The Search: Fifty Shades Of Blue
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05/09/2020

The Search: Fifty Shades Of Blue

Wandering into the various shades of real-world blue.

These are the life changing sessions that will stay with you forever and inspire your next exploration and they are what the Search is all about. However… sometimes The Search is also something else entirely. Sometimes it can be less like exploration and more like stepping back in time.

Surf travel writer Daryl Davenport sums up the motivation…

With all of the evolutions in Technology and Travel that fly off the global interwebernet at us each day, it’s easy to do the ol’ wake up/pick up and look straight to the device in the palm of your hand and believe that’s all there is…

Humour me a little here and look at the palm of your empty hand. What do you see? Nothing? Look closely again and you will see a series of lines which will tell you a lot about your life. The life you only get one chance at…

1.The heart-line runs horizontally across the top of the palm. It reflects the state of your heart on both the physical and emotional level. Surfing, we concur, is great for the heart and the well of emotion it beats to.
2.The headline runs horizontally across the middle of the palm. It reflects the state of your mind and brain. Offshore winds, new worlds and waves, the sting of a hot beach in a foreign land are great stimuli for the mind. The brain, however, must be punished. It must be surfed into submission. To become “surfed out” to become so overloaded on stoke that it buzzes into bath-warm submission.
3.The lifeline curves around the base of the thumb, starting between the index finger and thumb. Contrary to popular belief, this line does not actually indicate how long you will live but rather aspects such as strength, vitality, and prosperity. Three things you cannot enjoy while sitting on your arse looking at a screen.
4.The fate-line runs vertically from the base of the palm up the middle of the palm (not everybody has this line). It indicates aspects such as success, career path, and vocation. Don’t wait for fate. Only your own actions determine it…

So like the modern device, your life (quite literally) appears to be in the palm of your hand.

Get ready to go. Then: make a pact with yourself and simply decide to have a good time. Say: “I will always go with the flow…” “I will stay polite and in good spirits…” “I’m lucky…” That way you will never be disappointed.

Can you (really) hear yourself complaining about a cancelled flight? Turning again to the palm of your hand and dipping into social media to complain ad nauseam because your bloody flight is delayed? I am sure some beyond skinny kid scouring a rubbish-dump in a godforsaken hellhole looking for enough discards to scrounge a meal for the day is not listening or looking at your dejected-airport-pouty-selfie.

Yes, I could be writing all of the above to you, dear reader, but even more so to pro surfers in general. More than any other occupation on Earth, theirs is the stuff of our dreams so their expectations can often be high when it comes to what’s real or unreal. And who else spends that much time racking up “Likes” and pushing out the days of their every breath to the rest of us? Surely only the Kardashiens…

Thankfully the guys on the surf trip you are about to see are well-adjusted humans, still up for The Search and keen to get away from it all. Even Medina with his 3,900,000 Instagram followers and clearly recognised as “The-man-most-likely-to- post” was keen to escape when he heard about the rarely surfed lefthander that might, if found, add to the depth and quality of the simple life lines written on the palm of his hand.

“There are a lot of colours of blues here,” he said on arrival deep in the South Pacific, mesmerised by the ocean.

“Dark blue and light blue. Hey, what kind of blue is that, that’s beautiful I think,” engrossed.

“There are seven kinds of blue that I can see. And look at that shade! That’s the kind of blue I was looking for right there! Hey how’s that blue? Come here and look at that shit! There are 50 shades of blue in my eye!”

I mean you just can’t get that weird looking at life through a screen, right?