Ice Castles
Further is Never Far Enough In Surfing’s Coldwater Frontiers

Text: Nathan Myers
Photos: Dustin Humphrey
Surfing by Dan Malloy, Timmy Curran and Dane Reynolds

Dan Malloy is staring at a giant map of Iceland on the wall, tracing the coast with his finger. It's a crazy coast, ripped with fjords and fissures, born of ice and lava. It's a ridiculous coast, whipped by wicked wind and spanked by brutal Atlantic storms. Until now we’d been spending our time in one tiny corner. But look at all that unexplored vastness.
Dan is a bit crazy. The man got here days before us because he’s too excited to wait. Right away he’s romping up the frozen creek-beds, gulping the icy water, scrambling up the rip-rap slopes and hanging over cracked volcanic ledges to find some far-gone slab he’d dreamt of in his surf-addled youth. After one early surf session, he’s walking around shirtless, exclaiming, “I love this stuff. I’d rather be here than Indo any day. Seriously.”
Seriously. He has to add that part, because the rest of us are wearing big ski jackets, hoods up, gloves on, and still freezing. Dan’s dripping icicles from his frozen beard, wetsuit around his waist, going, “I might have seen something big moving out there… I don’t know. Maybe I was tripping out.”

The local surfers tell us orca stories. Nothing too crazy, just sightings and drive-bys, but still…orcas. We’ve all seen that awful footage of them tossing baby seals in the air, playing with their food. Yikes!
Then one dark and stormy afternoon Dan gets abruptly out of the water.
“What’s wrong, Dan? Did you see something?”
“Can someone drive me to that bombie we saw earlier?” Dan responds. “This spot isn’t doing it for me.”
The bombie was a half-mile down the road and almost as far out to sea. Dan jumps out of the van, bounds across the mossy lava field and plunges back into the bitter soup. If any local had seen this, they surely would have panicked. Icelanders have a deep respect for their ocean. “You will die,” they told the first visiting surfers.
But Dan’s a bit crazy. And there he went, paddling solo into the fading light to find what was out there.
So when we saw Dan staring at that big unexplored map the following day, we knew we wouldn’t be sticking around this well-charted corner of Iceland for long.
Check out SURF TIME MAGAZINE for full story