Sam Bleakley
We spoke to former European Longboard Champion and Surfing Brilliant Corners presenter, Sam Bleakley, about his vast experience in the surf world and empowering communities by sharing their stories.
Growing up in Cornwall
My dad grew up surfing in the 60s in Newquay and just got me into it when I was small, so I was always in the water. I just always surfed and it was very normal. I took the risk of getting more into longboarding in the early 90s when the longboard renaissance was happening and there weren't many young people longboarding.
There were good quality modern longboards around and I connected well with that. It was much more natural to me as a tall guy and I really loved nose riding. I didn't plan to have a career in surfing. It has always been in my life but at the same time, I've always been driven by what's happening beyond surfing.
I started competing probably when I was about 11, doing shortboard contests at first then switching to longboarding where I started to have some success at local events. I was already competing and had sponsorships before I went to university. Those sponsorships were kind of free wetsuits and subsidised surfboards and a few free clothes.
Then in the summer between my first and second year at university I won a British and European title and came fourth in a world tour event and the French company Oxbow were looking for a new team of riders. I happened to be in the right place at the right time to be asked to join that team.
Oxbow were big supporters of longboarding through the 80s, 90s, and into about 2010. That involved a salaried sponsorship where I was having a monthly paycheck. That was when I thought I could really make a career out of surfing.
Surfing Brilliant Corners
The idea emerged originally when I was graduating from university. I was doing a geography degree at Cambridge and at that time I was doing a lot of competitions.
I got very friendly with a travel photographer called John Callahan, and he was very interested in a lot of exploratory work. Between the late 90s and 2010, the magazine industry was very vibrant. You didn't have to depend on the American or Australian publications. You could get a lot of work with the British publications, the Japanese, Spanish, French, and Portuguese ones too.
We really specialised in publishing in those particularly and they were well paid. They were fuelling my surfing career more so than competition success, even though I was very prevalent at the longboard competitions, often working at them as well as competing in them.
So I had this role as a professional being photographed, but also a writer publishing work. Just by having that outlet, I was able to explore lots of metaphors in writing and one that I got interested in was music and surfing. That went in the direction of jazz music and surfing.
There's a famous 50s jazz album by Thelonious Monk called Brilliant Corners, and I'd written a few articles about longboarding and music under the idea of that Brilliant Corners album, which was a really complicated avant-garde album.
It's very difficult to listen to but it's very interesting because it's so complicated. It seems to be a nice symbol for being original. So when I made my first book I called it Surfing Brilliant Corners.
By about 2010-12 the magazine publishing industry was slowing down quite a lot, I was getting more into academia. I was doing a Ph.D. and considering working as a lecturer, which I do a little bit at Falmouth University.
By that time, I thought it would be interesting to explore some of the writing I'd done but in a more visual medium. So I made a film with a research grant from Falmouth University in Haiti and called it Brilliant Corners Haiti.
My motivation for making the films is never to sell somewhere. It's not about marketing for places. It's just about giving a voice to the emerging surf communities that don't normally have a voice in the surf media.
I think that they form the kind of stories that you want the local communities to be proud of because perhaps the type of narratives that get shared in their places aren't always so celebratory. For example, somewhere like Haiti generally does not get strong narratives being shared in popular media. It's mostly negative news about political situations or environmental disasters.
Between about 2012-14, I made five films without really much certainty of what I was doing or why but I managed to pull together budgets from either academic grants or surf brands. I made a film on Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados, Liberia, and China and then edited them together with a local editor and got a French company called Extreme Video to distribute them.
I then used that portfolio to get a producer to do another series that was funded by The Wave in Bristol. Those shows were on Sierra Leone, Oman, Ghana, Mauritania, and the Philippines and were distributed to TV. I learned a lot more working on those ones and developed quite a good network of cameramen and women and people to do that kind of work with.
Then the WSL approached me to produce it, of which we did shows in Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, India, Senegal, Algeria, and Zanzibar. And those ones have been free to view.
I probably would have been thinking I'd be doing that for a few more years. I was still in a contract with the World Surf League to do four more locations. Unfortunately, they pulled the plug on the financing due to the financial difficulties they were having with covid. So at the moment, I'm looking to find a new producer for the films.
I made touch with the Faroe Islands surfers last year, it was actually the next place we had lined up for Brilliant Corners. It’s really just a wonderful grassroots story to share. I'm used to surfing in the cold, but all of my Brilliant Corners films have always been in warmer climates, so I was looking forward to making a film up there. The Faroe Islands is a wonderful place to really celebrate a grassroots cold water surf community.
Telling stories that don’t get told
It’s been a self-taught process, I've got no training as a director or presenter or an editor; I've been learning a lot by doing them.
If you're a longboarder, you're already on a more marginal edge of surfing, which I appreciate, and then if you're British or European, you're even more marginalised. So I've kind of always thrived on the creative edge of surfing and not necessarily depending on the mainstream point of view, which is perhaps what's happening in Indonesia, Australia, Hawaii, and America.
My drive has always been as an outsider: “how can I thrive with my outsider status?”. I’ve found a lot more affinity with meeting Asian and African surf communities than I did spending time in Australia, California, or Indonesia where surfing is already very well documented and brilliantly celebrated in our films and our books and magazines.
Having been a geography-educated person who knew all about the ills of imperialism and colonialism, it was always about diversity and giving voice to women and celebrating the average-joe surfer and the average-joe educated person.
It's not about the best surfers in the best waves. It's about real people for whom surfing plays a role in their lives, so they don't have to be amazing at surfing. But it's also about street-level wisdom. A lot of the things that, as a traveler, you learn on the street level are from people who have very normal lives.
Travel should be responsible, light-footed, and be about supporting local people, doing locally-driven endeavours. The stories being told are intended to be celebratory stories, in art, music, and sustainable tourism, and to tell stories from communities that don’t normally get told.
It is still a small thing, and has never made me much money or bought me much fame. But I'm proud of my body of work and I've felt a lot of pride from hearing from the Algerians, Mauritanians, Ghanaians, etc. who say “I love the film” and thank you for giving them a voice in that way.
Cultural connections through waves
It can be very intimidating to find a way into places when you’re from completely different cultures, but through a shared activity, whether it's dance music, art, or surfing, you can learn through the same interests.
I learned about China through meeting Chinese surfers who were bilingual and open to an international perspective. They are the ones who taught me about Chinese food and history.
I first went to China in 2001 and then I went a lot between 2010 and 2014, which was quite a special time in the very early days of the Hainan surf scene.
It was a lovely time of which Monica Guo and Darcy Liu were very central to it all. They were really great and powerful emblems of what surf culture can do in communities.
It's the best feeling, a form of language without the need for words, when you get to share sea time with people. No matter what people's level is, being in the water together is an immediate way of sharing an experience.
Here in Cornwall, and in places like Hawaii, surfing is so big and busy, it’s easy to forget what it all means because everybody is surfing. But when you meet a group of emerging surfers you really are reminded of how much it means to them and how it gives a sense of pride and identity.
I like getting myself into those situations to see what grassroots surfing means. And there are a lot of fantastic grassroots scenes around the world. If you want the best waves, it's hard to find that. But if you are happy to look for the best experiences, there's a lot of really interesting places that you can go to have that from Oman to Norway.
I think a lot of people should really appreciate that. They don't necessarily need to be in quality waves.
I think that’s what really drives Nick Hounsfield and his team at The Wave, the way in which they can offer more inclusivity for surfing. As much as there's an element of high-performance surfing that you will always be able to get with those types of venues, I think it’s about the emerging communities and adaptive surfers in particular.
Great women longboarders
I love the performative side of longboarding, particularly the role that women longboarders play in surfing. It is a heavily overlooked aspect of surfing, that's not embraced as much as it should be, and I think it's a big missed opportunity by the governing bodies and brands missing the fact that some of the most beautiful performances in surfing are happening with women on longboards.
It's a joy to watch the style and the flow of women riding longboard waves like Noosa and Malibu, and it’s a very relatable type of surfing. It is spectacular to watch people riding heavy barrels, but only a small portion of people will ever do that type of surfing. I'm all for women surfers taking over the surf industry.
The energy you see when my daughter Lola and her friends are out, not trying to combat or attack the waves, but just surfing with them, is just really exciting and beautiful. It opens up all kinds of things, not just the spiritual and the mindfulness parts of surfing, but all the creative side of it, the links to music and art, and the environmental sustenance that we need.
That's why I like staying involved in surf competitions as a commentator for the WSL and ISA to be able to kind of be a spokesperson for the great women's longboarding that's happening. And of course, there's still plenty of good men's longboarding happening too.
Home & Abroad
You know, I never have considered leaving Cornwall to live elsewhere, it's so nice because we’ve got a view of the sea and we live near the beach. I'm hardcore born and raised locally, but I've always been very international in my perspective.
Being on the edge of Cornwall, I had to look out to the world. I've been very much a local / global person. I love the local community here. But at the same time, I'm very much connected to a global community.
I think if I didn't live in Cornwall, I would probably quite like Haiti. Sounds mad, but it would be an interesting place to live.
There are plenty of places I would still love to travel to like The Faroe Islands, to revisit South Korea, go to Mozambique, Angola. And as much as it sounds dangerous, I'd really love to go to Somalia and Libya. I'm very drawn to Africa!
