SURFING:
Surf’s up
St. Lawrence

People are riding the waves in Montreal. Yes, Montreal

by MATTHEW WOODLEY

Of all the wonderful reasons to move to this city, Corran Addison’s fervent “the waves” has got to be one of the oddest, especially considering that he surfs them. Maui, Ecuador, California, France—you name it, he’s been—yet eight years ago the 30-something South African chose to make a home in Verdun, as close to the water as possible, in which you can often find him.

Addison is a world-class freestyle kayaker, an audacious outdoorsman who’s been called the Dennis Rodman of kayaking more than once, something to do with his brash personality and the tattoo emblazoned on his chest. “I drowned when I was 16,” he says. “It was in a certain kind of wave that exists—there’s a lot of them in the Lachine rapids, actually—called a recycling hole. If you get sucked into one of those, you can go ’round and ’round till you drown. And I literally drowned and was given CPR, so this tattoo is basically a dead me climbing out of the hole.”

As such, Addison doesn’t recommend riding the Lachine rapids on a surfboard. But he does call the stretch of St. Lawrence near Habitat ’67 “one of the best waves in the world.”

There are no tubes, the fresh (can we call it that?) water makes boards less buoyant, and then there’s the mystery of how one rides a river, but therein lies the appeal you won’t find in the sea. “It’s one of these things that’s pretty hard for people—especially people who board surf in the ocean—to figure out,” Addison says. “You don’t just dive in and swim out to the wave. You have to learn to read white water, learn to read rapids. You basically dive in above the wave, swim out to the rapid, you then get washed down the river toward the wave, turn like hell onto the wave, do your surf, and when you’re done surfing, you come off the wave and into the rapid, going downstream, and you gotta then swim to the side—before you get carried over or something.”

Christened on board about six years ago by Addison, the St. Lawrence is home to an ever-growing number of river surfers (about 30 last Sunday) who share the water with longer-standing kayakers. As anybody who’s bobbed in crowded breaks will know, there’s a pecking order and surfers ride on top.

“It’s not that they’re higher on the pecking order,” Addison corrects, “it’s that they think they’re higher on the pecking order. Basically, surfers are snobs and a lot of the time they have a real localist attitude. Here, that attitude isn’t tolerated on either side. If anybody trips up, you know, if a surfer has anything to say about a kayaker or vice versa, they’ll get gang raped so fast and thrown out of there. This is for everybody. We all deserve to be here.”

Though it sounds intimidating at first, Addison insists that river surfing is an accessible sport with the right introduction, which he gives. “You don’t need to be young and you don’t need to be a super athlete, but you need to be a decent swimmer. You need to not be scared of water. You’re gonna be in water and, what’s the English word for brassé? You’re gonna be thrown around out there.

“Imagine, as an ocean surfer, that the river is one giant rip tide, and when you’re in that thing, boy, you’re going. And if you don’t know how to swim out of a rip, you’re pretty screwed. You have to know what you’re in, what its boundaries are and how to get out of it.”

So riding a rip is better than a great big salty break? “Well, what’s better, a martini or a good wine?” Addison points out. “They’re both pretty good to me.”

CORRAN ADDISON’S RIVER SURFING LESSONS ARE AVAILABLE FOR BEGNNER AND INTERMEDIATE LEVELS, $200 FOR A TWO-DAY SESSION (INCLUDING board and life jacket RENTALS). FOR INFO, CALL SURF 66 BOARDSHOP AT 697-0366, E-MAIL INFO@SURF66.COM OR VISIT ADDISON’S SITE, WWW.2IMAGINE.NET