Scandinavian surfers add a unique, frozen twist to the popular water sport
It's hard, heavy, brittle and melts away without trace. But ice is the material of choice for Inge Wegge, who sculpts chunks of it and uses it for a most unlikely purpose -- to make surf boards.
Normally when someone pours water into molds made of plastic and stores them in a place with subzero temperatures, they’re hoping to get a delectable frozen treat out of the process.
For a pair of surfers/filmmakers and their friends who enjoy the thrill of surfing in the chilly waters around Norway's Lofoten archipelago, their recipe is pretty similar, except perhaps for the added seaweed and fish heads.
They’re not making ice pops. The filmmakers have come up with an interesting twist on their usual surfing adventures -- as though catching waves in frigid conditions up above the Arctic Circle wasn’t already a unique feat on its own.
“They’re a small community of local surfers with very good [skills],” Agence France-Presse (AFP) photographer Olivier Morin told AccuWeather. Morin met the group of surfers about five years ago during his first trip to Lofoten, and he’s been following them ever since.
“They are very active in terms of surfing and challenges in any weather conditions,” Morin said.
The surfers' latest challenge: ditch their regular surfboards for ones made almost entirely of frozen water.
It sounds simple enough, but the process of perfecting the out-of-the-box idea has been more than nine months in the making for 33-year-old documentary filmmaker Inge Wegge and his team, according to AFP.
“I started thinking about it when a friend of mine was surfing on different things he found on the beach, like planks and a piece of ice,” Wegge told AccuWeather.
Wegge also found inspiration in director Jørn Nyseth Ranum’s film “Northbound,” which chronicles the exploits of skateboarders who glided and performed tricks on a ramp made of frozen sand and water, he said.
Ranum and Wegge have previously teamed up to create the documentary “North of the Sun,” a project that features them living nine months on a remote beach in a house they built of driftwood. They’re working together once again to create “Ice Edge,” a film that will showcase the making and use of the ice surfboards.
“[They] will probably be the world’s most eco-friendly boards, made just with water and the [low] temperatures outside,” states their Indiegogo crowdfunding page, where they hope to raise some money to contribute to the construction of between 15 and 30 boards.
“We will experiment with different techniques, with and without fins, long and short boards, sand on the board to get grip and maybe LED lights inside them to get some amazing night shots under the Northern Lights,” according to the filmmakers.
Morin, who has photographed some of their attempts to create the most effective ice surfboard, doesn’t doubt the team’s ability to pull it off. “Why would it not be possible, because everything floating is surfable?” he observed. “An ice chunk is surfable because it is floating; heavy, but floating, [and therefore] rideable.”
“They’re in a place where there is ice 10 months out of the year. Why not try to make a board out of it and see what happens?” Morin wrote in his story chronicling four days of attempts to create the surfboards.
The process
The crew initially carved ice chunks from the top of frozen lakes. However, these chunks melted within mere minutes of hitting the warmer water in which they surfed.
“The problem with this ice is that it freezes naturally at [too low of a] temperature, slowly around 23 to 17 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 5 to minus 8 degrees Celsius),” Morin said. The chunks tend to soften and melt quickly when placed in waters at 37 F (3 C).
Wegge added that the ice in these boards had too much air inside, and because the ice was older, it had already started to melt anyway.
Their attempts to create their own ice boards from scratch were a lot more successful, but not yet perfect.
The team then made molds out of wood and plastic and filled those molds with freshwater, as frozen-solid freshwater is stronger than the frozen salt variety, according to Morin.
They added seaweed to “cut down on the slippage factor, and also added other things, just for fun,” Morin wrote.
The soon-to-be ice boards were left to solidify inside a fishery in Svolvaer, Norway, in a room where the temperature was minus 13 F (minus 25 C) for a couple of days.
“Water frozen [for more than 24 hours] in a cold chamber used in the fishing industry makes the ice stronger, more dense and more durable in the water,” Morin said.
Next, it was time to take their new creations to the waves.
Haul might be a more fitting verb, as it took the strength of at least three people to hoist each of the rock-hard 154-pound (70-kilogram) ice blocks out of the fishery, into a trailer and out to the waters.
The average surfboard weighs six or seven pounds, for comparison.
While the improved version does last longer in the water, it begins to melt and eventually vanish in less than half an hour.
"The first 20 minutes, they are surfable," Wegge told AFP. "[They’re] just perfect for two or three minutes -- you need the right waves just then -- and after that, they are too fragile."
The crew still has some progress to make after testing them out in February, stating on their Indiegogo page that “the waves must be good, the board should not be too thick or too thin… and the boards are slippery, so we need to find more ways to get grip.”
As February through April are the coldest months in the Arctic, according to the filmmakers, they plan to begin creating the documentary in this time frame, along with the help of a group of surfers, a surfboard shaper and a professional ice sculptor.
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