A
fter forty years of surfing the beaches of south-west France, Alf Alderson finds that much has changed, but
one thing hasn’t – the quality of the waves. “Wanna buy some tweeds mate?” “What?” “Wanna buy some tweeds?”
I’m standing, befuddled, on a beach on south- west France’s Atlantic coast as an Aussie surfer asks me if I’d like to buy a woollen suit. Then the penny drops – ‘tweeds’ is Aussie surfer slang for a wetsuit.
As it happened I did want to buy a wetsuit, because it was September 1979 and decent surf wetsuits were hard to get hold of, especially in Europe, a region that was still ‘terra incognita’ as far as most surfers were concerned, so after a little bartering I became the proud owner of my first ‘proper’ surfie wetsuit.
Now here I am again, on that same beach just north of Biarritz in late September 2018, and it appears that everyone and their dog is a surfer around here now. The sun-dappled Atlantic is awash with shortboards, longboards, bodyboards and SUPS; the shoreline is an open-air market for surf schools catering for novice surfers from as far afield as Germany and Russia; once you get onto the streets, it’s hard to walk more than 20 metres without passing a surf shop, surf bar or surf hostel; and drive a few kilometres inland and you’ll come across the European headquarters of global surf brands such as Quiksilver, Rip Curl and Billabong.
On this trip with my mate Mark we’ve decided to do things on the cheap, opting for a budget self-catering apartment in the lesser-known surf spot of Mimizan Plage. Even so it’s within a thirty-second walk of the beach, and is a far cry from the battered canvas tent I had on my first ‘surfari’ almost 40 years ago, a trip which involved stealing vegetables from fields and allotments, drinking cheap, warm supermarket beer at the campsite before hitting the much more expensive bars around Hossegor, and if possible bailing from the campsite late at night without paying – so accurate for the old image of surfers as beach bums and wastrels…
The sun-dappled Atlantic is awash with
shortboards, longboards, bodyboards and SUPS,
the shoreline is an open air market
Back then Hossegor was the spot to be because it generally has the biggest and best surf; these days it’s the place to be because, in autumn at least, it hosts the Quiksilver Pro and Women’s Roxy Pro World Surf League professional surfing contests, if you like that kind of thing.
Mark and I don’t, which is why we are a hundred kilometres north of Hossegor in order to avoid the hype and the crowds. It’s often the
case that older, more experienced surfers will stay away from the places they frequented in their youth like this.
These days, if you don’t surf in south-west France, god knows what you do; in fact research by the University of Oxford indicates that good quality surf spots, like those found by the score along the 260-km stretch of coastline between Biarritz in the south and the Gironde estuary in the north, can generate in excess of $20 million a year to the local economy, so it’s no wonder that wave riders of every sort are so well catered for. So much for the old image of surfers as beach bums and wastrels…
The main reason, of course, is because no one enjoys surfing in crowds (and remember the golden rule of surfing – one surfer per wave), even more so when you’re old enough (alas) to recall the days when there actually were no crowds; it kind of takes the glow off the wave riding experience in Hossegor and equally busy Biarritz.
That said, surfing had been developing slowly in the area for around twenty years on my first visit so it could also get pretty busy at the favoured breaks back in the 70s, but not to the extent that it does today, and if you ventured away from these ‘honeypots’ then it was quite feasible to surf a break with just a few friends for company. In fact, there were so few surfers around that we’d often bump into the same people as we travelled
ONBOARD | WINTER 2019 | 49
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