September 12, 2001. As the twin towers buckled and the Western world gasped for air, a small group of surfers gathered at an ancient meeting place in the Outer Hebrides.

The far-flung archipelago off the coast of Scotland is home to the Callanish Stones, the ruins of a neolithic religious ritual site older than Stonehenge. There, on a low ridge above the dark waters of the Loch Roag, Derek Hynd, Tom and Joe Curren, Skip Frye, Andrew Kidman, Kassia Meador, Jesse Faen, Frankie Oberholzer and a handful of others met to try and make sense of the madness engulfing them.

“It was like War of the Worlds, nobody knew what was happening,” says Kidman of the 9/11 attacks and their chaotic aftermath. “We’d been there on the beach (in the Hebrides) hearing reports coming through the radio, trying to find out what the hell was going on.”

News of the attacks has everybody rattled - and feeling far from home.

“Imagine being on an island on the top of Europe where no-one is - it’s really isolated - and we’re all away from our families,” says Kidman. “It felt like World War Three had just started. Everyone was gobsmacked.”

So it was Hynd who suggested they head to the Callanish site and offer a prayer to whatever gods may still reside there. Finding solace in the silence of the ancient stones seemed to make as much sense as anything else at the time, even if it didn’t offer any easy answers.

Planes were grounded. War seemed imminent. What else was there to do?

But it would be forgiven if there was another, equally pertinent thought running through their minds as they stood out on that windswept ridge on the very edge of the earth: what the fuck were they doing in the Hebrides in the first place?

Six months earlier, Hynd had been on a trip to King Island with Kelly Slater and Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder. This was peak Y2K, and the pair were enjoying a break from ruling their respective dominions to run riot in the trademark wintry conditions. The waves, says Hynd, were “empty, blustery, cold and great.” Kelly was being Kelly - surfing at the absolute performance apex and scoring some unforgettable waves in the process. But Hynd noticed it was Vedder that was coming away from his sessions with more stoke, despite being the objectively lesser surfer of the two.

“It got me thinking that the stoke of the one was higher than the stoke of the other, and that it counted for a lot in the scheme of surf culture,” says Hynd. “In surfing no-one is ‘better’ than the next in the simple face of who's on song, stoke and potential wise.”

“One of the only great things about surfing The Pass, for example, is that despite the hordes and dangers you get to appreciate beginners and intermediates riding the waves of their lives, all of which is simply not the case at Snapper or Lennox or just about every other point around the world. They can stand, ride what seems to be forever, and get the time to fathom the enormity of the experience when they're doing it.”

It begged the question: what room is there in the metrics we use to measure success when it comes to wave riding? How do we define what good surfing is?

Is a weekend warrior’s head dip just as meaningful as a pro’s ten second foamball ride, if both are executed at the peak of their performance level? And what about style? Artistic interpretation? Equipment choice? Stoke? How it all interplays with the conditions on the day?

Could there be a way to judge it all, as subjective as ‘it’ may be?

Hynd, ever the agitator, had form with theory. Back in the ‘70s during his Newport Plus years, he’d introduced a handicap system for club rounds which he likened to the famed Stawell Gift running race.

“I wanted to make sure every surfer in every heat, semi or final got a better chance to surf to full potential and make it further than normal,” says Hynd.

“I'd already seen in other clubs and competitions how fucked up it could be to lose out and be done straight off the bat, despite surfing to potential. We only had a small club. One or two points head start (based on talent and experience) and everyone tossed into the same division, boys or girls, allowed someone's potential to rise.”

It also pushed the performance of the more advanced surfers.

“For the eight A-Grade guys, as zero markers, to take it easy meant risking elimination against surfers with narrowed odds. Right?”

The idea continued to gnaw at Hynd, and was only calcified by the KI experience with Eddie Vedder. Come 2001 it was time to put the format into action.

“The Hebredean happening took a shot at bringing all surfers together under the common surfing creed: we are as one,” said Hynd at the time in his post-comp wrap for Surfing.

The Hebrides offered a fertile testing ground for the format. The archipelago is littered with points. Reefs. Beachies. Every nook and cranny - empty, blustery, cold and great - offering its own potential. More importantly, the local surf scene had developed in relative seclusion during the pre-internet era.

“The Hebrides was just like King Island (in terms of) throwback surf culture,” says Hynd. “It had the clean canvas going for it, where some of the surfers could still front up unaffected by any surfing outside of Scotland.”

The call was put out, and quickly a smattering of pros, surfer shapers, travellers, regional amateurs, willing locals, and wandering svengalis signed on for the comp. A classic Hynd coterie. Derek Macleod of Hebridean Surf was instrumental in organising the local contingent, as well as logistics on the ground. A cinematographer was organised to film the whole thing, along with coverage from Kidman and Hynd in the American surf press. Funds were secured from local government with a promise to put the Islands on the global surfing map.

Details for the competitors in the leadup to the event were scant. Hynd. Hebrides. Comp. Curren. Sort the rest out as you go.

Once they were there, the format was similarly free-flowing.

“We had heats, says Kidman, “but they were completely random.”

“No-one was seeded, there’d be girls in the heats, there’d be locals in the heats, there’d be Tom Curren in your heats, then there were ripper guys like Jesse Faen, Hans Haegen, guys like that.”

The heat structure also borrowed from competitions of old in being a no knock out, cumulative point tallying system. 

“It's not as if the cumulative round scoring was unique,” says Hynd. “It just worked very, very well in the early pro days, I think in large part because of the diversity of equipment and styles that the field had.”

Just like the advent of the fin had split surfing progression off into a parallel universe, so too had the implementation of the elimination system in the ‘70s irrevocably changed the course of competition.

“The axing of the cumulative system was the turning point of pro surfing,” says Hynd. “With straight elimination, and I can speak first hand, it was tough on the loser. If the loser knew he'd been beaten fair and square in days of many a suss result, all the tougher knowing it was over, period. One way street.”

The spartan ruthlessness of elimination surfing had also stifled the spectrum of board design in competition - check out the 'diversity' in quivers at a top level comp today. For Hynd, cumulative point scoring allowed a more artistic, expressionist approach. Competitors were encouraged to ride whatever equipment they were most comfortable on in the conditions that presented. 

Hynd and 'Spirit of the Event' winner Skip Frye with assorted equipment

The theme also carried through into the judging criteria.

“We were judging the contest ourselves and had no fucken clue what we were doing to begin with,” says Kidman. “But Derek was orchestrating it. I remember sitting in the judging area and he would just randomly grab you. Andrew! You’ve got to judge the next heat!”

“He would stand there and tell you what to give for the score, and if you said, ‘Aww I thought that was a four’ and he didn’t agree with you he’d pretty much tell you to change it. He’d be like, nah bullshit you missed this, or that.”

But everyone soon cottoned on to the peak performance philosophy.

“After a while you got to see what he was feeling,” says Kidman. “He wanted to see the surfer really being involved with the wave. Say you were an average surfer but you took off on a really good wave and were really involved with riding that wave and rode it to the best of your ability, he would say that’s like an eight or a nine. If it was relative to the surfer and how good the surfer was.”

But it wasn’t just about individual performance. Spirit also counted. Kidman recounts one example:

“I had one heat where I was up against a longboard guy. He was a really good surfer, an English guy, I think he was one the world tour guys during that period, and the surf was in these really long peeling little waves. ‘Cos he had a longboard he just fucken worked every single person in the heat over. I caught barely two waves and he just worked me over. But Derek was watching what was going on. And because (the longboarder) did that in the heat, he got last - he wasn’t surfing in the spirit of the event. I just cruised in that heat, got a couple of waves and I ended up getting a huge score and I got a wad of cash that night. I was like, where did that come from?

Even with the handicap system, it was Tom Curren who ended up winning the event. Riding a borrowed fish, he systematically dismantled the conditions while still leaving room in the tank for more.

“Bigger than I would’ve wanted to see him on," says Hynd of Curren's equipment choice, "but the fluid drive was so compelling… shut the gate, in other words.”

Yet others were in the mix. Kidman nominated Christian Beamish, a shaper who happened to be riding a bike around Ireland at the time of the comp and made the hop over to the Isles with his single fin, as a standout performer. And Hynd says the silky surfing of Kassia Meador was the best performance he’s even seen from a female, ‘up there with the best of Joel Tudor.’

And then there was the local plumber, Steve Clelland, who took it to Curren via the handicapping system and ended up placing fifth overall.

“It brought me into the equation, ‘incredible like’ and it wouldn’t matter who I told ‘cos they wouldn’t believe it,” said Clelland afterwards. Indeed, Kidman rated the interaction between the locals and the surf legends, and the pure stoke it brought to them all, as one of the highlights of the trip.

The competition wasn’t without its hitches. Firstly, the 9/11 attacks threw a monumental spanner in the works, even though most of the competition had been completed. But then a dispute rose with the videographer over ownership rights. The footage was withheld, never to be seen again. “Never trust a smiler,” says Hynd of the culprit.

Despite some brief coverage at the time, the comp was relegated to historical footnote status. And that was OK. Realistically the format was never going to be a mainstream crossover hit. Nor was it intended to be.

But threads of the concept live on in Hynd’s more recent agitations, like Musica Surfica and the Roots/Arts Test. And that fundamental question that burns at its base - whether surfing is sport or art - will always remain.

One thing that is for sure. Progression isn't always linear. In 2020, as the WSL buckles and the surfing world gasps for air, a true crossroads moment appears. Never has there been a better time for reinvention. 

Opening up surfing’s past to help chart the course forward might not be a bad start.

What else is there to do?

// SURF ADS

Special thanks to Matt Warshaw and the Encyclopedia of Surfing