THROUGH THE KEY: SURFING IN SWEDEN – Wavelength Surf Magazine
Starting a new series on wavelength, ‘Through the keyhole,’ sheds light on the magic of surfing in a particular country or destination. Told through the unabashed eyes of a local, the series paints a rich picture that brings you into the unique charm of each location. First of all, we find out about Sweden’s seductive, brackish magic through the eyes of a former pro freesurfer and cold water fan, Tim Latte. With a dogged determination and relentless passion for adventure that proves to be a never-ending burning ember of fire and exploration for Tim, we discover the magic of surfing in Sweden.
Words: Tim Latte
Chasing Unicorns: The Adventure
This is where I grew up surfing, in the Baltic Sea. I’m from Stockholm, and if you know Sweden on a map, it’s kind of like a big lake. The water is brackish, so it’s not even salty. We don’t really get that many waves compared to many other places. Usually, when I meet someone from, say, Florida, they’re like, well, I’m from Florida. The waves are crap. And I think, mate, you haven’t been to Sweden yet! However, the passion for it is a little hard to describe…
I grew up here in Stockholm, went to school here and then moved abroad to continue my pro surfing career. As I got older, I was just like, I miss home, I miss my family, I miss friends. Then I just realized that we can surf a lot here in the Baltic Sea because of the way the weather patterns move. You’ll definitely need a car and you’ll definitely need to love driving because the closest surf spot to me is an hour and a half away. Usually in a day my friends and I drive six hours one way to surf for a couple of hours and then drive six hours back home. It’s a normal day surfing for us. It’s like a full-day mission. Last week I had a discussion with my friend, and he asked me why are you still here? And I’m just like, well, when I gave up the competition, I also missed out on the adventure. I have a saying at home here…”
“Surfing is only 50%, and the adventure and hanging out with your friends is the other 50%.”
The adventure is you drive around, you read all these maps, all the updates. You saved a lot of these projections and you look at the logs and you think, okay, I think it’s going to be good. And then you get up there, and you walk through the forest and you come down and you see left- or right-hand scalers, it’s offshore, and it doesn’t really happen that often in the Baltic Sea. You only have wind gusts, and it’s only there for a short time. And then you also fight, during autumn and winter, against both daylight and the rather harsh climate. It’s negative, and there are blizzards. It’s not your average day at the beach. It’s something that’s very special and very unique and rare, and you know you’re probably the only people out there scoring these pristine conditions.
“It’s kind of like chasing freaking unicorns to be honest., you’re chasing something that’s very rare but very addictive!”
In the process of going on an adventure, you experience and see many places that you otherwise wouldn’t. Especially if you are going further north up in Sweden, and for example into Norway. You’ve got the scenery, you’ve got the raw scenery, and then there’s so much undiscovered coastline as well. You have nooks and crannies, fjords and islands. Especially here in Sweden, there are several islands that I haven’t been to, but I know there must be some waves there. Many of the places here in Sweden have been surfed, but people tend to keep their mouths shut about it. It’s not just about being the one surfing the place for the first time, it’s more like being there on your day. Those are the things that we get fond of, it just doesn’t happen often. If you are there and manage to get a good one, it feels so much better.
Lay of the Land
Here in Sweden, we don’t really have beach breaks, they are mainly rocky breakwaters or a few outcrops. Especially up in the North, there are a lot of tiles, but they don’t work very often. And that’s another thing too, if you get one of those days that’s like 2, 2.5 meters and the wind shifts offshore, you know you probably have around six hours of good, solid swell and then it’s gone . So you maximize it. Some places only work twice a year. How should you be able to time and plan your life? You don’t really know, because everything changes and shifts up here, so you have to be on it.
There is surfing all over the country because there are spots everywhere, you just have to be on it. And if you take a look at the map, a small body of water like the Baltic Sea can have weather systems in the northern part that don’t even come south. You’re always hunting, and you have to check the wind. I think most surfers up here could actually be professional meteorologists. It’s all on different swells too. You have the Arctic, which is just gusty winds, north winds, south winds, easterlies, and then as you go far up north, you have different weather systems called arctic hurricanes.
I surfed a lake here in Sweden, which was actually really good. I drove eight hours up to Sweden’s largest ski resort to a lake that is only about 16 kilometers long. My friend just called me and said you need to come up. It will be the day of the decade, and we are talking about in a lake. When I got up there I slept in the car. When the guys woke me up, I looked out, and it was shoulder to head high, left hand peeler, in a lake. You could see the mountains that people were on on the other side. I surfed for three hours and drove home, didn’t understand what the hell was going on. I drove eight hours into the country, into the mountains and I surfed a lake. And it was the best day of the decade.
Kthe
When you’re out and about, especially if you’re going to the islands and up north, you pack your bag with tents, sleeping pads, sleeping bags and lots of food. You dress for cold weather and you sit in the car with your friends just pumping up tunes. You don’t want to go alone, because many of these places are very remote, and if something happens, you’re pretty much on your own. Some of the trips were a 40 minute hike into the woods and no one knows you’re there. Up in the north we usually grab our camping gear and we walk through these pine forests that are covered in moss. You go through it with all your gear on your back, wetsuit bag, camping gear, food, water and surfboards. You usually bring two or more, so it’s heavy, and you walk for 40 minutes and then camp. We build a fire, and then we just run outside and surf our brains out until we can’t feel our feet, fingers, or hands anymore. I think that is a completely different story. It’s not accessible to everyone, it’s more like a nature experience.
It gets so cold. Most of the time you can only be out for an hour and a half, and then you have to get up and pour some hot water over yourself or go inside. That’s the thing up here, if you forget a boot or a glove, which has happened to me on occasion, you won’t be able to surf. So you can drive six hours, and there won’t be a surf shop. You have to be on it the day before, make sure you have three sets of fins, an extra pair, preferably two wetsuits, double everything. You will bring a few boards preferably because you don’t know what the waves will be like. The hard part is that you have to have really good equipment. The tiniest hole in your wetsuit will probably ruin your session when it gets that cold. I use a 6.4 Manner. In January and February I wouldn’t go anything below 6.7mm, so it’s all real rubber. Sometimes when we go out and travel, we take the sauna tent with us. You have to put a lot more effort into just being comfortably numb.
New opportunities
Imagine, everyone has surfed and discovered things around the equator. But anything in the cold spheres, like up to the Arctic – that’s a lot of coastline. It’s grown now over the last few years, a lot of people have gone out and surfed and explored and stuff, which is really cool. I have some friends up in northern Norway, and they are surfing this wave that you don’t expect. It’s a huge ski area, and then inside you have islands on either side and you have this little inlet. You’re sitting there and you see this A frame that just comes off, it’s amazing. That’s the cool thing about it, because you can’t really understand how the hell the wave gets in there, and how we’re surfing in the Arctic right now. You just don’t know what to expect either, I don’t know how many times I’ve been skunked but you go in anyway because surfing isn’t on tap here.
The crew
It’s not a big crew. I’m not going to share the locations because I’m not a big fan of this and I see the point of being very careful about revealing things. If you’re part of the crew like we are, you can always come, these are the rules. We have our little chat groups and we just keep it together. I like to surround myself with like-minded individuals who live the same lifestyle. I know a lot of the surfers here in the Arctic, and I’m good friends with a lot of people, but the people I want to travel with are people I feel comfortable with. We are a small, small group of people just wandering around. A lot of the spots have been found by other guys who have been pioneering surfing since the mid-nineties, early 2000s when I was a kid, and they’ve been just as hungry as me.
In Sweden, surfing has grown, it’s so crazy that we now have problems finding a parking space and it mostly happened during the pandemic. I guess it’s my fault as well as the surf cams, there’s a scene, it’s a lifestyle, people love it. For the dedicated few, it’s more the lifestyle of being outdoors, surrounded by like-minded, positive people. And the good thing about up here is that localism doesn’t exist, and I don’t think it ever will because the Swedish people and our values are quite calm and collected.