Advances in the design of wet suits, which are made from neoprene, a synthetic rubber, have pushed surfing far beyond the summery, “Gidget,” “Surf City” culture of midcentury Hollywood and pop music.
Since the 1990s, and especially in the last decade, enhanced insulation in the suits has opened some of the most frigid reaches of the world — Alaska, Antarctica, Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden — to surfers seeking isolated adventures, craggy nature and uncrowded and unexplored waves.
“Everyone has done the tropics,” Timothy Latte, 25, a Swede who won the 2015 Lofoten Masters, said. “Cold water surfing is the new black.”
Today’s wet suits, which often cost $200 to $500 but can run to $1,000, are warm, light and flexible. Some come with battery-powered heat. All provide far more reliable protection from the cold than early, improvised gear fashioned from wool sweaters coated in oil; rain jackets and pants taped at the wrists, waist and ankles; dishwashing gloves; bathing caps; and generous slatherings of Vaseline.
Satellite images provided by Google Earth and Google Maps have also brought a sense of discovery to places more reachable by bush plane, boat, helicopter and snowmobile than dune buggy.
At the same time, residents of some remote locales have begun wrestling with the complicated balance of welcoming larger numbers of surfers while keeping pristine settings safe and unspoiled.
Unstad, population 15, is among the Lofoten Islands, an archipelago that juts like an arthritic finger from Norway’s west coast into the Atlantic, more than 100 miles above the Arctic Circle.
