9.30am : Lacanau-Ocean, Aquitaine, France
I’m sat in my car in the car park on the seafront at Lacanau; its cloudy and windy, the waves are big and blown out. Three surfers are in the front of their van checking the surf next to me, they’re drinking coffee and don’t look as if they’ll be paddling out anytime soon. My friend Dee is in the surf shop up the road buying a new leash so I thought I would take the opportunity to go through my notes from the brief converstion I had with Guy yesterday – It’s been a couple of months since we last spoke; I have been calling him but he has been his elusive self. When I eventually got hold of him he was in a bar in the departure lounge in Seville airport…
- Seville, cool!
- Well, yes, but its been a flying visit. We were working in Portugal, then we had 2 days here. I’m in London tomorrow and then Gloucester. Haha, not very rock and roll.
- Where’s Gloucester?
- It’s in the South West of England
- Cool
- I don’t know, it might be. I’ll let you know [laughing]. We just got back from a wicked trip to Ireland though. It was fully pumping – some days it was so good we couldn’t decide where to surf. We were in my mate’s van; one night we parked at a point break we surf loads – at first light it was about 4-5ft, no wind and the waves were reeling perfectly down the point and into the channel, so sick. As we paddled out it picked up. This dude from Dublin took off in front of me, blew the take off and got drilled. He was lying in the impact zone not moving so me and my mate, John, had to recuse him. The rip was so strong it took us about half and hour to get him in. We paddled back out, the swell kept picking up, we had loads of fun waves. It had been raining heavily and the water was black from the peat in the fields. After about 3 hours I took off super late on a big one. I made the drop somehow and had enough speed to get around the first section and then went into a cut back at full tilt and as I came back around the wave hit the inside section and peeled all the way down the point until it fizzled out in the river. My legs were like jelly and when I looked back the boys were little dots on the horizon…
- Fab
- …so we got out, kept our suits on, had a coffee and drove to a sweet little right hand slab down the road. When we arrived there were some French guys getting out – they were laughing and smiling so we knew that the waves were epic. We jumped in and paddled across the channel. The waves were perfect, empty and barreling. The swell had picked up a bit and some of the set waves were only just makeable. My mate Tony took off on one, the bottom dropped out of it and he free fell into this dark swirling pit of doom [laughing] … so funny! Anyway, the tide pushed up and it got so shallow we had to get out. We started paddling back through the channel and the rip was so savage that it was pulling us straight out to sea. By the time we got back it felt like we had been in an endurance race. We had a banana each and a flapjack and all agreed that we should keep the suits on and check another sick right just down the road. Guess what – it was firing – 4 to 6ft Irish perfection – yeeehaaa! We paddled out and it was insane, double overhead and fully peeling, totally rad. I had a load of waves and then I was sat out the back and I noticed that the sun was dropping in the sky. I looked at my mate Haze and he said “what time is it?” Haha, we had been in the water all day, we’d surfed for a total of 8.5hrs [laughing again]
- You must of been so tired
- Ah mate, the first pint of Guiness was soooo nice and then we ordered enough food for 10 people … hey mate, I gotta go – our flight is boarding. Lovely to speak to you. Take it easy : Woop !
…and just like that, he was gone