Reciprocity - The unlikely surfer/shaper alchemy of Harry Bryant and Josh Keogh

Harry Bryant sits on a bar stool in the Driftwood Spars, a 400-year old pub in St Agnes, Cornwall. He’s halfway through Guinness number two and gaining pace. In his Cornish grandma’s car outside there’s a magic 7’1” Josh Keogh that has been round the world in eighteen months. The board stems from a surfer/shaper design partnership that opens a dusty cul-de-sac in the evolution of the modern surfboard. It’s a story that starts with Maurice Cole and boards he made for Curren, nods to the Webber Herring-era Banana and even includes MP. The way the board surfs isn’t a happy accident, rather the meeting of a hyper talented surfer and a meticulous shaper that genuinely cares about craft.

“My friends laugh at me,” Josh Keogh says, “because I only have one surfboard and it is five years old.” Josh has recently stripped things back to basics, buying a plot of land in Wyndham where he lives with his girlfriend and two dogs in a caravan. “He comes over for a cup of tea and it’s like you are sitting down with a 70-year-old man,” Harry says. “He’s like a carpenter, or someone that builds robots, not just a board shaper but a nerd scientist. I’ve never even gotten him in the pub.” When Covid hit Australia, Harry moved down south (living with Josh’s parents) and the pair started experimenting. “MP had a surf shop out there,” Harry says, “for a tiny farm town on the Victorian border it has rich board history.”

While remaining underground, Josh’s boards have been quietly gathering attention for years. Harry’s surfing vindicates the designs. “Since he started making me boards about three years ago,” Harry says, “we’ve really understood each other. I could tell from the very first board he made me, I gave him feedback and he didn’t really say anything, but he applied every single tiny thing to the next board. That’s when sparks flew and I just wanted to dive into it.”

The lines might be different, but Harry’s surfing on the 7’1” is typically reckless and raw. “Where I’m trying to take my surfing in bigger waves,” Harry says, “is drawing inspiration from Tom Carroll surfing pipeline back in the day. Why hasn’t anyone done a better snap since then?” That kind of surfing is board and rocker dependent. “It’s a heavy board,” Josh says, “We’ve been tricked into thinking weight is a bad thing in surfing. Weight anchors the board to the water, which isn’t a disadvantage unless you are trying to do aerials. Harry’s board has swing weight in front, but he gets on the tail and he’s riding a cutting-edge performance board. There’s a session at 6-8 foot Draculas, he’s just going crazy, blowing the fins out, full roundhouse cutties. People are going to freak out when they see that.”

They started off working on Tom Curren style shapes from the late 80s with low, square rails and Maurice Cole reverse vee but conventional outlines. Josh made the 7’1” with a single-fin outline, a beak nose with a flattish nose rocker, a full-on razor edge rail from nose to tail but with a huge tail lift and double concave through the bottom. He pulled inspiration from Webber, cutting in a massive 3.5” of tail kick and planting the fins (a small, bespoke quad set made by Greg Trotter at Soar) way up on the rail to fit the tail curve. “Maurice Cole still has some of those boards he was making for Curren and we went down to Victoria to check them out,” Josh says, “but those flat nose rockers and extreme tail kick just disappeared when Kelly came along. It isn’t unique, but it hasn’t existed in our surfing landscape for a long time. Maurice even came and looked the blank over. He measured it up with a ruler, making sure I got the contours right.” 

The design got a further proof point in Hawaii, under the feet of Justin Quintal at second-reef pipe. After a first huge tube, the board holds a line through a crazy, spitting double-up. “Seeing Justin get that wave,” Josh says, “my board didn’t let him down. He got the wave of his life and it did the job… Joel Tudor said you aren’t a shaper until you are proven in Hawaii and it feels like I stopped just being a trendy guy who makes fish.” Josh is way too reserved and humble to let it show, but I can feel his grin across the world. “Working with Harry on this design has been the most fulfilling shaping relationship of my life,” he concludes.

The explosion of light, colour and sound

Post 40 my remaining surfing experience feels suddenly, arrestingly short. Framed through two very different, recent days of surfing in Ireland I wanted to explore what it is to surf on your own terms. 

Day One. County Clare. 3.45am, May 2024.

A local kid is out there before us, which gives an indication of the size. Not too daunting, just perfect shallow slab waves with one guy out. The tide is slightly wrong but improving. Matt gives me little kernels of intelligence I soak up like a sponge - where to paddle out, where to come in, what to line up off. The geology of the place is mind blowing, different to the other banner wave but no less otherworldly. For a while this wave saturated surf media, making stars, making history. Changing surfing in Ireland forever. 

Even on a sunny spring morning with set waves not much overhead everyone approaches it gingerly. There’s a sense of collective dread and fascination you have to look past. Just nerves I guess. I like the banter, the shared inhalation as the guinea pig pokes his nose over the ledge and has a go at one. Unsuccessful. The flogging is short and merciful. We scuttle out, getting washed into the channel and picking our way into the lineup. A set, much bigger than the ones before and magnified by being underneath it, looms out of the black water outside. I realise I’m only wearing one earplug while scrabbling under the first wave. Fear, however suppressed, does funny things to the mind. 

The crowd filters in. There is a great shared sense of being in it together. I recognise a few people. The bodyboarders define how it should be approached. Dan particularly has that voodoo quality of seeming to slow down time. The takeoff, which should be a panicked blur of critical consequence, seems to unfold at a leisurely pace for him. He sits twenty feet outside the pack, now and again giving someone a word of encouragement, but when his waves come there is no confusion. I enjoy this other dimension that some waterpeople can open up, it’s transcendental, pure poetry in motion. It stems from a deep comfort in your element. Confidence born of repetition. Way beyond my 10,000 hours, it’s a level of fluidity I’ll never possess. 

Matt says “sit with me and if I tell you to go then go.” But I sit as far as possible from him while still being in the lineup. If there was no one out here I think I’d sit right next to him. As a rootless surfer who hasn’t really had a local spot, I always defer to locals. Giving them space to operate feels like one of the fundamental principles of good karma in surfing. Out here I’m a tourist, the best I can hope for is a good scrap. I get a few on my 20 year old bodyboard, which has started taking on weight and has an alarming amount of flex. All you need is a little view. The sense of the shelf being inches below your belly takes getting used to, can imagine it’s quite a trip on your backhand. The wave makes almost every picture fall short. It breathes, digesting itself, exhaling with a roar. 90% of standup rides are not completed, I’d guess. There are a lot of nose dives and generally eating shit. 

For some time afterwards I dream of the place, its hook and heft of course but also just the sheer stunning geological rawness. I can see why it has exerted a draw. It is nourishing in a certain way, the spectacle and the camaraderie, the testing nature of it. I am back at the van before the children wake up. 

Later, a hiker stops by the van in the middle of nowhere and comments on my wetsuit drying on a road sign. It takes a while to realise it is Willy Britton, uncle to Easkey and a pioneer of surfing in Ireland like many of that clan. The last time I’d seen him had been twenty years before, when I lent him a bonzer and he went out and drew some beautiful long lines on it. We trade thoughts on the incoming low and agree we’ll see each other up north. Surfing has these little twists of fate in abundance, I love it.

Day Two. County Sligo. 4am, May 2024.

The right is softer than I remember. I guess it might be swell direction or period or tide or the general glassy malaise of the morning but it’s quite gentle despite the decent groundswell running. I remember once watching Cain Kilcullen out here on a similar day paddle up the reef and get three perfect tubes. Two guys paddled up, he paddled back and that spot of reef didn’t break again once. He read it like a book. I try and emulate it but it’s hard to read the boils. 

I have so many memories from this zone. The left off the back of the right on fire and a young Fergal Smith charging it. Long looping tunnels. A lost bodyboard fin. A wave we called cowshit left, on a winter trip when we saw no other surfers in ten days, walled up and running. Finding that zippy rivermouth from Litmus, but from the wrong side of the river, asking a very old drunk farmer if we could cross his land. A little mossy slab, tucked out of the westerly gale, the wave so mechanical it didn’t seem real. The right in the harbour, looking for all the world like Jeffrey’s bay. These rich experiences set the tone of my surfing life. 

The swell ebbs. I break out a big hull and paddle out to a marginal right. The inside section runs through a huge stringweed bed, you have to stay high on the face. I try not to lose my board, fin catching on the weed, watching the rocks below. It is sheet glass and for a brief period before the tide shuts it down, a soft headhigh a frame. There’s a freedom in this little peeling wave, a lack of expectation to it. My children are hunting fossils on the foreshore, my wife (long-suffering) is lying in the van with the rear doors open reading. These are details I can notice and absorb completely as I ride waves. It may be one day that I bring them back to this place and we surf together on long boards, sharing the takeoffs, trimming together in the light and emptiness. Wouldn’t that be a fine thing. 

After each wave there is a chance to watch the rest of the set rumble through, lifting the string weed, bending towards shore across the shallow rock. It is completely satisfying. The sad reality is with friends this session would be dismissed as a waste of time, a crapshoot, a goose chase. But alone there is a pause to wonder at it, how fortunate it is to be exactly here in this moment, watching these perfect little waves mark the end of a swell, back in this place that built my approach to surfing, with my own family here too. Surfing truly unmediated is a chance to closely witness an endless sequence of light, colour and sound. For just a few brief notes we are one with it. 

Finisterre Writing

Some recent marine conservation articles for Finisterre:

Patagonia, I dreamed of abundance

Rewilding the sea

Turtle Soup

The Ocean of Us

And one about east coast surfing

The right side of wherever

Tom Kay Profile

A profile of Finisterre founder Tom Kay in the most recent Surfer’s Journal.

A Letter to Patagonia

Sei whales are going off like gunshots in the fjord, huffing ten foot pillars of breath that are snatched away by the howling wind. This is a calm day by Punta Arenas standards. Three tiny, endemic dolphins boil on the surface. Paddling across the Lingue river, past a blue boat called Felipe Jesus IV, among a thick school of fry. A huge kingfisher swoops one off with a livid flourish of velvet brightness, the fish squirms in its beak. Six vultures watch impassively from the stern. Out on the bank a thousand seabirds flow into the sky. Los pelícanos, a v of nine, swoop low over the looping first section of the wave. Everywhere are moving things and we are small participants in a great concert of life. Patagonia, I dreamed of abundance.

Pink flamingos a roadside shock, limbs picked out against a slick of bright white salt pan. A valley with the scent of death and in its heart the reason; the carcass of a cow with twenty attendant vultures, sprouting like stalactites before wearily flying away as we approach. A luminescent red chested bird singing on a wire and as day gives way a hundred hares, the solitary beasts on the midnight highway. On Chiloé Island the blunt jawbone of a horse hollowed out and filled with dry beans to be beaten ritually in music that plays between the worlds. The old man will not sing for us except for money, which we do not have. A crescent bay stretches northwards and a dozen pods of dolphins hunt the shorebreak, beyond them huge fish are breaking the surface and on the horizon are whales. Big waves lift fronds of kelp as long as houses. We stand spellbound at all the life before us. We stand at the genesis of one of the great oceanic conveyor belts, the Humboldt current. Patagonia, I dreamed of abundance. 

Trying to make headway through the Valdivian temperate rain forest is impossible. A steep jungle trail with the crack of a shallow left on the reef below. Giant angiosperms and the scent of warm eucalyptus. Tsunami evacuation signs point straight uphill. A thousand logging trucks heading north, laden with trunks, to feed paper mills that in turn pollute rivers. Along the pan-am highway, a hundred miles of Monsanto arable land from hell. The trees are dead coloured, stricken by a grey-brown pesticide death in their roots and leaves. There are 30,000 hectares of GMO maize, soy and canola in Chile. A brown trout, fighting for his life, dies gasping, bludgeoned on the side of the rotting hulk of a fishing boat. There are no native salmonids here, which eases the guilt, but what is native now? At the mouth of the river a left cracks against the rocks, waiting for winter sand flow. 7,000 miles of coastline. Patagonia, I dreamed of abundance. 

On the Ruta del fin de mundo, lichen hangs off the trees in thick green shrouds, evidence of a lack of pollution. Guanaco are surprisingly big up close. In the shadow of the needles a river of sparkling beauty, a giant yellow salmon hangs in torpor. He is dying. Moths paint the windshield in a way we have quite forgotten, all of our bugs are dead. Under the lighthouse, beyond the beach made up of a million shells, another left rumbles and spits. Senor Apollo barks outside the Quincho in the mornings. A thousand pink buoys bob in the fjords, the fish farms are Patagonia’s dirty secret. Effluent lines the creek. Chatwin wrote of the warlocks who controlled the island, the deliberately deformed invunche imprisoned in a cave and brought out to terrorise the local people. The illegal fishing vessels use cut-up Humboldt penguins and dolphins for bait to catch king crab. Of the 25 key fish species, 16 stocks are collapsed. Rusting fishing boats fill the fjords. Patagonia, I dreamed of abundance. 

We shake hands with a man from Isla Madre Del Dios, a 26 hour ferry ride from Punta Arenas. He shows us photographs of a condor, stark obsidian against turrets of white rock. A bauxite mine in a fjord. In the caves are the bones of old whales and the Kaweskar people. In the shops in Punta Arenas they sell prints of the painted bodies of the Haush Indians of Tierra Del Fiego. On remote and freezing shores they foraged and hunted seals and guanaco, adapting to one of the harshest climates on earth. There were only 300 of them and much about their culture was never known. Disease and persecution rendered them extinct in the 1920s. What a world they must have known. Patagonia, I dreamed of abundance.

“It is a cancer eating our country,” a local woman says of salmon farming. It is the second biggest business in Chile but the Chilean people are small consumers of salmon. Unregulated antibiotic and pesticide use pollute closed fjord ecosystems that naturally team with life. Under the farms, dead zones are created, anoxic and hypoxic areas where nothing can survive. Sick and mutated fish are shielded from public view. Some escape to predate native fish. The concession system is openly abused. The farms are creeping south from Chiloe and north from Punta Arenas into previously unoccupied areas, which happens to be some of the most magnificent, pristine fjordland on the planet. The cancer isn’t confined to the ocean, it destroys local communities. The money comes from outside. Much of the labour is shipped in and the profit shipped out. Nobody dares speak out and those that do are choked of budget and silenced. Guerilla stickers and posters – no salmonistas. Patagonia, I dreamed of abundance.

The sand is stacked up and the takeoff behind the rock is doing a passable impression of a reverse gold coast point. Thick little nuggets that race and gather over the sand, complex for a regular-footer. A couple of guys make it look easy, getting buried in the dawn mist, engulfed in grey walls. The black sand and black rock and sealions all absorb the light. Within an hour, twenty Argentinian guys staying in the Hospedaje have swarmed all over it in a pack. It’s easy to get out, we didn’t come here for waves. We came to understand the threats to marine life which might look abundant to our eyes, this being one of the most productive ocean ecosystems on the planet. But the dream of abundance, dead and forgotten in so much of our ocean, hangs by a slim thread in Patagonia.  

This article was published in Issue 101 of The Surfer’s Path

Outside Magazine

Beyond the Noise on Outside Magazine.

Surfer's Journal 27.4

A profile of Tom Lowe in The Surfer’s Journal.

Monster Children

Backwash was featured on Monster Children in this little article here.

The Rolling Home

A little piece in The Rolling Home Journal No. 5 about human relationship with nature, accompanied by an illustration from Josh Vyvyan (@joshuadraws). You can scope the journal here.

A week on the road

Be-Wilder

A little side project I’ve been working on: https://www.be-wilder.co.uk/

Letter to Europe

Under cliffs rejoiced and ducked

Spanish lips and Catalan fists

Watched the moon grow wide

In the silent forests of the north

Felt the pure rage of Atlantic storms

Wind whipping Irish kelp

Walked endless tracks and slipped into

Forgotten villages

Found kindness in the eyes of strangers

Beyond a dozen borders

Laughed loud with Polish farmers

Drunk tequila with German schoolgirls

Fanned phosphorescence in mandalas

Kicking ripples on the stroke

Dawn in the Gotico, St. Germaine, Kreuzberg

Each precious day unique

Promises on Alpine tracks, Dutch canals,

In Galician floods

A hundred bazaars, a thousand odd cries

The gentle death of light

Breathless days through cobbled streets

In love with promise and potential

Mumbling other tongues and understanding

Proximity and belonging

Strength in this meeting of eyes,

linking of hands and unity

Strength for the weak, dispossessed,

the world beneath our feet

Whilst greasy men wave their egos

In airless rooms

We open our arms and call you sister, brother, friend.

We stand together.

WE ARE OCEAN

We Are Ocean is a challenge to the dated and disengaging term ‘ocean literacy.’ Commissioned by Dan Burgess of Wildlabs, the short film to introduce the concept is a collaboration with director Chris McClean and producer Aqualung. Voice by Amy Greenhough. A manifesto was also created to spread the idea that the future depends on recognising that we are ocean.

BKW3

It's happening! Welcome to join us on the 13th December at Finisterre London.

Unnecessary gun club, 2012. Photo James Bowden. 

Two pleasant evenings spent chatting with Sandy Kerr, Noah Lane and Sam Bleakley at Finisterre. Photos by Rob Morgan of Roma Surfboards. 

True North

I wrote the narration and voiced this short for Finisterre called True North. 

#252

Fun to unite a stellar cast of friends to collaborate on Issue 252 of Wavelength, which has been running for the same length of time as me. Features above by Candice O'Donnell, Noah Lane, Josh Vyvyan, Sam Bleakley, Mike Lay, Easkey Britton and Jack Johns. 

Travelogue

Delighted to write the introduction for Millican's first Travelogue.