It’s an early summer evening at Sennen Cove in the far west of Cornwall.

The sea is crystal clear, the bright sun hovers over the Isles of Scilly, and perfect, glassy shoulder- high waves are caressing the shore.

As I sit in the line-up, I can see the fins of three or four basking sharks some 50 metres away. A set wave arrives, I whip my board around, paddle and leap to my feet. I angle it to surf to my left and at once see another, much more proficient surfer ahead of me.

It’s a dolphin, effortlessly leaping ahead of the curl of the wave and riding it shorewards. I trim my board and follow, intoxicated afresh by the feeling of surfing and by the dolphin’s absorption in the pure pleasure of the moment.

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If you’re lucky enough to surf with dolphins, so much the better, but regardless: surfing is addictive. Ever since Captain Cook’s Journals noted, in 1777, that Tahitian canoeists derived “the most supreme pleasure” from being “driven on so fast and so smoothly by the sea” surfing, in one form or another, has grown exponentially. It is now a multimillion dollar global industry, practised not merely in Pacific idylls but anywhere that picks up swell. Not least, the UK.

For many years, the holy trinity of Hawaii, Australia and California seemed to have the exclusive rights to surfing. Writers such as Mark Twain and Jack London were lured especially to Hawaii, where they were duly mesmerised by what London characterised as an indigent surfer “flying through the air, flying forward, flying fast as the surge on which he stands”.

Surf culture blossomed worldwide in the 1950s, becoming a fabric of daily life in places such as Malibu, California, the north shore of the Hawaiian island of Oahu and Australia’s Gold Coast. Indeed, a quartet of Australian lifeguards — Bob Head, Ian Tiley, John Campbell and Warren Mitchell — played a major role in popularising surfing in the UK when they arrived, in 1963, at Newquay in Cornwall. Their exemplary surfing captivated the town’s locals, who were quick to take to what London had termed “a royal sport for the natural kings of the earth”.

Today, Newquay is Britain’s Surf City. Surfing permeates every aspect of life in the town, and in Russell Winter, brought up in what was once a major fishing port, Newquay can boast of a genuinely world class surfer.

Fistral Beach, where Winter learnt his craft, hosts the Rip Curl Boardmasters, Britain’s biggest surfing event, each August, and is also on the doorstep of the Cribbar, a legendary big wave that has been ridden only by a few expert surfers. But surfing is far from merely a Cornish pursuit. All around the UK’s coastline surfing communities can be found, from Brighton to Saltburn-on-Sea, via Devon, Wales, Northern Ireland and all the way to the Orkney and Shetland islands.

That we have so rich a surf scene is, in large part, due to a man who lives at a surf break known as Pleasure Point in Santa Cruz, northern California. Step forward Jack O’Neill, now in his mid-eighties, who in the 1960s pioneered the invention of the wetsuit.

Wetsuit technology has come on immeasurably since then, with brands such as O’Neill and Rip Curl now producing wetsuits that are so good that you’ll be warmer in the water than on land during a UK winter surf session. In Finisterre, a company based in St Agnes, Cornwall, there is even a company that specialises in making ultra-warm, après-surf clothing, specifically for the cold water surfing experience.

But what is it about surfing that makes it so irresistible? For me, it’s the whole caboodle, from checking meteorological charts to see what kind of swell is on its way to arriving, anticipation mounting, at a favoured surf break. The sight of clean lines of swell makes anyone who has ever ridden a wave dizzy with childlike enthusiasm, but then there’s the immersion in the ocean that comes of paddling out, through breaking waves, to reach the line-up (the place where surfers wait to catch waves).

At once, surfing is both a deeply physical and felt experience, but then comes the act of riding a wave, a feeling so exquisite that some surfers claim it’s better than sex.

The obvious retort to this is that those surfers’ sex lives are somewhat impoverished, but their reverence is understandable. To ride blue-green, unbroken and peeling walls of moving water is to be lost entirely in the moment, to be blissfully unconscious of one’s self — or anything else, for that matter — and yet, at the same time, profoundly attuned to a natural, dynamic and endlessly fluid environment. In this sense, surfing is as Zen as it gets.

Or, to think in rather more Western terms, perhaps surfing is the perfect example of what Freud meant when he spoke of delayed gratification. A lot of time and effort goes into catching a wave, and even the best ride is over in under a minute. But it’s pure pleasure when it happens — and better still, it’s only a wetsuit away.

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