It’s now more than 18 months since I travelled anywhere (other than Agnes Water) to surf, my longest homestay in over 30 years.
To be honest, it hasn’t bothered me as much I’d imagined it would, mainly because we live in a surfing paradise with other surfing paradises nearby. And having recently become a septuagenarian, it’s not like I’m jonesing to get on a boat, find a slab and surf HARD. No, that bird has flown. Travel, however, is in my bones, and when I can, I will, for as long as I’m able.
Now that everyone is talking about a return to normality, the international borders opening to us with vaccine passports and so on, it doesn’t take much to start me dreaming. This week it was a post on the Magic Seaweed website about a dot in the Baltic Sea called Bornholm, where a guy named Dennie Hilding has lived, run a sustainable farm and surfed for about a decade.
Bornholm’s first surfer, Dennie has spawned a crew of about 20 who surf year round despite the icicles. And it looks pretty good. I pulled up Google Earth and worked out that I had once looked at that body of water from the opposite coast, and had seen fun waves.
It was 2003, and to celebrate their admission to the European Union, the Baltic States were offering ridiculously cheap “weekend escapes”. My wife and I grabbed one and flew from our home in France to Vilnius, Lithuania. We spent a couple of days exploring that magical little city that still bears the scars of two brands of totalitarian cruelty, then lit out for the Baltic coast in a rented Lada, coming to rest at the seaside resort of Palanga, where I saw peeling left and rights to either side of the long pier.
Trading the Russian deathtrap for a couple of cycles, we rode along the shore for several hours, finding more surfable waves in little rock bottom coves. Never saw a surfer or a surfboard, but if I’d been kitted with a board and 5mms of neoprene, I’d have surfed in at least four of the breaks we found.
Since first going to Europe in 1973, I’ve surfed the Atlantic coasts from County Donegal, Ireland in the north to Safi, Morocco in the south, the North Sea coasts of Yorkshire, Scotland, the Netherlands and Belgium, the islands of the Channel and all over the Med. I’ve never been much of a cold water person, but jeez I’ve had some fun!
In the early days, of course, we were never prepared for it. In the summer of ’73, my mate and I abandoned our bikes in Exeter and caught the train to Newquay, Cornwall, where at a surf shop 100 metres from the station I bought a second-hand Bilbo rounded pin from the legendary Aussie surfer Stuart “Twizzle” Entwhistle. I didn’t have enough dough to also buy a duck-tail wetsuit, so until I’d got a job as a guesthouse (not so) handyman and saved 10 quid, I braved the Cornish elements in just my boardies.
In later years when Europe was our base, my work took me everywhere, and always left time to look for surf. And, working for a surf company, there was never a shortage of surfboards or wetsuits wherever we went.
Gary “Kong” Elkerton and I once travelled up to Yorkshire for our mate Gabe Davies’ buck’s party, and with ferocious hangovers the next morning, we surfed beautiful lefts on a reef just outside the shipyard where Captain James Cook did his apprenticeship. Another time I took a bunch of Hawaiian surfers on a promotional trip to the beautiful island of Jersey, where, when the massive tide rushed in, we surfed fun waves until they started smashing into the seawall. That night we held a Meet the Hawaiians party at the pub and the entire Jersey surfing community turned up in suits and ties.
But the best of times in my search for European surf were in Sardinia, an unlikely swell magnet in the middle of the Mediterranean. Here the water was relatively warm, and the rugged island offered a variety of surf, ranging from playful longboard waves in the bay of the capital, Cagliari, to challenging reef setups on the windswept north and west coasts, particularly at a place called Capo Manu.
After every morning surf session, our Italian hosts would insist on setting up long tables by the beach and serving astonishing multi-course lunches washed down with good local wines, making the evening glass-off surf sessions somewhat comical.
I think of surfing in Europe often, particularly at this time of year, when the evenings on the Bay of Biscay are still gloriously long, the summer crowds have thinned out and the swells are consistent and clean.
Will we ever get back there? I live in hope that the borders will reopen before the steam runs out.
FOOTNOTE: Another too-close-for-comfort episode last week at the river mouth when super-fit foil surfer and stand-up paddler Martin Krause suffered a heart attack as he left the water. Two off-duty nurses performed CPR until the ambulance arrived. Martin has now joined our large stent club. Heart disease can hit anyone. Never take it lightly. Wishing Martin and Laure all the best for a speedy recovery.
