ONBOARD Magazine winter 2019

After 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 southwest
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.
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 sun-dappled
Atlantic is awash with
shortboards, longboards,
bodyboards and SUPS,
the shoreline is an open
air market
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…
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.
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