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SW France
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SW France Introduction
It's been said that memory is 80 percent smell. If that's true, an elegy to Southwest France in August might comprise bitter coffee and ripe dog shit; coconut sunscreen and sticky-sweet Orangina; melted root beer wax and stale diesel fumes; saltwatery brine and eau de toilette. The other 20 percent would be slightly more visceral: diamond green barrels spitting close enough to shore to drench the lovely naked asses everywhere; 4 p.m. thunderstorms and 10 p.m. sunsets; waking up in the pine needles and looking for trees bending eastward -- and that's all in one day.
Despite the recent onslaught of two-week, perfect-wave boat trips that are closer to Club Med than Kerouac, there's more to surf travel than getting mindlessly pitted all day, gorging yourself and then going to sleep. If you don't have the time or inclination to immerse yourself in a foreign culture, buy a Game Boy and a ticket to Indo and leave Southwest France to those with a little bit of time and curiosity.
That said, you can score perfect waves in France. With a little luck, you could be surfing green beachbreak barrels, solid rock shelf peaks and (if you're really lucky) perhaps the best rivermouth left in the whole freaking universe. Couple that with fine wine, gorgeous women, hundreds of years of history and architecture, and you've got the potential for the surf trip of a lifetime.
HISTORY
Hollywood screenwriter Peter Viertel brought surfing to France back in 1956, when he was on the Basque coast filming The Sun also Rises. After seeing the untapped surf potential in the Biarritz area, he had a board sent over from California and quickly made friends with Biarritz locals George Hennebutte and Joel de Rosnay.
By the time surf travel was gathering stem in the '60s, guys like Billy Hamilton, Wayne Lynch and Nat Young were coming over to the Bay of Biscay and documenting their amazing discoveries with movies like Evolution and Waves of Change. After American and Australian audiences saw that there was more to France than the Eiffel Tower, travelers starting filtering through in small groups (a la Naughton and Peterson) in the '70s.
By 1979, with the inception of the Lacanau Pro, surfing in France had come of age and began to gain respect as a serious sport. Through the '80s, French people started surfing in droves, the industry began to take shape in the Basque region and more contests started happening up and down the coast.
By the early '90s, France's civilized nature and still relatively uncrowded surf became an escapist cliche for disillusioned American and Australian pros. Guys like Tom Curren, Gary Elkerton, Robbie Page and Maurice Cole started up new lives (Curren in Anglet, Elkerton in Lacanau) in the Old World, legitimizing France's spot on the surf map even further.
The '90s have seen a jump in the competitive French surfing population, with guys like Mickey Picon, Didier Pitier and Laurence Pujol heading out on tour and making a name for themselves in Hawaii and abroad.
Crowds
The days of perfect empty French beachbreak are pretty much over. Unless you don't mind walking (the beach does extend about 130 miles north of Hossegor, with few access points -- you do the math) or don't mind donning some serious rubber (water temps in winter hover in the mid to high 40s), you'll be dealing with other surfers, just like most any other so-called First World country with surf.
The crowds you'll run across in season (June-October) are a wildly eclectic mix, from traveling pros to feral six-to-a-van parking lot dwellers to talented locals. Sometimes it seems all the flotsam of Europe has ended up in Southwest France, particularly during August where the lineups are littered with all manners of surf craft, ability level and fashion disasters (you know how the Euros like their grape-smugglers). It's best to work on your whistle, as "going left" may not actually be understood in the saltwatery Tower of Babel.
But if you're able to pry yourself out of the all-night party scene early enough to hit the sand at dawn, you could be rewarded with silky green-blue barrels with just a few hearty souls. Frenchmen hate the dawn patrol.
Hazards
Apart from an errant beginner's longboard smashing your face or booty-burn from nude sunbathing, France is not such an overtly dangerous place to surf. There are no great whites waiting to take a chunk of flesh; there are no stonefish or stingrays and the last time someone got stung by a sea snake, the snake's name was Francois.
The biggest danger surfing in France is far more subtle -- many a traveling surfer has found himself or herself stumbling back to the parking lot/hotel room at dawn, reeking of cigarettes and overpriced beer, paralytic and completely unable to do anything but vomit and pass out, let alone surf hollow beachbreak. Couple that with maddening month-long summer flat spells and you could end up coming home from a month in Hossegor with a beer belly and some strange sexually transmitted disease instead of a snapped board and a gleam in your eyes.
Pollution
A fall morning after a storm in Hossegor will reveal an entirely international array of detritus washed up on the beach. There are bleach bottles in Spanish, bits of tire with Portuguese writing, German candy wrappers, French perfume bottles, pieces of boat hull with Arabic lettering -- it's as though all of Europe decided that the Bay of Biscay would be the best place for a garbage dump.
Up until the last decade or so, the Atlantic wasn't really used in the winter months, so nobody really cared what it looked like. The bulldozers cleaned all the trash for the summer tourists, but as soon as September came around, you had to walk through a minefield of shit to get to the beautiful offshore (and potentially hepatitis-ridden) barrels.
All this is slowly beginning to change. Surfrider Europe and Greenpeace have been working with the French public and politicians to change their traditional "throw-all-the-shit-in-the-river" ways.
Surfrider Europe has a program called "Black Flags" where they monitor water quality at the French surfing beaches and post black flags up when the water's bacteria count exceeds a standardized safety level. Gives a whole new meaning to the concept of blackball, eh?
The Seasons
Summer
Where else can you surf completely butt-ass naked (if you're into that sort of thing) all morning, walk up the beach and grab a cafe creme and a pain au chocolate for breakfast, smile at perhaps the most genetically perfect women on the face of the planet (if you're into that sort of thing) check out a 16th century castle after lunch, grab the glass off (which lasts till 10 p.m.), have dinner and then proceed to dance all night? Welcome to the fantasy of Southwest France in summertime.
While the fantasy most definitely happens, the reality tends to be different. The Atlantic has an annoying tendency to go completely dead flat for weeks on end between May and September, and it can (and most certainly will) rain for days on end at some point in the middle of summer. Sometimes, the flat spell and the rain storm can happen over the same two-week stretch, and then you'll find out how much you really like French coffee and whatever novel you brought along.
Fall
Fall is why you came to the Bay of Biscay. The weather patterns begin to shift sometime in September -- low-pressure systems start forming up in the North Atlantic and send lines of swell marching straight into France's beachbreaks, the water starts to get a little chillier, the tourists have all pretty much left and the summertime sea breeze starts to clock around offshore. Fall is when you're stoked you brought a good 3/2mm fullsuit and a 6'8" pintail.
Winter
Up until fairly recently, only cold-water hellmen and crazy people surfed in France in the winter. With water temps hovering in the mid to low 40s and giant, shifting beachbreak that's sure to catch you inside, December in the Bay of Biscay is about as far from golden Waikiki as you can get.
But with the advent of new wetsuit technology and a steadily increasing local surfing population not content to surf just eight months a year, crowds have increased. At spots with defined peaks and channels like Guethary and Lafitena and La Piste, you will be surfing with others on any given midwinter's day.
From November to February, size will not be an issue -- strap on your 5/3mm, grab your 7'6" and drive around till you find a peak that won't kill you.
Spring
Spring is a quirky time on the Atlantic coast. The water starts to warm back up (though it can chill right out with one overnight storm); a few sporadic residual North Atlantic swells stagger down the coast; the sandbars are ragged from winter's onslaught; the wind doesn't really know which direction to blow from and one day will see 30 guys to a peak, while the next day will be totally empty.
But if you're feeling lucky and have a little bit of time to sit right on it, spring can be a damn rewarding time to hop on a plane.
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