For nearly two hours on a windy Sunday in February, Henry Hurren took a beating in the waters off a largely uninhabited island in Hong Kong, trying to surf a short wave for a few moments at a time.
The half-hour ferry ride there from the Chinese territory’s main island was bustling with day trippers. Mr. Hurren, 32, passed outdoor restaurants and families who had camped overnight as he hiked to the spot he paddled out from in a wetsuit.
But in the water, he was alone, trying to prove there are new places to surf in a city without a lot them.
The wave off Tung Lung Chau is known as a slab, a quick one that breaks on a rock. It is not the kind you picture a surfer riding smoothly toward shore in a world-class surf spot like Bali. Over and over, Mr. Hurren caught it for a few seconds before tumbling back into the chilly water.
Many surfers never surf slabs, said Mr. Hurren, a nature guide who teaches surfing and shares some of the waves he finds on his Instagram page. “It’s like a really concentrated version of surfing,” he said.
The surf scene in Hong Kong — a territory that includes more than 250 islands in the South China Sea — is concentrated at a few beaches that lack consistent year-round swell. But those beaches are relatively accessible to a city of about 7.5 million people.
The best-known and easiest to access is Big Wave Bay on the east coast of Hong Kong Island, the main one in the territory. It is a tiny, imperfect stretch of sand next to a village that can be reached in about 20 minutes by taxi from the high rises that dot the endless skyline Hong Kong is better known for. The waves there are usually not that big.
The beach is also used by swimmers and standup paddle boarders, and tensions can run high if too many people are in the water. Last year, the government began intermittently enforcing a rule against surfing at the beach, according to people who surf there.
One shop near the beach commissioned a sign explaining surf etiquette, complete with an illustration of a surfer shouting a Cantonese expletive after being hit in the head with someone else’s board.
Mr. Hurren has been going to Big Wave Bay since he was 5 but says he never felt entirely comfortable there and that it can be hostile to newcomers. Any secret surf spots he did not find himself were not his to share.
If he wanted more people to surf, he would have to find other places. Waves like the one off Tung Lung Chau are not for everyone, he acknowledged, but he has found about a dozen more spots suitable for a range of skill levels.
“The thing that makes Hong Kong surf so special is you have to believe in it for it to work for you and everyone around you,” Mr. Hurren said. “I’d say turning nothing into something is what our Hong Kong spirit is.”
The sport had such a low profile when Mavis Lai, 41, was growing up in Hong Kong that she did not even know she could surf there. She first took it up at a weeklong camp in the Canary Islands after she had moved away and was working in London.
After Ms. Lai moved back to Hong Kong in 2015, she worked as a surfing coach for a couple of years before becoming a sports therapist. She recalled going to Thailand and marveling at how good the local surfers were despite, like Hong Kongers, not having much surf all year. The waves were much better there, she said.
“Maybe in Hong Kong we have the worst conditions ever,” she said she remembers thinking.
But Ms. Lai makes the most of it. In the winter, the main surf season at Big Wave Bay, she goes there three or four times a week. She tries to schedule her work around the forecast and trains to stay fit enough to last for several hours whenever the surf is good.
Other Hong Kong surfers go farther, venturing across the border to the Chinese province of Guangdong.
Clark Wang, who runs a surf hostel and teaches surfing in the city of Shanwei, said by phone from Bali that he has noticed an influx of people from Hong Kong. In 2023, there were only one or two, he said. Now Mr. Wang estimates that Hong Kongers account for about a quarter of Shanwei’s surfers.
Rohan Rajpal, 27, who has spent the weekend in Shanwei at least six times since October, still surfs at Big Wave Bay during the week. Mr. Rajpal, who works in financial technology, said he thinks the wave in Shanwei is fun but that the water is nicer in Hong Kong.
Mr. Hurren said it had taken him a decade to surf waves he had seen “just because I didn’t think it was doable.”
He said he first noticed the wave he was riding off Tung Lung Chau as a teenager but began surfing it only last year. Before that, he spent years paddling out to look for the rock it breaks on.
On that windy Sunday in February, an experienced surfer saw him carrying his board and stopped to ask where the waves were.
