How a child scared of the ocean grew to love big waves
Cleland’s father, Alan Cleland Sr., first took him out on the waves when he was four years old. By six, he was surfing on his own and taking advantage of any opportunity to get into the water.
While at school, Cleland would skip lunch and go surfing during the midday break.
“I had 30 minutes. I would get my board and go straight to the water. Then I would go back to school, and the teacher would get mad at me: ‘You’re all wet. I’m not going to let you in the school’. And I was like, ‘OK!’ and I would go straight back to the water,” he recalled with a laugh. “I’ve been surfing my whole life. It’s something that has formed a big part of who I am.”
While the waves pulled Cleland in with an irrisistible force, they also shook him up. It was not without tears that he tackled his first big waves at the age of 11.
“Pascuales is a very dangerous wave. It’s a lot of water, a lot of current. It’s the open sea,” Cleland said. “The first few times, it scared me quite a bit … I was crying. I’ve never liked big waves. I don’t know why, but while I was growing up, out of all my friends, I was the one who was most afraid. Even now I don’t understand why, but I was always very afraid of the ocean.”
It was a battle both against nature and his fears as Cleland paddled out to the powerful beach break time and time again, until one day he was no longer afraid.
And since Pascuales became a surfing playground for him, Cleland has shed his fear of other big waves as well. Surfing the infamously treacherous Teahupo’o during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Cleland charged into barrels to collect scores in the 7s and 8s and advance to the third round.
Less than half a year later, he made his WSL Championship Tour debut, advancing to the Round of 16 on the fast-breaking barrels of the Banzai Pipeline in Hawaii.
“Living there, you get used to the dangers. You get used to the fears you have,” Cleland said of how growing up near Pascuales steeled him for the world’s most intimidating waves. “You have to overcome your fears and everything that scares you.”