Scheveningen Surf Festival

Since 2017, SSF is being held to celebrate local and Dutch surf culture. And boy, I can tell you, the parties are nuts! I’ve been helping them since 2018, the second year since they’ve launched the event, to write about our culture, history and legacy.

The first piece I’ve written in 2018 was an online article about our history. Since we’ve been surfing since the sixties, we’ve got quite a lot of stories to tell. The community is small and in the past 3 generations a lot has already been written about it by legends like Hans Groen.
Therefore, it was quite challenging to pay respects without the piece ending up as a sum up all of the beneficial people in the development of the sport and lifestyle in The Netherlands. I went a bit rogue with the assignment, but since surf is still punk, SSF liked the piece. Obviously, it’s in Dutch, but you can still (try to) read it over here!

The Scheveningen Surf Krant is an initiative which saw the light of day in 2019 as a promotion to SSF. Lucas walked up to me during the 2018 edition and asked me If I’d like to be a part of something new. We had a quick brainstorm over a beer about releasing a recurring pulp magazine to celebrate Dutch surfing culture.

Next year an awesome template, which featured stunning surf shots taken and surfed by some of my friends, was dropped in my email giving me full artistic freedom to write up two pieces about this year’s edition of SSF and our local culture.
I wrote one comical piece about what to expect from this year’s festival cracking jokes about pulling your grandparents from the Pleistocene for 60+ surfing lessons and claiming that surfing and changes go better together than Jim Levenstein and warm apple pie.
The other piece was a homage to Scheveningen (locally known as Skiffa). A loving, but also cynical piece about the local culture and the funny quirks we sometimes have as Dutch surfers.

I owe a lot to the Dutch surfing community. Without it you probably wouldn’t even be reading this. That’s why it’s truly been an honor to be asked by my lovely friends Geert Verhoeff (The Shore Scheveningen) and Lucas Winckers (Zidiot) to write for the Scheveningen Surf Festival for two consecutive years in a row.

Pictures by the amazing Michal Pelka <3