But for how much longer? Starting this year, professional surfers are to be drugs-tested before major competitions, thanks to regulations announced in November by the sport's governing body, the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP). For some, this move sounds the death-knell for a pastime that, according to cliche, has long been associated with the underground.
"Part of its appeal is that it is counter-cultural, marginal and in some way subversive and that's where the association with drugs comes in, whether real or mythic," Andy Martin, author of surf book Stealing the Wave, told the Guardian recently. "But the commercial imperatives require [surfers] to be straight. How mainstream can surfing be before losing its soul?"
It's this question that I'm trying to find answers to, this windy morning in Newquay. But for most of the surfers I speak to, the answer is fairly simple. The more mainstream, the better. Max Hepworth-Povey, 27, a local boy who runs a surf school called Errant, thinks the sport's rise in respectability will bring him more students.
"I see this as a massively positive thing," agrees Corinne Evans, a 23-year-old who hosts introductory surf sessions for kids in the summer, and models surf equipment in the winter. "The more seriously the sport takes itself, the more companies will be willing to invest, and the faster the sport will grow. This has been a long time coming." Sipping on a suitably soft orange juice in a bar called Belushi's, Evans thinks it is time to shed surfing's druggy stereotype once and for all. "People think we're all layabouts who get high the whole time. But the vast majority of us just enjoy the healthy lifestyle that comes with the sport."
Alan Stokes, one of just half-a-dozen Britons who make their living from competitive surfing, concurs. "British surf culture is pretty clean," he says, shortly before leaving for a tournament in Nicaragua. "People here just want a natural high."
But worldwide, that hasn't always been the case. As recently as 2000, marijuana allegedly played a large role in the Hawaiian surf community, according to Martin, who lived on the island at the time. "There was a view in Hawaii that marijuana smoking in particular was actually good for surfing because you increase your lung capacity with all that drawing in of the smoke," he claims. "The more marijuana, the better the surfer."
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