Northwest of North Point

If Earth were an orange and you were to jab a bamboo skewer straight through Margaret River, Western Australia, it would surely emerge on the other side at Dragør, on the Baltic coast of Denmark. The two towns could not be further apart in every way, their only common denominator being surfer and photographer Tom Pearsall, who lives half the year in each. 

Right now, he’s in Dragør, although his mind is elsewhere: Back home in Margaret River, surfers are experiencing their best spring in living memory. A 20-foot swell has just slammed the southwest corner of the Australian continent, lighting up every big-wave bommie in the area. If he were home, Pearsall would be fair amongst it, shooting, surfing, or both.

But he’s not. In Denmark, the cruelest aspect of his circumstances is that he lives just 150 feet from the shoreline and stares at the surfless Baltic Sea all day. “Sea” might be generous. “It’s a muddy pond with ducks in it,” explains Pearsall about the view out front. “It’s knee-deep for 200 meters. It’s gray and cold most of the time. It’s not quite the ocean I’m used to.”

His living arrangement is a trade-off with his Danish wife, Amalie, whom he met in Margaret River five years ago while she was on holiday. Pearsall was giving an English mate a surf lesson when Amalie flew by on a wave and flashed a smile. His friend was soon surfing on his own. Tom and Amalie now share a son, Astor, and have adopted a very modern, intercontinental lifestyle, spending January to June in Australia, then July to December in Denmark. They keep one-bedroom apartments in both places. For Pearsall, life’s an Endless Autumn, which a shrewd surfer could leverage to their advantage. The move, however, has come with a substantial culture shock. 

“I’m finally succumbing to the idea of being here,” says, sighing. “I just miss that morning routine of the car park back at home. I’m a bit of an introvert—I don’t go out much—and those little social interactions in the car park or in the water seem so much more profound when you suddenly don’t have them.”

Without regular access to surf in Denmark, Pearsall has taken up water polo. Physically—and socially—it’s the closest equivalent to swimming with his housing at maxing North Point. “It’s like rugby in a pool,” he says, laughing. “I’m a beginner, so I’m just getting abused the whole time. They’re either not talking to me, or they’re screaming at me. Luckily, I can’t really understand Danish. But it’s been important for me to find my feet here.” 

Pearsall recently competed in a Nordic championship in Stockholm, where he was red-carded for punching an opponent. “It wasn’t really a punch,” he explains. The coach pulled him aside to admonish him before whispering, “Tom…that was fucking incredible!”

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Pearsall arrived late to surf photography. He didn’t shoot a frame until he was 26—10 years ago. He’d moved down to Margaret River from Perth after leaving school and first had to acclimatize to the blunt aquatic force of the southwest. 

“Me and a mate from Perth rocked up to Grunters one day, and it was just rifling,” he recalls. “We managed to get out, but then we couldn’t get back in. I almost drowned a couple of times in those early years. It was a quantum leap in waves and ability, but I started riding bigger boards and soon absolutely loved it.”

A lot of visitors have a dig at the Box when the Margaret River Pro is in town, and some fare better than others.

During COVID, the cops checked people’s IDs to ensure they were Margaret River residents before admitting them to the car park, and people were turned away if they weren’t—it was great.

Matahi Drollet, Teahupoo—I was at Teahupoo and had dengue fever, causing the warm tropical water to feel ice cold, but I swam anyway to feel its energy and document Matahi’s relationship with the wave.

Kevin “Big Kev” Merifield is an 87-year-old retired Australian football player who just had a heart operation but is back in the lineup, catching bombs out the back while everybody hoots as he flies by.

Prevelly town residents, nervously watching an encroaching bushfire.

Jack Robinson, deploying the landing gear.

Oliver Kurtz, Skeleton Bay, Namibia, about to turn and park on one of these grinding freight trains with no shoulder.

A dose of malaria medication in Angola—those pills made me feel every slightest change in temperature.

Lyder Bäckström Natvig, Norway. Freezing wind and sleet were blowing down the fjord, but I didn’t care. Surfing at the foot of that mountain range is magic.

Like most, he spent much of his twenties working out what he didn’t want to do with his life. A “Seize the Day” tattoo was followed by a stint working in the town’s restaurant and bar scene. “I learned some great social skills, but I was partying a lot,” he says. “I was skinny and smoking a lot of darts. I was pretty unhealthy there for a while and wasn’t surfing much.”

The change for Pearsall began when he trained with former navy diver Joe Knight, who runs courses in heavy-water survival. “That was key to staying calm in the water—being armed with the understanding of physiology and breath hold,” Pearsall says. “I could really push it in a safe way, and it gave me access to nearly anything.”

At that point, photography also had piqued his interest. Too many outrageous moments in the water around Margarets were overloading his organic data card. “As you’re paddling over a wave and looking down into the barrel,” he explains, “you’re seeing the guy in there, and it’s the light and the spray, and it’s just…you blink, and it burns into your mind.”

Working as a surf guide in the Mentawais, Pearsall met Australian photographer John Barton, who’d been shooting in the islands for years and had built a life around it. “That was really the first time where I saw what it could be,” Pearsall offers. “The next time I came back to the islands, I brought a camera with me.”

At home in Western Australia, Pearsall threw himself into photography. His signature shot appeared early. It was taken from the impact zone on a big day at North Point as a cleanup set stormed through, the pack scrambling in the image. You can see the whites of eyeballs and sense the panic. 

In the Australian west, these days aren’t uncommon. It’s one of the few places that can look Hawaii in the eye: The convergence of the Indian and Southern oceans, whipped by subpolar storms, sees huge energy make landfall. Pearsall’s photography puts you amongst it, almost too deep. Some shots feel dangerous to look at.

“They’ve got a shark buoy way out the back of North Point,” Pearsall recalls of another big swim. “There was one day when it was just massive. It built so quickly, and this set came through that just didn’t end. It had maybe 20 or 30 waves that were breaking on the reef, past the outside boil. I was just swimming in foam. It was like an avalanche. But because I could swim under them, I kept heading out into the bay while everyone else was washed in. It eventually stopped, and it was just silent except for my breathing and the water fizzing. I looked around and there was no one anywhere near me, and the whole ocean was white, reflecting from the sunset. Then I looked up and the shark buoy was 50 meters away. I was waaaay out to sea.”

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Pearsall’s first few years of photography cataloged daily battles between surfer and outer reef. “The chaos of it all,” he says, explaining what drew him out there. “Especially the chaos on those really outrageous days. There are some sessions you’re privileged to be a part of, where people are really pushing it. A lot of those situations are peak human experience. All your senses are just pinging off, and you can’t feel much more alive.”

There’s a certain type of southwest surfer who lives for those days—guys you’ve never heard of. The area has produced dozens of world-class surfers, all comfortable in heavy water, but for every Jack Robinson, there are 10 Brett Herrings. The younger brother of ’90s tour flame-out Shane Herring, Brett has lived over west for two decades, occasionally in tents or shipping containers, ghosting out on the biggest days, hard to miss in his golden surf helmet. Pearsall recalls shooting with him one giant day at Southside—Brett being run down by a set, dislocating his shoulder: “He reckoned his arm stayed in the one spot, but the wave spun him three times and popped it out.” Pearsall swam out in his jocks to rescue him.

In the absence of any clear commercial lane, documenting the area’s underground scene seemed like a good use of Pearsall’s time and skill. “I wanted to get deeper with those guys and their motivations for surfing,” he offers. “That’s where my own surfing was heading, so it made sense to follow those guys.” At home, Pearsall keeps a 10’0″ Mick Mackie twin in storage. He calls it the Enterprise: “You can literally paddle it from one bommie to the next.”

Eventually he met a surfer named Luke Saranah, and the pair would go on to chase swells together not only locally, but through Africa, Norway, and Mexico. “He never expected anything from me,” says Pearsall of the relationship. “I’d miss his best wave every trip, and he wouldn’t care. I’d surf as much as I’d shoot. I was just a surf buddy with a camera.” 

Pearsall’s new horizons promptly closed four years ago, when Western Australia became the “Hermit Kingdom,” cut off from the rest of the world by the pandemic. The Margaret River car park crawled with cops, checking licenses and placing cones in every second parking space to keep surfers socially distanced. 

Amalie was in Denmark, and Pearsall proposed to her on a video call. “I was thinking a lot about the future at the time,” he reflects, “although I didn’t realize the future was living in an eighteenth-century Danish fishing village.”

In many ways, the move to Europe crystallized a change in his work that was already well underway: less primal, more curious. Geographically, Western Europe might fit pretty neatly into Western Australia, but it offers cultural excursions far beyond a drive north to Gnaraloo and a week in the desert. The equivalent route in Europe would take him through six countries and six languages, and could land him in the Basque Country, France, or Portugal. “Europe is pretty overwhelming for me, to be honest,” he says. “Just the humanity. I kind of get swept up in it: ‘Where’s everyone going?’ ‘What’s this guy’s story?’ My head starts spinning, and that’s probably where my photography is leading.”

In terms of surf, Pearsall has yet to find his feet—in a North Atlantic sense, anyway. What he has found is a Danish scene equally mad as the one at home—only mad for five-second-period swells.

“I got a message recently from a guy telling me about a wave on the northwest coast of 

Denmark,” Pearsall says. “I packed the car and drove through the night with no idea where I was going. At dawn, I walked over these dunes that looked like something out of Dunkirk. 

It was a pebble coast with all these World War II bunkers on the beach, but there were these little waves breaking in muddy-colored water and all these surfers in the water. These guys can only surf when it’s 50-knot straight onshore. I’m just out there counting the days until January.”

[Feature image: Jack Robinson, Western Australia. Jack’s always in the most critical spot on the biggest waves. You have to match his intensity to get the shot. This wave sucked me over and blew off my flipper. I spent the next hour kicking in circles.]