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Massive trucks and bulldozers were working furiously, moving rocks and what looked like bits of a concrete demolition site, and dumping them by the edge of the groyne wall. It was hard to figure out what they were actually doing it for. Strengthening the wall? Making it higher? Getting it ready to push over into the ocean? The mix of sounds – breaking waves and crashing stone, the call of shore birds and the piercing cacophony of reversing trucks – couldn’t seem to drown out these hammering questions.

Mum’s been on the frontlines of battles to protect wilderness for most of her life, and raised me as an active witness, from Tassie old growth to Ecuadorian cloud forests, to Borneo wilderness to the wild rivers of Japan. Before our trip to Iceland, we researched and reached out to our friends and networks, to find out more about current issues. The list was long – toxic salmon farms, dams for energy-hungry aluminium plants, industrial fishing, the climate crisis and melting glaciers, interim political parties approving whaling and impacts from a huge increase in tourism over the past few years.

One of our contacts – author and climate activist Andri Magnuson – introduced us to his friend, Steinarr Lár, President of the Icelandic Surf Association, who told us about the threatened wave of Thorlákshöfn (or “Thorli” as it’s affectionately known by local surfers). This perfect point break, only an hour’s drive from the capital, Reykjavik, rolled many of these issues into one; human hubris in changing the landscape with impunity for short-term profit, enslaved to a globalised economic system that generates money from an idea that ‘green’ cement can earn more carbon credits to ‘save the climate’. Absurd? Yep.

We arrived on a peak swell. I quickly donned my wetsuit, borrowed our photographer Nick Green’s gloves and jumped straight off the rocks into the waves. I was so excited and exhilarated that I thought I could charge this place without booties. It seemed fine until I tried to stand up on my board and found my feet had disappeared! After lending some extra equipment, I paddled back into the line-up. The wave is powerful with crisp rolling walls, cylinder drops into tubes and a shoulder that smoothes into a channel. It’s a wave that’s enjoyed by increasing numbers of locals... wide-eyed sea lions included.

Looking back towards the shore, the bulldozers were relentless. The car park was filling with locals ready for the afternoon session, and they told us the council had just approved the ‘regional plan’ for a port project that extended the rock wall, splitting the lineup in half while claiming to not affect the wave. For Icelanders, surfing is rather new – a treasure yet to be truly discovered – with Thorli offering the most consistent wave in the country.

The ocean here has a reputation as a place of bounty, but also a place of great danger as Andri explained to us. “Most of us were raised with fear of the ocean. I was warned as a kid I would die within 10 minutes of falling in. We lost thousands at sea in the 20th century – every family had lost a brother, father, grandfather. Surfing is a wonderful, deep way to understand the forces of the sea. The current authorities do not seem to be able to imagine the value of such a sport or the wave for the future of Thorli, the opportunity to connect the local kids to nature... and the pure happiness in the wave.”

We finished the day in the blissfully heated thermal baths at the town’s public pools, defrosting frozen fingers and toes. One conversation with a local surfer while bobbing about under the stars, struck a deep chord. The race to protect this pointbreak is still very much in play, and in the process Icelandic surfers are gaining an appreciation of the treasure on their own coasts, and a sense of their own growing surf culture. This issue – as catastrophic as it might become – has brought them together and revealed the potential of Icelandic surfing.

This story features in the first print edition of Roaring Journals: order your copy here.