9am, on the beach, La Graviere, South West France…
The sky is blue, I can feel the light offshore breeze on the side of my face as it grooms the perfect 3-4ft waves that are breaking in front of me. There are smiling surfers everywhere, I’m wondering what Guy is up to, so I call him… he answers, tells me he’s going surfing and will call me back.
It’s now 5pm and he hasn’t called so I try again;
- Hola!
- Haha, OK – so what happened to “I’ll call you in a bit”?
- Sorry mate, I’ve been in the water all day. It’s been epic. I got in when I spoke to you, surfed for about 3 hours, got out, had a cheese omelette and a coffee and then got back in until about 4pm – I’m broken.
- No worries. So what’s happening?
- Oh, It’s been so cool. Summer has been sick… I went to Ireland with my mate Dennis at the start of June, it was super chilled, the waves didn’t pump but we surfed every day, we hung out on Achill Island for a while, “wild and empty”, found a couple of quiet little spots that I’ve never surfed before. We scored a rad river mouth all to ourselves one evening, there was no wind, really still and head high peelers reeling down this boulder point. I rode my foamie and I was tucking into the curl at full speed on these glassy little walls, sick! The next morning we woke up for a dawn patrol and as the sun rose the sky turned electric pink, then it faded to electric purple and then orange, the colours were so vivid that the side of the van was glowing the same colour as the sky, so beautiful, magical. Then I was in Spain with work for about a month, super hot everyday; one afternoon in Murcia it got up to 44 degrees, mental !! I think it’s the hottest conditions I’ve ever played in.
- My mum say’s its one of the hottest Summers she can remember in San Sebastian. So, how’s Newquay? How long are you home for?
- well, I’ve been here for the last 3 weeks, the town is pumping, super busy. We’ve had waves most days. I’ve even surfed the South Coast a few times. Newquay is kind of always busy but this time of year it just blows up, I love it. I’m away a bit over the next few weeks, I gotta go to Cologne and then I’m meant to be in Naples in Italy but I might try and get out of that, my mates are going to Thurso so if the chart looks good I’ll jump in with them instead.
- Where’s Thurso?
- It’s a cool little town in Scotland that is home to one of the best waves in Europe, when it’s on it’s world class, check it out on the internet, lovely people, sick waves and…
and then we talked more about surfing in Scotland. This led back to Ireland and then we chatted briefly about a trip he has planned with a couple of his mates to the Lofoten Islands in Norway which is somewhere that I really want to go to. Mmmm – I wonder if they’ve got room for one more ?