Check out this insane clip of Jeb Corliss!

Welcome to Coasteering.org. This site is designed to give general information relating to coasteering and the International Coasteering Association (ICA). It will also help you book your first coasteering session in the UK.

What is coasteering?

Coasteering is a mixture of swimming, climbing, scrambling, and traversing the coastline. When it is safe to do so coasteering also allows you to jump into the sea from height. You can explore areas of the coast that you would never normally see. Coasteering is ideally a group activity that allows you to have fun with friends, family or corporate colleagues. If you wish to book your first Coasteering session/lesson contact us.

EBO is a well established international adventure training company that specialises in many extreme sports as well as Coasteering. It has become one of the UKs leading Coasteering providers offering coasteering in Newquay Cornwall, North and South Devon, Wales and Scotland.

What is the International Coasteering Association?

As Coasteering has developed EBO and our international partners have decided to launch a forum for like-minded individuals and companies who want to improve Coasteering internationally. This forum is called the International Coasteering Association and is available to anyone who is involved in the sport. It is not a regulatory body and does not cost anything to join, it is also non profit making. The ICA was created to increase the safety, environmental and developmental aspects of Coasteering.

If you undertake a coasteering course with us you will automatically be eligible to become a full ICA member.

EBO and our partners in Switzerland, Thailand and the UK are working together to improve the profile of coasteering. Coasteering is becoming international in its scope and there are established routes from the UK to the USA as well as Asia.

ICA has been established as a focal point to discuss Coasteering problems as well as new developments.

The K38 UK Rescue Boat Operator course develops basic operator skills to safely operate a PWC in an ocean environment. This tiered training program has specific learning outcomes that must be achieved before students can progress to the next skill sets. Designed for rescue professionals and those who utilise PWC for patrol and safety in a marine environment students are taught to operate PWC’s in a controlled and disciplined manor. This 3 day course, with optional night operations will show students how to technically operate a PWC in the toughest of marine environments, perform rescues as single operator or with a rescuer on conscious, unconscious and with multiple casualties.

Whilst there are surf training elements this is not simply a surf rescue course and covers the basic elements needed to safely patrol and perform rescues with a PWC and rescue board. Training in the surf environment develops operator skills and prepares operator ability for real life rescue situations.

Training incorporates hands-on training with multiple skill stations, mock rescue drills and rescue board techniques, as well as downed PWC retrievals, boat maintenance, troubleshooting and considerations for implementing a successful PWC program. The course provides many rescue evaluations from actual incidents, video, extensive workbook information, technical boat handling skills, boat/oil/fuel and necessary gear associated with the instructional overview, with the exception of mandatory personal gear. Students will receive a workbook, tests, homework, skill sheets and a certificate upon satisfactory completion.

'This is an extremely physically demanding course:' students must be in excellent physical condition and be competent ocean swimmers with good knowledge of surf conditions and ocean dynamics K38 UK is the only licensed operator permitted to deliver K38 Water Safety courses in the UK and Ireland. Ben Granata of K38 UK is the only Instructor who is certified by K38 Water Safety Shawn Alladio to teach in the UK and Ireland. (If in any doubt please contact Shawn Alladio http://www.shawnalladio.com)

K38 Swiftwater Rescue Operator

Personal Watercraft are an invaluable tool in Swiftwater and flood rescue scenarios as shown by Shawn Alladio (Higgins and Langley award winner)in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The K38 Swiftwater Rescue course builds an operators technical handling skills in a moving water environment. This is an extremely physically demanding course:' students must be in excellent physical condition and be competent swimmers with good knowledge of river conditions and river rescue dynamics.

For more information regarding the K38 UK Swiftwater training please contact us.

K38 UK is the only licensed operator permitted to deliver K38 Water Safety courses in the UK and Ireland. Ben Granata of K38 UK is the only Instructor who is certified by K38 Water Safety Shawn Alladio to teach in the UK and Ireland. (If in any doubt please contact Shawn Alladio http://www.shawnalladio.com)

K38 Tow Surf Operator

This 3 day intense course teaches students the fundamental rescue drills required to operate in heavy surf conditions. Students learn the basic technical operator skills needed to operate in the surf impact zone and how to perform conscious and unconscious rescue techniques. The classroom session shows students how to modify their PWC’s for surf operation and what safety equipment should be carried. Students are not shown how to tow surf! Students must have a high level of surfing ability and experience in large wave environment.

"Cotty and I have just completed the K38 Tow Surf Operator Course.  We have been towing together for a couple of years and since Ben became qualified we have been keen to do the course to see what we could learn.  Turns out we learnt loads.  We were especially interested in unconscious pickups and the course teaches some good, fast and effective techniques of doing so, as well as a variety of other drills and procedures.  We spent a day learning everything on flat water and then another day doing it in the surf.  We learnt some good techniques of handling the ski in the surf line and manoeuvring through white water at speed.  We learnt the importance of communication and awareness and that discipline is needed to perfect the use of pwc's in the surf.  Ben is a very well spoken instructor and did an excellent job of passing on the information and knowledge to us.  The whole course was relevant to any tow team and it is great that Ben has taken on the knowledge used across the world and is now able to pass it on to surfers in this part of the world.  To sum up I would say the K38 Tow Surf Operator Course is essential for any serious tow team.  After the course I felt much more confident on the ski and in our teams ability as a whole." Alistair Mennie

K38 UK is the only licensed operator permitted to deleiver K38 Water Safety courses in the UK and Ireland. Ben Granata of K38 UK is the only Instructor who is certified by K38 Water Safety Shawn Alladio to teach in the UK and Ireland. (If in any doubt please contact Shawn Alladio http://www.shawnalladio.com)

Extreme kayakers have been condemned for canoeing down a dam in west Wales.

A photographer captured the latest incident as one canoeist slid 300ft down the spillway at Llyn Brianne reservoir in Carmarthenshire, near the borders of Ceredigion and Powys.

Welsh Water said the practice was dangerous and such activities were banned at the reservoir.

An onlooker said: "I always stop and look anyway and I saw four people ready to do the spillway.

"There were a lot of people watching at the top car park.

"It looked pretty scary."

Llyn Brianne was completed in 1972 and supplies drinking water to a large part of south Wales.

The reservoir is up to 272 ft (83m) deep and holds more than 13 billion gallons (60 billion litres) of water.

A statement from Welsh Water, the owner of the site, said it "strictly forbids" water-based activities at the reservoir and would take "appropriate action" against anyone in breach of this restriction.

"Reservoirs can be dangerous for various reasons and those involved in water sports in inappropriate locations, such as at Llyn Brianne, put themselves and others at unnecessary risk," said a spokesman.

Richard Harvey from the Welsh Canoeing Association said he could not comment on the group involved, the locality or the legality of their activity but he did say he was aware the slipway had been used by kayakers for about 20 years.

"We encourage people to paddle responsibly and in the realm of the law," he said.

"It's very important that kayaking is done at no risk to other people or the environment and that a detailed risk assessment is made before taking to the water.

"Enthusiasts also have to be aware of the law and the possible legal restrictions relating to a particular stretch of water.

"If they go too far we do not condone it."

The Tiree Wave Classic is the most prestigious and longest standing windsurfing event on the British calender, this year celebrating its 25th Anniversary and looking back over the event's history.

From the 8th -14th of October the event will play host to Britain's best riders in Pro, Amateur, Masters and Women's fleets with a fantastic prize fund guaranteeing the top Pro £1000 and as well as many other top prizes for the other fleets! It is set to be an unmissable, adrenaline fuelled week of competition and entertainment set against the breathtaking backdrop of Tiree's spectacular scenery. Who will pull the Scottish Broadsword from the sand?

The event will be funded by Event Scotand in association with Argyll & Bute Council so a big thank you for their continued support along with event hosts Pura Vida Boardriders. The event would also not be possible without the organisation and help from the British Wavesailing Association.

The Tiree Wave Classic is the most prestigious and longest standing windsurfing event on the British calender, this year celebrating its 25th Anniversary and looking back over the event's history.

From the 8th -14th of October the event will play host to Britain's best riders in Pro, Amateur, Masters and Women's fleets with a fantastic prize fund guaranteeing the top Pro £1000 and as well as many other top prizes for the other fleets! It is set to be an unmissable, adrenaline fuelled week of competition and entertainment set against the breathtaking backdrop of Tiree's spectacular scenery. Who will pull the Scottish Broadsword from the sand?

The event will be funded by Event Scotand in association with Argyll & Bute Council so a big thank you for their continued support along with event hosts Pura Vida Boardriders. The event would also not be possible without the organisation and help from the British Wavesailing Association.

A surfer’s relentless dedication to his sport is a puzzling thing for those of us who haven’t ever hung ten on a surfboard. What value, we may ask ourselves, does it have beyond personal pleasure? What drives so many surfers to shrug off conventional notions of adulthood in exchange for the promise of the ultimate “stoke”? And why does this single ambition so often produce the kind of UV-induced superficiality that has become the surfer’s archetype, parodied by dozens of Hollywood films, from Endless Summer to Point Break?

No wonder it’s difficult to believe that surfing has much spiritual currency beyond its notoriously insular subculture. But ask surfers themselves, or any of the other multitudes of “extreme sports” participants, and they’ll likely say something entirely different. Indeed, after riding thirty-foot waves or running marathons in the desert, climbing cliff faces without ropes or dropping out of helicopters to snowboard remote mountain peaks, people often claim that they’ve experienced nothing less than the timeless transcendent dimension of life. And this raises an interesting question: Are extreme sports merely satisfying a junkie’s need for adrenaline, as many of us are apt to think, or have they become a kind of modern-day crucible of the sacred?

One hypothesis is that of French “body anthropologist” David Le Breton, who believes that the “physical limit has come to replace the moral limit that present-day society no longer provides.” On this subject, Le Breton writes, “In a society where reference points are both countless and contradictory and where values are in crisis, people are seeking, through a radical one-to-one contest, to test their strength of character, their courage, and their personal resources.” The result, he concludes, is that today, it is in the realm of extreme physical pursuits that “sacred experiences . . . are abundant.”

If this theory is accurate, it supports what big wave surfers have been saying for over fifty years: that in going beyond limits to conquer the Goliaths of the ocean—waves of indescribable proportions in unimaginable breaks far from the shores we normally inhabit—they uncover the spiritual dimension of life. In fact, explains thirty-five-year-old big wave surfer Dave Kalama, those moments when you step over the edge of what you think is possible are among life’s most profound “because they are the times when you call upon or you experience the deepest sense of who you are. . . . There is something about riding a sixty-foot wave that draws something out of you. The wave commands so much focus and so much attention that it’s the only thing that matters. It’s very purifying, because as far as you’re concerned, nothing else exists.” The history of big wave surfing is filled with stories of people who live for those experiences, who look for them in the “unridden realm”—a place where death is a powerful reality and survival redefines what we know to be humanly possible.

Consider the story of Greg Noll. In 1957, Noll was twenty years old and pioneering a life of surfing on the beaches of Hawaii. In March of that year, he stood at the shore of an infamously dangerous beach called Waimea Bay on Oahu’s North Shore and watched the approaching waves. No one had ever risked riding its ferocious surf. As Noll told filmmaker Stacey Peralta in the surfing documentary Riding Giants, “People really believed that if you paddled out at Waimea, there was going to be this vortex and there would go all the haoles flushed down the toilet.” Accompanied by a small group of comrades—fellow surfers who were responsible for forging what would soon develop into a new American subculture—Noll entered the bay and successfully caught a wave, becoming the first person ever to do so.

Noll’s greatest feat, however—what he himself describes as the most significant day of his life and the ride that would secure his place as the grandfather of big wave surfing—would come many years later in the winter of 1969. That was the year that one of the greatest swells of the twentieth century slammed into Hawaii, the result of three massive storms converging in the Pacific Ocean. As hundreds of people evacuated their homes in fear of the colossal waves that battered the coastline, Noll entered the water armed with a surfboard at Makaha beach on the North Shore. He spent two hours just sitting in the water absorbing the mind-blowing spectacle, four- and five-story-high walls of water rising up one after the other before exploding down in front of him. Finally, he paddled into a gigantic thirty-five-foot behemoth, riding its face to the bottom before being forced to jump off his board as the mass of water seemed to detonate around him. He had managed to survive the largest wave ever ridden, a record that would not be beaten for two decades. Thereafter, Noll retired from surfing completely. “That day at big Makaha was like looking over the goddamn edge at a big, black pit,” he said. “After that, there wasn’t a hell of a lot more I could do.”

Nearly thirty years later, Texan-born surfer Ken Bradshaw would share a similar experience. Having already become the first man to ride a forty-foot wave, on January 28, 1998, he eclipsed all previous big wave records at an outer reef off Oahu called Outside Log Cabins. During the height of an El Niño storm, on what is now called Biggest Wednesday, he was towed into a wave that was acknowledged by all who saw it as measuring eighty feet from trough to crest. He flew down the vertical face of the wave at death-defying speeds of forty-five miles per hour. “The gods were smiling on him,” said a stunned friend who watched the spectacle from shore. Yet shortly after the ride that was to become the stuff of legend, Bradshaw fell into a deep existential depression. At forty-five years of age, he had finally lived the dream that had defined his life’s purpose. What was he supposed to do now? It was only later, when he discovered new frontiers (in the form of even more challenging breaks), that he began surfing again.

Three years after Biggest Wednesday, Laird Hamilton, the originator of tow-in surfing and perhaps the greatest big wave surfer alive today, would find himself at just such a new frontier. In 2001, Hamilton traveled to Tahiti to surf a unique cyclone-shaped wave called Teahupoo (pronounced cho-pu), which translates into English as “broken skulls.” Indeed, the elements at Teahupoo seem almost designed for death. Just under the surface of the ocean, razor-sharp shallow reefs extend from the beach and then dramatically drop off to a depth of three hundred feet. When an approaching swell hits this reef wall a third of a mile offshore, it creates a tubular wave so powerful that it has been called a “freak of hydrodynamics.” As ex–pro surfer and writer Matt Warshaw observes, “Waves as small as three feet can be ridden at Teahupoo, and at six feet it still has a reasonable shape and demeanor. Above eight feet, however, Teahupoo gets exponentially stronger, thicker, rounder, and more malevolent: each ride begins with a vertical entry; each wave transforms into a thick-walled cavern, which in turn collapses with enough force to send shock waves running through the still water of a nearby channel.” Just four months before Hamilton arrived at Teahupoo, local pro surfer Briece Taerea was slammed into the underwater reef while riding a fifteen-foot wave. He broke his neck and back in three places, went into a coma, and died two days later.

Within seconds, the first wave that Hamilton was towed into grew to mammoth proportions. One photographer who witnessed the scene could only describe the monstrously thick wall of water, measuring eighteen feet tall, as “liquid napalm.” In the middle of his ride, in which he had to drag his right hand against the inner surface of the wave just to avoid being sucked upwards by hydraulic forces, Hamilton disappeared into the wave’s hollow spinning core as the tube began to shut down on itself, ejecting an explosion of whitewater mist. Seconds later, he suddenly reemerged . . . alive. Footage from that day shows Hamilton sitting in a boat afterwards, weeping from the power of the experience. “I felt honored,” he would later say, “to be awarded with something so magnificent.”

It’s no wonder that, as Drew Kampion wrote in his book Waves: Form and Beauty on the Ocean, surfing’s most captivating challenge has always been riding big waves and “in a real way, the men who were able to ride them were accorded a kind of god-like respect within the society of their peers.” Though the grace of its masters can make it look effortless, surfing is amazingly difficult. Just paddling into the lineup, the area beyond the surf zone where surfers wait for advancing waves, is exhausting and quickly humbling work. Actually catching a wave requires that the board be moving at the same velocity as the oncoming swell, and it demands a simultaneous combination of spontaneity, speed, balance, and stamina. And that’s just for a wave four feet high. Try for a moment to imagine being in the path of a fifteen-foot wave. In essence, it is a force of energy perhaps ten feet taller than you and moving through the water at a speed of twenty miles per hour. Riding a wave this size—the general height qualification for big wave status—requires a level of skill and experience difficult to comprehend.

Big waves are actually quite rare. Eighty percent of all ocean waves are less than twelve feet high, and forty-five percent are smaller than four feet. The largest waves, those measuring over thirty-five feet, require anywhere from six to nine hundred miles of unobstructed ocean, or “fetch,” to reach full size. By the time such an anomaly encounters a reef break or shore incline, it has become a powerful rolling mass of wind-born energy moving through the water at speeds of thirty to fifty knots per hour and capable of exerting forces of more than three tons (that’s six thousand pounds of pressure per square foot) as it finally curls up over itself and breaks. In an attempt to elucidate just why the experience of riding a wave is so unique, author Daniel Duane writes in Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast, “The climber never quite penetrates the mountain, the hiker remains trapped in the visual prison, but the surfer physically penetrates the heart of the ocean’s energy—and this is in no sense sentimentality—stands wet in its substance, pushed by its drive inside the kinetic vortex. Even riding a river, one rides a medium itself moved by gravity, likewise with a sailboard or on skis. Until someone figures out how to ride sound or light, surfing will remain the only way to ride energy.”

For those driven to put themselves in the center of the “kinetic vortex” of big waves, the risk is incredible. Being caught in the falling lip of a wave can send surfers underwater so deep and so fast that the pressure change breaks their eardrums and the capillaries in their lungs. Dismemberment, fractures, or broken bones from contact with the ocean floor or from the seething force of whitewater are so common that Laird Hamilton stopped counting his stitches after a thousand. Both of his feet are disfigured from broken arches, but he claims that they may now be “stronger than before.” Derrik Doerner, another pioneer of tow-in surfing and the man who launched Hamilton into the infamous wave at Teahupoo with a jet ski, was once hit in the face by a surfboard underwater. Just before he went unconscious, he felt his cheek. “My hand went in, like, two inches,” he says. “The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a helicopter. I had a broken jaw, broken cheekbone. I needed 123 stitches in all.”

Even more horrifying is native Hawaiian big wave surfer Titus Kinimaka’s experience riding Waimea Bay in 1989, one day before the famous Eddie Aikau surf contest. At dawn, he paddled out into the eighteen-foot swells and spent several hours surfing. While riding his final wave, however, the lip collapsed on top of him and his surfboard “chopped” into his right leg. “I dove under and got tumbled around again,” he says, “and when I finally came up there was something hitting me on the side of my cheek, back by my right ear. I was kind of dazed, wondering, ‘What is this thing?’ and I grabbed it and was looking at it, and then I realized it was the bottom of my foot.” Suffering from a snapped femur, the first thing Kinimaka asked when given the bad news was if he would still make the contest the next day. “What was I thinkin’?” he mused during an interview a year later. “I was possessed.” Indeed, after a steel rod was inserted through his right hip and he spent four months in bed healing himself, the first thing Kinimaka did was go out and surf ten-foot waves at Hanalei Bay.

What could possibly motivate big wave surfers to risk so much? In regard to his ride at Makaha in 1969, Greg Noll writes, “Some of my friends have said it was a death-wish wave. I didn’t think so at the time, but in retrospect I realize it was probably bordering on the edge.” In fact, it seems to be that very edge, the one between life and death, that surfers find so gripping. Perhaps this is because, in the words of mountain climber Lionel Terray, it is only “after treading the delicate path on the frontiers of Death for a long time [that] we can fully hug Life in our arms again.” Dave Kalama has said that surfing big waves “goes from being the scariest experience of your life to being the best experience of your life, all in a matter of seconds. And, fortunately—or unfortunately—that feeling is one of the most addictive things in life, like air or water. To keep your sanity, you have to ride waves, and some of them need to be big. . . . The closer you get to total annihilation, the more real everything becomes.”

Derrik Doerner says of his experience in the water, “It’s meditation to me. I get back on land, I stub my toe, I trip. Whereas out there, it’s just . . . perfect. All the elements come together, and there is no fear.” And as the famous bodysurfer Mark Cunningham explains, “It’s not just riding the waves, it’s swimming through them, it’s diving under them, opening your eyes underwater as you watch this thing impact right in front of you. And you just knife right through there, between the bottom and where those whitewater fingers are tryin’ to grab you. Just the whole dance out there. You’re like a piece of the ocean. I mean, what is the human body made of? Water. The physical makeup of the bodily fluids and ocean is very similar. And now you’ve found each other.” While recalling his own mythical eighty-foot wave, Ken Bradshaw told an interviewer, “I guess it’s an addiction. I have no idea, but it must be like being on drugs. Because when you’re not doing it, it torments and eats away at you. When it is happening . . . I guess it’s like looking at life itself. For a moment, you’ve got it all. It’s yours. You’ve gone to the very epitome of what you can do. How many people can say that in this world?”

 The first ever Student Kitesurfing Nationals are set to take place in the UK later this month.

 Hosted by the Southampton University Kitesurf Club, the event will be held at Calshot Beach with 52 competitors taking part.

 Fans of the sport can get a slice of the action on March 20th and 21st in an event aimed at some of the country's best university kitesurfers.

 This could be one challenge that really allows competitors to show off their skills, as the format of the competition is pure freestyle, which means that people can introduce plenty of old-school tricks into their entry, the Daily Echo reports.

 With some top prizes up for grabs -ranging from a holiday to top-of-the-range wetsuits - participants will no doubt be hoping to impress the judges, including a number of pro-riders such as Ali Barrett and James Boulding.

 There will be 26 universities taking part.

 Calshot Beach lies on the south Hampshire coast and is part of a shingle spit which boasts an impressive array of wildlife.

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 Snowboarding fans looking to challenge themselves and push their skills to the limit may want to head up to Scotland.

This is because, according to the Scotsman, the Cairngorms are "wearing their finest winter coat in 30 years" and provide the perfect conditions for any fanatical sportsmen and women.

 Paul Raistrick, 37, who lives in Kincraig, is one such person and he says that although "potentially every turn is a life-threatening one", the adrenalin rush that the snowboarder experiences is "fantastic".

 He is one of the only people to tackle some of the region's most remote mountain gullies, including Aladdin's Mirror Direct, a grade IV route in the Cairngorms' Coire an t-Sneachda.

 "The snowboarding is very technical. You're not pulling tricks," Mr Raistrick, who has navigated his way down 55-degree descents, explained.

 Located in the eastern Highlands of Scotland, the Cairngorms are home to CairnGorm Mountain, which offers a range of skiing and snowboarding activities and classes.

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A new leisure event taking place near London could give windsurfers in the area the opportunity to check out the latest products and innovations from the sport.

The British Leisure Show will be held at Royal Windsor Racecourse from Friday March 19th until Sunday March 21st and promises an action-packed schedule of events.

 Open from 10:00 until 17:00 GMT every day, there are eight dedicated leisure zones to tempt visitors covering areas such as cars and bikes, outdoor and country activities, as well as boats and watersports.

 All ages are welcome and the organisers note that companies will be displaying a selection of watersport accessories, such as wakeboards, wetsuits and waterskis.

 There will also be dinghies and scuba diving equipment on offer for those who are a little less adventurous.

 Caroline Evans, a spokesperson for the event, said: "We've created a family friendly event with something available for all ages to try."

 Royal Windsor Racecourse is accessible by car and train, as well as a special river taxi service.

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