A Day In The Surfing Life // Woody New
In these times when we are all bombarded with entertainment and information every minute of the waking day, it is easy to scroll surf clip after surf photo and only see those great surfers for their surfing alone. But beyond those few fleeting seconds of excellence on a wave, most talented surfers are multifaceted human beings. They’re more than just their surfing. Woody New, particularly so.
Woody is one of the latest additions to the C-Skins family, and the subject of this latest instalment of our Day In The Surfing Life series. In the depths of the Cornish winter we spent a day with Woody to find out more about how surfing sits alongside all of his other interests and activities, and to dig into his day-to-day.
As it’s his final year, Woody’s studies are taking up a lot of his focus and attention. He’s surfing whenever the waves are good, but the rest of the time he’s working on his final year project and co-ordinating his cohort’s end-of-year exhibition in Bristol. That final year project is a diversion from his focus on underwater photography of the first two years.
“I mainly joined the course for the marine photography, but the longer that I’m going with it, the more I’m realising that I’m enjoying all aspects of photography.”
“My third year project is based on this small-scale organic farm over towards Edgcumbe, and it's essentially how these animals live in die on the farm. It's in quite an honest sort of way of shooting, and it involves me putting myself into those herds, those flocks, and shooting from their perspective. So I'm shooting the communities within the community of this farm. And then, you know, there's the grief, the loss, but also the sense of friendship. Almost like making it seem like a pub. So imagine if you're in a pub full of chickens, with all of these different personalities.”
“I guess my nature photography is different to how most people might think of it. Like, I don’t often go out and sit in a hide in the woods waiting for a fox for hours and hours and hours. I like to insinuate myself in the crossovers between human and animal life; with the humans that spend a lot of time with those animals and with the animals that are comfortable around humans. So the sort of the boundary between wild and domestic is where I like to put myself.”
The farm isn’t just the subject of Woody’s final year project, however. Unsurprisingly it goes deeper than that. The farm belongs to a family friend and Woody works on the farm three days a week with his twin brother Huck and his housemate Mungo, and they get paid in food. “We do some fencing and jobs like that, and then we get these big joints of pork, or a whole chicken, or, you know, two dozen eggs or some berries.” It means that he doesn’t need to go to the supermarket, eats seasonally, and knows exactly where his food has come from. This connection to the natural world, and consideration of what and how he eats, isn’t something that comes across in a short clip of Woody getting barrelled. But it seems that this is just how Woody has always been, and the values that he was raised with, and so it’s not a big deal to him and not something that he feels the need to shout about.
For us as surfers and ocean lovers however, it is Woody’s underwater photography that stops us in our tracks.
“I had to get all of my scuba tickets before starting uni. So I got up to rescue diver, which is like the third stage of PADI before you get dive master. And then the university have got, you know, 200 grands worth of underwater camera kit for us to play around with and in the second year we went to Egypt for a two week intensive underwater photography trip.”
His approach to capturing images in the Red Sea mirrors his approach to his third year project, embedding himself with his subject and trying to have minimal impact on them or the environment. That meant things like getting his buoyancy just right so that he could stay as motionless as possible without touching the reef or holding on to the bottom, and testing his settings against an empty patch of reef so that he could get the shot in one go and wasn’t needlessly disturbing fish.
The amount of diving that Woody was able to get under his belt on that trip had an instant impact on his portfolio, and a set of his images were published in a conservation magazine, but it hasn’t dampened his enthusiasm for diving and shooting at home.
“The water here is so full of life. Especially in the first five meters, so it’s all really accessible.” Last summer he focussed on shooting the jellyfish that are seasonal visitors to our shores, using off-camera strobe flashes to capture the details of these translucent creatures. “Trying to actually hang out with the jellyfish is really difficult,” he comments, “Especially when you’ve got a camera distracting you. Okay, there's a shot, but you have to get really close to jellyfish and they still move, so particularly with really tiny jellies that are so hard to see even when they’re right in front of you, you can’t take your eyes off them.”
Through the summer months Woody lifeguards part time at Sennen Cove. He grew up just outside Penzance, so has always had that unique West Penwith seasonal rotation of surfing Sennen in the summer and the beaches and reefs of the south coast through the winter. Over the last few years based out of Falmouth in term time, some of his closest beaches are over on the north coast. If he’s got to get in the car to go surfing, he makes it count.
Woody’s surfing sits firmly in that high-performance bracket. He’s solid on his feet with an innate ability to read a wave and respond to it, finds his way into and out the other end of barrels with the ease and familiarity of somebody who has grown up surfing solid waves, and has an air game to match.
On the best days at certain stand-out breaks, he’s one of the handful of surfers whose waves end up doing the rounds on social media. And, in heavy, shifting beach breaks, he’s instantly recognisable as the surfer picking off the good ones that most others might not think makeable, and making them look easy - like on this day. It was borderline un-surfable but Woody was getting barrelled and launching airs off the end section.
In the afternoon, Woody has to go into university to develop some films and make some prints. On the way, conversation turns to music, another big part of his life and one that again you can’t quite get a handle on from seeing photos and clips of him surfing. If you ever cast an eye over club night posters pasted up around Falmouth, you’ll quite likely see his name.
“I don’t often say that I’m a DJ. I don’t like saying that I’m a DJ because every man and their dog can DJ these days. I just love listening to music, and it’s a great way of getting paid to play four hours of music.”
He got his start playing restaurant gigs, and long extended daytime sets, which are still his preferred slots. “I really enjoy them. I’ll play a lot of Bossa Nova and jazz, building the atmosphere, and you actually have people listening to you. It’s more hard work but it’s a lot more rewarding, I feel, than going on at half eleven or half twelve and having an hour to play to people who aren’t really going to register whether you’re a human or not.” Voluntarily DJing the start of the night, when people are actually paying attention and getting people up to dance, is testament to Woody’s broad musical tastes and ability to select tracks. It also means that he finishes early and can be up for a dawn surf the next day if he wants.
At Falmouth University’s Institute of Photography, we walk down a corridor lined with large underwater photographs, including one of Woody’s from that Red Sea trip. He still shoots a lot of film, by choice, and has recently been using a Mamiya medium format camera belonging to his friend, filmmaker Rob Blackett, and has a couple of rolls of 120mm film to develop. He explains the process as he concentrates, his hands in a gloved dark box working blindly as he unrolls and feeds the film into the machine. Outside at a large light box, he’s pleased with some of the shots he’s got from another personal project that he’s been working on, and picks out a couple to make prints from. The other roll of film was one that Rob had left in the camera, and had photos from their New Year’s strike out to Fuerteventura on it. They scored good waves on that trip, bouncing a tiny hire car along the Northern Track and getting the ferry over to the right hand point on an uninhabited nearby island.
The next week Woody had a reading week coming up. The forecast was looking alright, as it has done for a lot of the start of 2025. He spoke about maybe heading over to Ireland to link up with his shaper, Hugh Brockman of BOS surfboards, for a few days. Or maybe staying put and trying his luck at home if the forecast looked good. He had the end of year exhibition to work on too, corralling 41 other students to get their work organised and ready to hang in a gallery in Bristol. We say so long as he sets up to make a print in the darkroom. He’s got a lot of good things going on, has Woody. Much, much, more than you might assume from scrolling past a photo or clip of him surfing. And he surfs incredibly well.
WOODY WEARS THE NUWAVE WIRED 5:4 MENS CHEST ZIP HOODED STEAMER
