Scotty Don't Surf!

SCOTLAND isn't renowned for its rich surfing history. When some of the best wave riders on Earth travelled to Thurso earlier this year to compete in the inaugural O'Neill Highland Open, the rest of the surfing world seemed to think it was hilarious.

As a new exhibition at the Aberdeen Maritime Museum shows, Scottish men and women were surfing years before their Antipodean cousins even knew what a surfboard looked like.

"Quite a few Scottish people settled in Hawaii not long after Captain Cook had first made contact with the islands in 1778," he says. "There is a story of a chap - a Scotsman - arriving there on a boat in the early 1800s and expecting to be the first white man to settle, but he saw this white face in one of the outrigger canoes, paddling out with the natives to greet him, and when he spoke this fellow had a broad Scottish accent, so he'd been beaten by quite a few years.

"If this guy was in one of the outriggers with the locals, he would certainly have ridden waves in on the canoe, so you have to speculate that a Scotsman could have been one of the first non-Hawaiian people to surf."