A look back: Gallery highlights...Sun, surf, and tanned bodies on white sand beaches, as boards carve the waves...
Maybe, but if you go to Gower, Aberavan, Llangennith or Fresh West on a wet - or dry - day there may be a total absence of the sun, tanned bodies or white sand...
But what there will be are Surfers!
The sport - or just the past-time for the more laid back of the wave riders - may have originated in more tropical climes, and may have been popularised by pictures of Hawaii or Bondi Beach and the surfing music of the 'sixties and well beyond, but it flourished here in Wales... despite the often rotten weather.
Cornwall perhaps led in opening up surfing onto UK shores, the first board coming there in the late 1930's, but it did not take long for it to round the headland at Lands End, and wave riding to arrive in Wales.
The Surfs Up exhibition comes to Swansea as a partnership between Renaissance Southwest, Exeter Museum and the Heritage Lottery Fund, and tells the story of the way Surfing "rose from the depths, seized the imagination of new generations, and grew and emerged, not only as a powerful attraction, but as a major industry."
Around the walls of the exhibition pictures are featured showing the history of the great, the good, and the characters that have made Welsh surfers known, not only throughout this country, but throughout the world!
Welsh wizards emerged from the tumbling waves, some going on to greatness in the new era of "professional" surfing, competing all around the world, some content to become great exponents of the art away from the gaze of crowds and media, some to become involved in the industry that surfing spawned...the fashion, the creation of the boards themselves... but above all... to ride the waves.
Included are the pioneers from the 1950s and 60s, the championship surfers that took up the challenge through seventies and eighties, and also the young surfers who now rule the waves in Wales and beyond.
The Surf's Up exhibition was at the Swansea Museum until the end of April 2006.
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