazy things, as the stunts and world record attempts would bring in many more spectators.

China does have some good waves along that huge coastline, and with more attention and more surfers, local and foreign, it won’t be long before more waves are discovered on offshore islands and on the mainland. A group led by Gary Linden was in Hangzhou recently, following the bore upstream and scouting for a possible Red Bull event similar to their bore - riding contest at the Pororoca in Brazil. With all the interest in surfing the bore, a Silver Dragon Surfing Contest looks to be a matter of time, especially if it can bring in money and positive domestic and international publicity.