Luke Gartside

When I first ran into Aussie charger Harry Bryant on a muddy track in North Cornwall, he looked relieved to be taking in a lungful of fresh air.

He’d just touched down, hot on the heels of a mad week on the continent. It began over in Ireland, surfing the big Paddy’s Day swell, then out in Dublin for the final of the Six Nations, which Ireland won of course, sending the whole city into a jubilant frenzy. Then, a quick hop to Amsterdam for a few days exploring with a couple of Aussie mates. 

When they flew home, he decided to come to Cornwall to enjoy a bit of downtime and hang out with his grandparents. But the local crew here had other plans for him. After a flurry of IG messages and dropped pins, he was whisked off for a whirlwind tour of the county's premier coves and watering holes. 

By the time the week was up, he’d consumed a solid haul of mussels overlooking Cornwall’s most historic harbour, sank several pints of Guinness in each of the Badlands' most iconic pubs and packed a substantial tube or two beneath our coast’s most dramatic cliffs. 

The day before he flew out, I caught up with him for a coffee and a meandering reflection on his accidental Cornish surf trip, beginning with the question asked by every puzzled local he encountered along the way: “What on earth brings you here?”

“My mum grew up in Padstow and her parents still live there,” he told me. “She actually met my dad on the beach at Booby’s Bay.” It was the mid-1980s and Brett Bryant had come over from Sydney with a borrowed bronze medallion to do a lifeguard season. After they got together, the family bounced between Britain and Australia, with Harry spending his first few years of school at Padstow Primary. “I think I started getting into indoor soccer and my dad was like, “That’s it, we’re going back to Australia!” he laughs. Soon after, the family settled on the Sunshine Coast, trading frigid, stormy seas for the crystal peelers of Noosa National Park.

“I always knew that I’d come back and reconnect with Cornwall,” says Harry, ”but I never thought that I was going to score waves here as well. That’s what’s made this week really special – surfing all day then coming back for a roast dinner with my grandparents.”

Throughout his stay, he’s heartily embraced the classic Cornish goose chase, racking up hundreds of pasty-fuelled miles checking spots from Bude to Land’s End. 

“It’s pretty funny because I’ve been borrowing my nan's car,” he explains, “I took it one morning and was like, ‘I'm just going to go check the surf nanna, I’ll be back in a bit’ and I came back three days later! She was tripping!”

“It’s been sick to drive around, check a load of different waves and meet a heap of crew,” he continues. “It seems like the surf culture is really rich here. So many people have been messaging me and asking me to come over for this and that. It’s been cool to go to all these little villages and surf towns and see how stoked everyone is.” 

The day before we caught up, I’d coaxed Harry up to North Cornwall to check a left that I hoped would be pumping. It wasn’t. And the weather was even worse than the waves. But he took it in his stride, just stoked to bear witness to what he later dubbed a “pretty core surf check”. 

“It was pouring with rain and freezing cold and everyone was kinda sitting around shivering getting soaked just waiting for the waves to turn on,” he says. “It makes you appreciate how easy we have it in Australia. Here you’ve got a super short window and you’ve got to be on it.”

Earlier in the week, an equally optimistic call saw us decant to St Agnes, where we were greeted by very Cornish waves spilling into Trevaunance Cove. 

“That was a pretty funny session,” says Harry. “I was surfing with Harry Timson and the day before he’d put up an Insta story and heaps of kids messaged him like, ‘Where are you guys surfing today?’ We were checking it and there were two guys in the water and we paddled out and instantly there were like 25 kids surrounding me, I couldn’t even get a wave out there!” 

Watching from the rocks, I particularly enjoyed seeing Harry get tangled up on the inside with a guy on a Drag soft top. Based on the kid's expression, I reckon he’ll be telling that story for years. When, after the surf, local Markie Lascelles took us up the hill to the Driftwood Spars, Harry looked almost as excited. 

“That's probably the best pub I’ve ever been in!” he says. “The fire was on and Markie was telling us all these stories about how Queen and Rod Stewart both played there on the same weekend. And he showed us where they’ve still got one of the old mine shafts in the wall.” 

Living around here, it’s easy to take afternoons like that for granted. But having an excitable Aussie to show around certainly helps bring into focus the things that make the Cornish surf experience unique. 

“I love how everyone here’s really clued up on the history of their towns,” says Harry. “Lots of the crew I’ve been surfing with would just sit and tell me all about the place. It’s nice that people really care and are keen to share it with people who are blowing in and out.”

The county’s tangible sense of history was something Harry found himself drawn to even as a kid. “I was obsessed with all the castles and I still kinda am,” he says. “There’s just something about them that I love so much.”

“When I was young I used to get my grandparents to take me all over Cornwall to visit them. St Micheals's Mount was my favourite along with King Arthur’s in Tintagel and a few further down the coast as well. I actually had my seventh birthday in one. 

My mum and dad went in there and said ‘My son loves it here so much, do you think we’d be able to set up down on the grass and have a birthday party?’ And they ended up letting us use the whole castle for the day.” 

It’s not just inanimate links to the past that have enriched his time in Cornwall either. On his last visit, he got to experience the ‘Obby ‘Oss event in Padstow – one of the oldest surviving festivals in the UK. The day sees a pair of men dressed as giant hobby horses lead a procession from either end of the town. Each is trailed by hundreds of stick-wielding dancers, drummers, accordion players and revellers. At midnight, the two sides meet in the town centre. 

“It was pretty insane,” remembers Harry. “My mum had always told me that if anyone in the village has any beef they settle it that night. She said, ‘If you’re not from the village, make sure you don’t pick a side. Just go and dress normally and don’t rev anyone up because they take it really seriously.’ Being from Australia I’m such a smart ass and I love the whole pub culture,” he laughs, “so I love revving people up.”

For the proceedings, Harry was adopted by famous local restauranters Rick and Jack Stein, who are old friends of the family.

“My parents actually managed Rick’s seafood restaurant back in the day,” says Harry. “Jack was cruising around with a backpack full of ciders. It was a full-blown piss-up.” This year walking around Padstow Harry says numerous people have come up and told him they met at the event, to which he’s always forced to reply: ‘Sorry mate, I have no recollection!”

He didn’t surf much on that trip, save for a few sessions at wobbly Constantine, but it definitely stoked his desire to come back and explore more of the place. 

“It was sick to check out the beach where my mum and dad met,” he says. “There’s some rocks out there called the Quies that my dad used to swim around in the winter with the other lifeguards as training. He always used to tell me about it, but going there and seeing how far away they are and how cold the water is was pretty amazing.”

Not to be outdone by his dad, Harry was deadset on getting in the sea sans-wetsuit as often as possible on this trip and even managed a few waves in boardies at Porthtowan, much to the delight of the local crew assembled at the Blue Bar, who plied him with congratulatory whisky upon completion. He says this hereditary preference for the cold is one of the main things that drew him to surf trips on this side of the world and particularly to Ireland. But after his first trip there, he realised his affinity for the people was just as strong as it was for the climate and the waves. I remember reading somewhere that a lot of the convicts the English shipped over to Australia in the 1800s came from Ireland, so it’s likely they played a role in forming Aussie culture as we know it. When I put this to Harry, it seemed to ring true. 

“That’s why I reckon we get on so well,” he agreed. “We’ve got a real similar sense of humour and pub culture. We kind of understand each other.”

“There’s a lot of places that I go, like America for example,” he continues, “where you can go to a pub, crack a joke and it’s like you’re talking Korean. But I could literally walk into any pub around Ireland, or England for that matter, and sit around at a table and have yarns and leave knowing everyone.” 

After a weekend doing plenty of that in St Agnes, Harry ended up at the Cord Surfboards factory, where Markie offered to shape him a new sled for a last day air session and to keep at his grandparents’ place for any future missions. Before that, Harry had conducted his whole Cornish surf adventure with a one-board quiver: a 7’1 orange quad, made by his good mate Josh Keogh.

“I’ve really built up this relationship with it over the last few years, where I feel super comfortable and it kind of works in all conditions,” he explains. “So when I knew I was only going to bring one board over here, it had to be that one.”

Paddling out one sunny morning at Cornwall’s premier reef break, his intuition was confirmed. 

“From the very first wave I got, I knew any other board I could have brought wouldn’t have handled the conditions,” he says, “and it was the absolute perfect board for the day.”

“It’s quite an amazing feeling being in the water and knowing that you’re in the exact right place at the right time on the right piece of equipment. I’ve had a lot of moments like that this week, just driving up and down the coast, where I felt like I wouldn't really want to be anywhere else in the world.”