Hi-Land Fling: Dreaming big pays off at Lost Shore’s first pro surf contest

There’s something a little bit Field of Dreams about the Lost Shore surf park at Ratho, just outside Edinburgh. In the 1989 movie, Kevin Costner’s character Ray, a hard-up Iowa farmer, makes an apparently eccentric decision to turn one of his corn fields into a baseball diamond. Some question his logic, particularly when it starts to seem as if he might lose his farm, but his faith in the idea is validated when a posse of old-time baseball legends magically materialises and starts playing baseball on it, drawing spectators from miles around.

Lauren Sandland, on her way to winning the Hi-Land Fling at Lost Shore | Alex Jeynes Photography/ https://www.instagram.com/alexjeynesphotography/

In a similar vein, Andy Hadden’s decision to transform a disused quarry into Europe’s biggest inland surf resort may have left a few people outwith the surfing world scratching their heads when it opened last year, but it paid off in true Field of Dreams style this week, as some of the most progressive young surfers in the world arrived in town to take part in a new surf contest, the Hi-Land Fling Pro Surfing Invitational.

Among the top-drawer wave-sliders strutting their stuff in the pool on Monday and Tuesday were Arianne Torres, Lauren Sandland and Georgie-May Hicks, former Spanish Open, British Open and English U18 champions respectively, plus seven-time Irish champ Gearóid McDaid, former French surf champ Nicolas Paulet and US surfer Hunter Jones, whose aquatic abilities have seen him work as a surfing stunt double for the Netflix series Outerbanks. Also on the very exclusive 20-person guestlist: reigning Scottish champions Craig McLachlan and Phoebe Strachan, both already well acquainted with the perfectly sculpted contours of the various Lost Shore wave settings and looking to maximise their home advantage.

Hunter Jones, competing at the Hi-Land Fling at Lost Shore | Alex Jeynes Photography/ https://www.instagram.com/alexjeynesphotography/

The goal of the contest, according to Lost Shore’s surf and hospitality director Lee Wood, was to create something “to show just how far surfing can be pushed in our waves.” Rather than the usual format of a knockout contest, then, with two or three surfers going head-to-head in each heat, an innovative leaderboard format was devised which saw each athlete ride 16 waves in Round One, with the top-scoring six men and top scoring six women progressing to the finals.

Checking out the action at the Hi-Land Fling | Alex Jeynes Photography

What that meant in practice was that rather than playing safe in the early stages, competitors had to bust out their best moves from the get-go or risk not making the last six. McLachlan, originally from Thurso and now a surf coach at Lost Shore, showed the others how it was done, booking his place in the final by pulling off a dramatic one-two punch of tricky tube-ride followed by technical air to score a near-perfect 9.33 out of a possible ten.

Scottish surfing champion Craig McLachlan, deep in the barrel at the Hi-Land Fling | Alex Jeynes Photography/ https://www.instagram.com/alexjeynesphotography/

In the finals, competitors surfed four different wave types – barrelling waves breaking left and right and turns waves breaking left and right – with their best wave score from each wave type added together to make an overall total. It wasn’t enough to just be a world-beater in right-hand barrels then – in order to win the Hi-Land Fling, you needed to be able to do everything well.

In the men’s final, there were only a couple of points separating Paulet and Conor Donegan dos Santos of Ireland by the end. Paulet actually bagged the highest men’s right-hand barrel score of the day with an 8.77, but Donegan did marginally better on the turns waves, then put things beyond doubt with a 9.67 on a left-hand barrel to clinch the win. McDaid and McLachlan finished third and fourth respectively.

Hi-Land Fling men's winner Conor Donegan dos Santos | Alex Jeynes Photography/ https://www.instagram.com/alexjeynesphotography/

In the women’s final, meanwhile, Sandland also left it late to defeat Hicks and Torres, posting an 8.97 on her final wave of the day, a barrelling right. “I enjoyed this event so much,” Sandland said afterwards. “I’m so happy to have won it on the last wave, too. It was really tight in the finals, so to get my best score at the very end was really special.”

What did she think of the format? “I definitely enjoyed it. It’s a lot easier than in the ocean as you’re not competing against other surfers trying to find and surf the best wave. Every wave is perfect which makes it so much fun as you can be more creative – try different manoeuvres or find a new line on the wave.”

Lauren Sandland at the Hi-Land Fling | Alex Jeynes Photography/ https://www.instagram.com/alexjeynesphotography/

That sense of creative opportunity – thanks to a format that encourages experimentation – is perhaps the key to the High-Land Fling’s success. That said of course, a surf contest in a wave pool can only ever be as good as the waves on offer, and the exceptional quality of the waves at Lost Shore clearly doesn’t hurt. By way of contrast, consider veteran surf scribe Matt Warshaw’s report for Surfer magazine on World Inland Surfing Championships in Allentown, Pennsylvania, back in 1985, which saw some of the biggest names in surfing, including world champions Tom Curren and Tom Carrol, grovelling around in knee-high chop in what was then considered a state-of-the-art facility.

Lost Shore overview | Alex Jeynes Photography/ https://www.instagram.com/alexjeynesphotography/

“Each wave was a tissue-weak replica of the wave before it,” Warshaw writes. “Pulsing forth out of a long metal grill at the end of the pool, 15 to a set, one wave every 2.5 seconds... Everybody rode exactly 10 waves per heat. Went frontside only. Two-paddle takeoff, a quick hit off the top, a second weaker hit, then grovel toward the shallow end. That was it; no other performance options were available. Sure, we laughed it off [but] really the whole thing was sad and demeaning. Everybody lost.”

Clearly, wave pool surf contests have come a long way in 40 years - and the next chapter of the story is now being written at Lost Shore.

For more on Lost Shore, see www.lostshore.com