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Welcome to the 10th edition of The Bodyboard Report! 🤙 🧊

There is a character in the Mortal Kombat game universe named Sub-Zero.

He is cold, ruthless, almost impossible to stop, and no matter how many times the fight goes against him, he keeps coming back.

Sub-Zero (live action here) also has a habit of turning everything around him into ice and then absolutely destroying it anyway.

Cold water bodyboarding works a little like that… ❄️

This week we go cold.

We go north.

We go west.

We go to the wild and windy edges of the planet where the surf is heavy, the lineups are empty, and the only people in the water are the ones who really, genuinely, do not care what anyone else thinks.

Grab your 5mm, 1.9 core, extra large thermos, and let's put a toe into it. 😎

Here is the thing that most warm water bodyboarders never fully appreciate until they experience it.

Cold water lineups with heavy waves are mostly empty.

Not just quiet. Not just uncrowded. Actually, genuinely, blissfully empty.

Because the moment temperatures drop below a certain point, a large percentage of the surfing population simply disappears. They put the boards away, they book flights to the Canaries or Indo, they wait for spring.

And the ones who remain? They tend to be a very specific kind of person.

They are the ones who came for the wave, not the experience of being seen surfing the wave. That distinction matters more than it sounds.

When you paddle out into 10°C / 50° F water on a grey February morning in Ireland, or a July swell on South Africa's West Coast where the Benguela Current orten keeps the ocean at a bone rattling 8°C / 46°F, nobody is filming a lifestyle video.

Nobody is positioning themselves for a good angle. Everyone in that lineup earned their spot by just showing up and getting in.

That shared understanding creates a different kind of energy in the water. Something rawer, more honest, and oddly more relaxed than you would expect given the conditions.

Cold water bodyboarding also demands a completely different physical relationship with your equipment. Thicker rubber means less sensitivity, so you learn to read waves through instinct rather than feel.

Most riders forgo gloves, but if you do wear them, they make you grip harder, so your positioning becomes more deliberate. The board needs to work harder in heavier, more powerful surf, and that forces you to really understand what your equipment is doing underneath you.

Everything becomes more intentional. And once you have surfed heavy, cold, raw water and come out the other side still grinning, warm water almost feels like a bonus rather than a requirement.

Here is something most bodyboarders feel instinctively in the water but never have the numbers to back up.

Seawater density runs from around 1,020 kg/m³ at the equator all the way up to approximately 1,029 kg/m³ in polar regions, and temperature is the biggest driver of that difference.

What that means in practice is that the 29°C / 84°F tropical water you are gliding through in Brazil or Bali sits at roughly 1,021 to 1,022 kg/m³, while the 10°C / 50°F water off the West Coast of South Africa, Ireland, or Scotland is pushing closer to 1,027 to 1,028 kg/m³.

That is because as temperature drops, density rises, and the influence of temperature on surface seawater density is greater than even salinity.

In real terms that is a difference of around 6 to 7 kg / m³ of water surrounding your body and pressing against your board on every wave.

It does not sound like much until you multiply it across the volume of a breaking wave and realise you are being pushed, lifted, and compressed by something measurably heavier than what you ride in the tropics.

Your board generates more lift!

Your body experiences more resistance on entry, barrels close out faster and harder, and fins that feel effortless in 29°C / 84°F water suddenly need to work for every stroke.

Cold water does not just feel thicker.

Physically, measurably, it actually is.

The Benguela Current that keeps the Cape West Coast at between 8°C / 46°F and 12°C / 54°F in winter is not just cold. It is delivering some of the densest, heaviest, most powerful water you will ever put a bodyboard into.

And the riders who have figured out how to charge it well? They are playing a slightly different game to everyone else...

And so did I for most part of the last 38 years bodyboarding. ❄️🌊

If you have not watched Ben Player's icy masterpiece called Far Nørth, you need to close this email right now, find it, and watch it before you do anything else today.

Ben Player won three world titles, two of them at Pipeline, and at the height of his competitive career he walked away from the tour to spend five years chasing the most violent and unforgiving waves in the far north of Europe.

The result was a 40 minute film unlike anything bodyboarding had ever produced, shot in stunning 4K with an original score by the brilliant Mickey Smith, a Cornishman who had made the cold coast of Ireland his permanent home and had already produced one of the most poetic pieces of surf filmmaking ever made in The Dark Side of the Lens.

The combination of Ben Player's courage in the water and Mickey Smith's eye behind the lens produced something that felt less like a bodyboarding film and more like a nature documentary about what human beings are capable of when they stop asking for permission from the weather.

Ben suffered a ruptured spleen at Riley's in Ireland during the making of the film, got airlifted by the Irish Coast Guard, and came back to finish what he started.

That is the cold water mindset in a single story. You do not get a ruptured spleen and decide the ocean owes you warmer conditions.

You heal. You go back. Sub Zero. No problem. ❄️

The Bull in Scotland. Riley's in Ireland. The frozen grey Atlantic stretching out in every direction with nobody watching and everything on the line.

Ben called Far Nørth the highlight of his entire career. Not the world titles. Not Pipeline. The film where he went somewhere cold and difficult and came back with something true.

That tells you everything you need to know about what cold water bodyboarding does to a person.

Not to enter a contest. Not to shoot a sponsor edit. To find a wave. Breaking in freezing Nordic water, in a country not remotely associated with surfing, because the idea of something undiscovered was worth the cold and the uncertainty.

They found it. That trip captures something essential about what drives a certain kind of bodyboarder. Not the points, not the crowds, not the fame. The hunt. The possibility that somewhere on a remote coastline, something extraordinary is breaking with no one watching.

Iceland, Norway, the Faroe Islands, the wild west coast of Ireland, the outer headlands of Scotland. All of these places carry waves that most of the bodyboarding world will never see because the barrier to entry is not skill. It is willingness. The willingness to be cold, uncomfortable, far from home, and completely out of your depth in search of something real. ❄️🤙

Lewy Finnegan spent three months in bed and used that time to decide, very clearly, that he wanted to be a professional bodyboarder more than anything in the world. When he got up, he became an athlete.

A West Australian who throws himself at monstrous slabs with a commitment that makes your hands sweat just watching from a phone screen.

Cold water bodyboarding builds this kind of person. You cannot hide behind conditions when the conditions are trying to actively discourage you from being there. You are either in or you are out.

Sub Zero had that attitude. He kept fighting. These riders have it too. ❄️🌊

Did you miss the last previous publication? 👇

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