Transcriber: Sabha Abdel Aziz Meslhy Reviewer: David DeRuwe
Hello, everyone.
Like you already know, my name is Girmantas.
What you don't know about me,
when I was four or five years old, I had a drowning experience.
I was learning how to swim in a lake,
and I had to swim along a low pier to make maybe one meter,
a meter and a half.
There was a windsurf board in front of me, and I had to make this short distance.
Yet I went straight down to the bottom.
To this day, I remember going underwater, some weeds around me,
small fish swimming by, windsurfing board ahead.
Also sun glare.
Someone jumping after me and pulling me out.
It wasn't really dangerous or anything.
It happened within a few seconds,
I didn't lose consciousness, I didn't drink too much water.
Yet it was quite terrifying
to realize how quickly things can change in the water,
how quickly you can lose control and lose your ground.
If anybody told me back then that I would spend most of my life
in and around the water, I would have never believed it.
Yet this is the first picture of me surfing just a couple of years later.
In the early 90s,
nobody believed that there's surfing in Lithuania or in the Baltic Sea.
You can imagine.
Lithuania just regained independence,
and Western culture was still quite alien to us.
We didn't have even the right equipment.
I was riding a windsurfing board, just without a sail.
I remember coming back to school after the summer
and writing an essay: "How I Surfed during the Summer."
Nobody believed it; even the teacher was laughing at me.
(Laughter)
Luckily I had the picture to prove them wrong, so I didn't get a bad grade.
However, this addiction to catch another wave
has literally shaped me as a person.
I kept coming back for more, and I still am.
I might even say that surfing gave me a reason to be better at anything I do.
Now before I continue, I'd like to ask you a question.
How many of you before entering here today
thought that there is no surfing in Lithuania?
Just raise your hands.
Just a few?
Well, we can continue in the bar then.
All right, so I'll take it that the work we did over the last 10 years paid off.
But today, I am surfing the waves all over the world.
I am the founder-president of Lithuanian Surfing Association.
I am also an organizer of Surf Camp Festival.
Surf Camp was instrumental to bringing surfing to masses in Lithuania.
10 years ago, mainstream opinion was pretty clear:
There's no surfing in Lithuania; there are no waves.
Even our friends that used other boards like skateboards, snowboards,
wind and kite surf, and so on, even they didn't believe
that the waves are good enough for surfing.
So we decided that it's pointless to fight this opinion and argue about it,
let's invite them for a surf camp.
A couple buddies, my cousin, and I,
we shaped seven boards, and invited 50 friends to try surfing.
That's how all started:
with 50 friends at the beach, surfing during the day,
listening to music overnight, and watching surf movies at the beach.
10 years later,
2000 people gathered in Preila this August,
and we had 480 people trying surfing for the first time in their life.
Actually, Surf Camp was growing so fast,
that we had to scale it back after year six
because we weren't ready to accommodate so many people.
And the whole idea was that Surf Camp is an event
which is free of charge, and we teach anyone
who wants to catch a wave and to be safe around the water.
However, thanks to Surf Camp, surfing is not so uncommon in Lithuania anymore.
We have surf schools opening up here and there. We have surf shops.
Local news are covering our national championships,
and local shapers are even producing Lithuanian surfboards.
Suddenly, more and more Lithuanians are travelling the world to surf
in Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Latin America, and East Asia.
And part of the reason for that, the biggest part of reason for that,
is surfing itself.
It's very hard to describe the feeling, the sensation you feel,
when you ride the wave.
Yet, this ever-changing body of water, moving wall of water,
provides exceptional joy.
Surfing has one of the slowest learning curves.
It's very hard physically.
Yet it's the same difficulty mentally
because you need to learn how to read the waves,
you need to understand where the wave is going to break,
what is it going to do next, and so on.
That's why surfing is a unique sport because it doesn't have any premeditation.
You can't have a general idea or a plan what you want to do.
Yet it all comes down to the wave that the ocean will provide you with.
No two waves are the same.
Some might be very similar, but most are really different.
And that's why you can't plan ahead; you just have to be present.
Some scientists believe that this concentration required
and being present helps to treat some mental conditions,
like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
In Britain, National British Health Service
even provides funding for surf treatment camps.
So people who suffer from these conditions
might get some help.
Last year, we held the first Surf Camp for kids
with autism spectrum disorder, here in Lithuania.
We followed the international experience, and the results were simply amazing.
In the beginning, everyone had their doubts.
Some said the water is too cold; others said kids don't know how to swim.
Others said something else, the usual stuff.
But when the first kid caught a wave,
the emotions, the smile on his face, was simply priceless.
I don't remember ever seeing so much positive energy in the air.
And then everybody wanted to do that.
We had a hard time to bring them out of the water.
They were all late for lunch.
All of these experiences weren't possible if I didn't try surfing 25 years ago.
But people say that it's the journey that matters, not the destination.
And I think that everything that happens in between the waves,
in between riding the waves, is just as important.
The tiring travels across the world,
the waiting in the airport or in the surfing spot,
waiting for a swell to show up.
Fatigue, excitement, all of that adds up.
Each wave has a story:
What did it take for you to get there and to catch it?
What did you have to overcome?
What did you have to sacrifice?
What coincidences steered you towards it?
Every wave is an adventure,
and one of those adventures happened four years ago in Morocco.
We were on a surf trip with a couple of friends,
and this particular spot we were surfing in had a big rip current in it.
What is a rip current?
A rip current is a water stream that goes straight out to the ocean.
If you imagine waves breaking at the beach, you could realize quickly
that the water is not going to climb uphill.
It has to come back to the ocean, so usually the water finds a channel
and goes straight back to the ocean.
This particular place, this particular rip current,
was as wide as the stage I'm standing on right now
and moving as fast as seven kilometers an hour,
which is a regular walking pace,
so you can imagine, that's quite a lot of water moving around.
So on a pretty big day, my buddy Marios and me, we paddled out,
and at the end of the channel, we heard a cry for help.
(Audience) Help! help!
So Hisi Maris still remembers the story.
So, there was a guy, a body boarder without fins, floating around -
doesn't seem too bad.
Well, he was half a kilometer out to sea.
So we tried to give him some pointers, some advice,
what to do, where to go, how to come in safely to the shore,
but we just quickly came to realize that he's not going to make it on his own.
So much for surfing big waves; we had to help the poor fellow.
If it wasn't for us, nobody knows how he would have ended,
because there was nobody else in the water and you couldn't see him from the beach.
So me and Marios, we took turns by dragging the guy
while he was holding on our feet.
And what do you do when you're in a rip current?
It's pointless to paddle against the stream
because it'll wear you down and get the better of you.
The only way to escape the stream is to go perpendicular to the stream,
far enough so it doesn't affect you anymore,
and only then you can come back to the shore.
On one side, we had a rocky point;
on the other side, there were three kilometers of sandy beach.
It was clear that we were going to go to the south for at least a kilometer,
so we were far enough from the current, and then we can come back to safety.
When we reached the beach break, we didn't want to endanger ourselves,
and stop for a minute to explain to the guy
how we were going to proceed next.
Having two boards, board leashes, a clueless beachgoer with us meant danger.
Once a real threat presents itself,
you couldn't really expect what he was going to do,
and we didn't really want to entangle ourselves with him.
This proved to be a crucial mistake because a feeder current
took us back another half a kilometer in three minutes.
So we had to start over again halfway back.
After some time, a local school owner paddled out on a big board,
on a longboard, so it was easier for him to help us,
and it was more efficient to drag the poor fellow in.
And according to my GPS watch, it took us one hour and three kilometers of paddling
until we finally got him to safety.
He was in shock, perhaps hypothermic,
and medics took over once on the beach.
If this whole experience taught me one thing, you have to be aware.
If you're on the water, you have to be present,
have to be aware, have to know what's happening.
This lost concentration for a couple of minutes
did cost us another 20 minutes of paddling.
In other cases, in other instances, the cost might be much higher.
But then, let's step out of the water.
How aware are we in our everyday life?
How many of you felt that sometimes
life is carrying you like a current,
like you're not controlling your everyday life.
You go to work you hate because everybody does.
You take a mortgage on your house or apartment
because everybody does.
You do things you have to, but not the things you want to.
It's pointless to fight the stream.
And if you want to go somewhere, you'll have to find the way around.
So if you stop and look around and define what is happening to you,
only then you can understand where you've been taken.
Only then you can determine your next goal, where you want to go,
define the obstacles, and find the way around.
And if we reflect on my childhood experience,
I drowned not because I didn't know how to swim,
everybody in this auditorium knows how to swim,
or at least, how to float in the water,
That's in our body; we can float.
I drowned because I didn't even try.
So that's what people do when they lose ground.
They try to reach for the bottom,
and usually they reach the bottom.
But not in the way they want to.
So my tip for all of you,
if you suddenly lose your ground and start drowning,
just stick your head up and swim to safety.
Thank you.
(Applause)