In a Swedish summer the kindest thing you can say about the sea temperature is that it’s cold; in winter it’s freezing. Literally: in January and February, surfers at Torö, an only partly inhabited island an hour’s drive south of Stockholm, have been known to walk out over a crust of Baltic sea-ice to get to the waves. Even when I visit, in October, a frigid wind is blowing; the sea is restless, the colour of mackerel and cold as a fish’s skin. It looks anything but welcoming; but according to Daniel Månsson, who took the photographs on these pages, “Tomorrow, maybe Monday, it’s going to be working. We’ll be out there.”
Pictured: The photographer’s childhood friend Magnus, paddling out. Joel Sjögren, a 16-year-old regular, says: “This is just what Torö’s like. When you look at it, you can feel the water beneath you, how cold and dark it is.”
