Starting life as a small tropical depression off the coast of Africa near the Cape Verde Islands on 21 August 1966, Hurricane Faith was exceptional in that it maintained a hurricane intensity for a period of 15 days while travelling a complicated route around the southern, western and northern perimeter of the Bermuda high pressure system. The entire track of Faith represents one of the longest hurricane tracks on record. The centre of the hurricane passed within 40 kilometres of St. Maarten, Leeward Islands. There were gale force winds in the northern islands of the Leewards, the Virgin Islands, and along the northern coast of Puerto Rico but only minor damage was reported.

After travelling up the eastern seaboard of the United States, Faith continued northeast, crossing tha Atlantic and responsible for the deaths of two men attempting to cross the Atlantic in a rowing boat, Puffin. Prior to reaching Scandinavia, Faith passed over the Faeroe Islands. Finally, on September 6, after travelling 8,000 miles over open water, Faith came ashore near Trondheim, Norway. One person drowned when a ferry boat sank near Denmark. Remnants of this long-lived storm were tracked for a further 9 days and 2,700 miles, crossing northwest Russia and finally dissipating over the ice a mere 300 miles from the North Pole.

Faith had been building up a huge ground swell in the Atlantic, which it continued to reinforce as it travelled north west towards Scandinavia. These huge seas arrived on an unsuspecting Cornish coast on a bright sunny morning in early September 1966 this being long before the days of wavebuoys, or animated WAM's. With an offshore wind to hold up the long walls of water, they were like nothing seen before or since in living memory.

This was my last day in Newquay before the start of the next term at university. I walked along Fistral from Pentire to Towan Head, where a small crowd had gathered to watch, open mouthed, as monstrous waves formed over the Cribbar reef and thundered up the rocks at their feet. This looked more like Waimea Bay than Cornwall, with the waves starting to feather more than half a mile out.

Jack Lydgate and visiting Aussie surfers Johnny McIlroy and Pete Russell paddled out. Doug Wilson was there with his camera. 'It was an incredible sight', said Doug. 'Cribbar was really working, there were rights and lefts on the waves. The trio of surfers just sat and watched for a while as these monsters marched in, then one by one, they took off'. Paddling hard and deep, each clawed his way into the shallow faced 15 foot lumps, before taking a drop that came direct out of their own nightmares. Sixty feet further in, the wave disembowelled itself on the reef, turning inside out and sucking anything in the way into a foam ball that spectators described as 'the size on an average house'.

'Some of the waves were actually over twenty feet', said Doug. You look at the wave, and you look at the surfer and as Jack was six feet tall, some of these brutes were three times overhead.

'It was hard to estimate the exact size' said John Conway, late editor of British surfing magazine Wavelength, who was watching from Towan Head at the time. 'But when Jack Lydgate paddled up one wave, he left three hand-hole paddle marks in the face - and he wasn't even at the top. He was riding an 11 foot board'.

Roger Mansfield said 'There were lines stacked up to the horizon, and to this day, its the biggest surf I have ever been close to in my life. The men went down the old lifeboat slipway and paddled out wide round the headland'.

Jack Lydgate got cleaned up. He was strong and powerful and managed to swim back round the headland. It was a long time before we saw him again. As Jack staggered back up the old lifeboat slip, Pip Staffieri's little ice-crean van parked nearby. Jack ambled over to the van, having just come through hell and said, 'How about a free ice cream for all the trade I've brought you this morning?' Pip, with a big smile, leaned out of his van and handed jack the biggest ice cream you've ever seen!