Are you brave enough to take on Cornwall's 40-foot answer to Hawaii's big waves?

Maybe the old veteran shouldn’t have told the 11-year-old Tom Butler: ‘Oy! You shouldn’t be going out there!’ It only provoked him. It led him, ultimately, down the rocky path to the Cribbar.

When a wave the size of a dinosaur rears up out of the water and starts furiously charging towards you, most sensible people evacuate and head for higher ground. Then again, there are some — an elite few wave warriors — who can’t resist the opportunity to shove their heads into the jaws of the beast. Serious surfers like Butler, a Newquay native, wax down their boards and paddle out to meet the challenge. ‘If you’re born here and grow up here,’ he says, ‘the Cribbar is the big one.’

There is one thing that you might care to thank climate change for: the Cribbar is becoming a more frequent visitor to our shores. The ‘Cribbar’, from the Cornish ‘kribow’ meaning ‘reef’, is not so much a part of the landscape, more the occasional, colossal end product of a perfect storm of topography, far-off hurricanes and the jet stream. On calmer, settled days, with children playing on the beach, big waves can seem like a memory, a ghost, possibly a hoax. But then, in the right season, they come roaring back to life, regularly reincarnated. And now, with glaciers in retreat and temperatures rising, the big-wave season is getting longer and more spectacular than ever.

As someone whose biggest wave was, at most 10 feet (and a fair chunk of that surfed upside down), I can’t help but take my hat off to Tom Butler — and feel a degree of justified awe. When I started out, some time in the last millennium, the Cribbar was more myth than monster. The massive wave that breaks off Towan Head (beyond the Headland Hotel) on a submerged pinnacle of rock was once thought to be unsurfable: too huge, too wild, too out of control. According to legend, it was first tamed way back in the 1960s by a crew of migratory Australian lifeguards. But it wasn’t until the early noughties that it landed in the history books. The Cribbar is our Waimea Bay, the closest UK approximation to Hawaii’s classic big-wave arena. Admittedly, a lot colder and greyer with fewer palm trees, but comparable in scale and intensity: a solid 20-feet wave, on its day, with reportedly 30-40-feet faces. It is strictly for battle-hardened surfers used to putting themselves in the way of harm.

Butler is definitely that. He started surfing smaller waves around the age of three. He was tall for his age and as he got bigger, the waves did too. He became British surfing champion. Then, at the age of 16, the day came when he was finally ready to step up and take on the Cribbar. The paddle out on big days is from Little Fistral, hugging the headland that runs out to the Cribbar and using the rip next to the rocks to drag you out. Or if it’s too big for that, you go off the back of the old lifeboat slip behind the building in the car park.

It’s hard to line up the wave because the peak jumps around a lot. Then there is the classic conundrum of how to catch the wave and not get caught by it: too far out and you won’t have a shot; too close and you run the risk of a bunch of extremely heavy slabs of water landing right on your head, sweeping you onto the nearby rocks. But if grace descends and you are fortunate enough to find yourself in just the right position and you paddle like a maniac and leap to your feet and find yourself astride a huge spitting monster of spray and turbulence, riding on a dopamine high, then it feels as if you just won the lottery. Which is what keeps you coming back for more.

After overcoming the Cribbar (and finishing his GCSEs), Butler caught the attention of Quiksilver who became his sponsor and dispatched him on a mission, partly inspired by the film Endless Summer (1966), to Australia, Indonesia, and Hawaii. He went on to carve out a career as a professional big-wave rider. An adept of tow-in (in which you rely on a jetski to slingshot you onto the peak), he has taken on the most ginormous waves on the planet — freaks of nature such as Mullaghmore Head on the west coast of Ireland and Nazaré in Portugal, which has claims to attaining the magical, mysterious height of 100 feet.

But some years ago Butler turned down an invite to the Nazaré Challenge, ‘sick of the politics and the demand to monetise.’ He married, had a son called Ziggy, and now devotes much of his time to Coastal Crusaders, a community interest company which is enabling disabled people, young and old, to go to the beach and get in the water. ‘It gives the wheelchair world access to something extreme,’ he says. ‘Just not at the Cribbar.’

Now 37 and ‘cruising up to middle age’, Butler fondly recalls Cribbar swells of yesteryear. ‘Storm Hercules (2014), that was a big one. But the Covid year — 2020 — it was a spring tide: I’ve never surfed it as big as that.’ However, Butler is far from calling it a day. Big waves are a realm in which age and experience and wisdom count for as much as youthful ambition. ‘The worst thing,’ he says, ‘is to go out there all guns blazing. It’s a head game. I’m not reckless. But, still, you have to be willing to go for it. It’s not a sport where you can just dip your toe in.’

In his lifetime, Butler has seen the wave supercharged by climate change. It used to peter out in February: ‘This year we were still surfing it at 15 feet in April.’ He expects it to make a return appearance some time in September, whipped up by hurricanes in the Caribbean. Like dedicated birdwatchers, you have to be patient for a sighting. To be ready. Butler is lining up his big wave boards in preparation. ‘More people are going out there now,’ he says, ‘but I wouldn’t encourage beginners.’ It’s more frequent, but it’s also more volatile. Having fallen in love with the Cribbar as a child, he describes his attraction to the wave as being like ‘a bad relationship: you commit so much, invest all this time — and then… it smacks you in the face.’

Up close a big wave can look like a mean, ugly, foam-maned leviathan that really wants to take you down with it: from the safety of the shore, it’s like seeing a precarious but majestic mountain, arching up to the sky only to collapse and die and pump out its life-force on the beach — and then be reborn.

Always head to an RNLI Lifeguarded Beach and stay between the black and white chequered flags. Never go out alone; always surf with a friend or let someone on shore know where you are and when you plan to return.