“EVERYBODY thought we were nuts.”

While surfing was already popular in more tropical climates, Andy Bennetts and Malcolm Findlay were among the first to head to Scotland’s coastline with their surfboards.

Now, about 60 years later, the two friends have come together to compile a history of Scottish surfing.

Surfing Scotland: Sixty Years Of Surfing In The Cold Water Kingdom was published last month and has already attracted positive reviews.

Andy, who lives in Haddington, said: “We are looking at why Scottish surfers are different from other surfers.

“It is basically to do with the hardships you have to put up with in terms of cold weather, snow on the beach and that sort of stuff.

“We are having a look at how the sport has developed.

“Right from the early days, East Lothian and Pease Bay, that area, was pivotal to the development of surfing in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“There was a very small number of people doing it.

“There was a group in Fraserburgh, which Malcolm was one of up there, and our paths crossed.

“They had a bit of a surfing club and we had the same and it developed from that into, eventually, the Scottish Surfing Federation, which covered the whole country.”

The new book goes on to look at the modern facilities and how the sport has changed, including the creation of the Coast to Coast Surf School in Dunbar.

Technology has also changed, with more effective wetsuits protecting the country’s surfers from the elements.

Andy first tried the sport when he was just 17 and now, at the age of 73, can still be found on the waves off East Lothian and the Scottish Borders’ coast.

He said: “I started surfing back in the 1960s. The first time I stood up on a board was in Cornwall in 1965.

“I was hooked on surfing from quite an early age and got a surfboard for myself.

“My grandparents lived in Cornwall and we used to go to see them on an annual holiday.

“I decided surfing was the sport for me and in 1968 I bought a board, which we had sent up from Corn- wall because you could not get anything anywhere else at that point.

“Myself and two friends went up to Aberdeen in the train with the boards and we thought we were the only people with surfboards in the whole of Scotland.”

Over the next 60 years, the popularity of the sport “mushroomed” and it is now an Olympic sport.

And while much of the attention at the next Olympic Games will be on the sporting stars in Paris, there will be a battle on the other side of the world, with Olympic gold up for grabs in Tahiti.

Surfers gathered at Pease Bay at the weekend for an event called Gathering of the Clans, before the book was officially launched in nearby Dunbar on Saturday.

Andy said: “Essentially, it is the history of Scottish surfing in a book and we have written it.

“That makes me feel pretty proud that we have managed to achieve that.

“When you see copies and the way it has turned out, it was a lot of work but I am very pleased and so is Malcolm.”