Scottish surfing champion Phoebe Strachan joins the fight to save the seabed

To put it mildly then, Davies is not a man to shy away from a challenge, but there were times during his most recent project when he feared he may have bitten off more than he could chew. Since 2013, when he brought his pro surfing career to a close, Davies has worked for Patagonia, the famously planet-first outdoors clothing and gear company, and he is currently their ocean marketing manager covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

For the last couple of years he has been working on Patagonia’s Protect Our Ocean campaign, a concerted effort to persuade decision-makers all over Europe to bring an end to bottom trawling – a fishing practice that destroys vital habitats on the seabed. It’s been a complex project, involving coordinating with various different environmental NGOs dotted around the continent, overseeing a series of initiatives to raise public awareness, including the production of five short documentaries, and setting up a petition calling for “an immediate ban on bottom trawling in Marine Protected Areas and inshore zones”, which has now attracted over 200,000 signatures.

Having done all this, however, Davies felt he needed a single, inspirational image to tie everything together – an image that would, as he puts it, “connect the surf community to the environmental community, and something that might also inspire people who might never visit an NGO website to go ‘wow, what is this image and what are they trying to say here?’” The concept he eventually set his heart on was bold but also logistically nightmarish: an underwater shot featuring two surfers, one in the foreground holding a bellyboard with a slogan on it; the other in silhouette, streaking along a wave breaking just behind.

Having enlisted the services of veteran lensman Al Mackinnon, and with some of Patagonia’s top surfers at his disposal, Davies initially tried to set up a shoot for the spring of 2023, but it wasn’t to be.

“We wanted the image to be relevant to the campaign,” he says, “so it had to be somewhere where the campaign is active, so we were in Scotland, but with that come all the variables: you need sunlight, you need perfect wave conditions, you need great surfers, you can’t have crowds so you need a remote location, so for all those stars to align was always going to be hard.”

At the second attempt, however, at an undisclosed location somewhere in northern Scotland, everything came together and Mackinnon managed to capture the desired lightning-in-a-bottle moment: five-times Scottish surfing champion and Patagonia ambassador Phoebe Strachan rocketing across a perfectly-lit wave, with champion longboarder Nienke Duinmeijer of Holland in the foreground, holding a bellyboard bearing the slogan “Protect the ocean so it can protect us”.

“We basically had everything going against us,” recalls Strachan, “the time, the tide, the time of year, the daylight, all of that, so we knew we only had a very small window – pretty much just three hours – to try and get this shot. It was really difficult because the people under the water obviously couldn’t see what was going on above the water and the people above the water couldn't see what was going on below, so we had to be really careful and just hope that no one was going to get run over.”

How does the Patagonia campaign apply to Scotland specifically? Perhaps the best person to answer that question is Nick Underdown of the Scottish charity and Patagonia partner organisation Open Seas, which campaigns to protect the marine environment by promoting sustainable fishing practices.

“Scotland supposedly has a network of Marine Protected Areas but many of them have no protection at all from bottom trawling,” he says. “This is an unacceptable situation that the Scottish Government has promised coastal communities it will resolve for years, but it hasn’t delivered.”

“The Scottish Government set up Marine Protected Areas in 2014, but ten years later less than five per cent of our inshore seas are protected from fishing methods that actively scrape the seafloor. So we’re left with this crazy situation where some of these areas have got OK protection in place, but many of them have no management at all, so the damage continues.”

For more on Patagonia's Protect Our Ocean campaign, visit www.eu.patagonia.com; For more on Open Seas, visit www.openseas.org.uk