On Saturday we woke up to a nice sunny morning and headed to a spot near Woolacombe for our first session. It was right after low tide and the waves were clean, waist high. We had a good 2 hours session (got loads of waves), and headed for breakfast in Braunton. 

While we were sat down for breakfast Max made plans to drop his surfboard (Firewire Dominator) off to a shaper in Barnstable. The board was dinged on a surf trip in Morocco when a guy decided to take off on him. We drove to the shaper’s house hoping for some good news. Though the shaper’s reaction was worrying “I have 5 of these boards in my workshop and none of them can be fixed, sorry buddy”.  He carried on explaining how the board had soaked too much water already, it was too heavy on one side etc etc.. There was a moment of silence.. And Max’s face dropped.. Eventually the shaper offered the take the board in and give it a try without making any promises..

We drove back to Woolacombe to chill out, checked the surf shops, bought a new surfboard for myself, rented a demo board for Max and we fixed the ding on Sarah’s board.

It was 2 hours after high tide when we went in for a 2nd session in Woolacombe.  Again clean, waist high waves.. Surfed for a good couple of hours feeling blessed with warm weather. We had a quick lunch and a short power nap and went in for our 3rd session at low tide, surfed until 8:30 pm. 

Feeling surfed out, headed to the pub in Georgeham for a meal – lots of good conversations about surfboards and surf trips – went back to the campsite planning for another dawnie in the morning. 

On Sunday morning, we headed to Croyde for our last session of the weekend. The waves were clean, shoulder high at 10s period. Unfortunately there was a competition and everyone was crammed on each side of the peak but this didn’t stop us from getting some good waves and having fun. I felt the take off at Croyde was quite steep for me, I had a few wipe outs on my new surfboard but managed to get in a couple of nice lefts as well. 

We headed back to the campsite, packed up, after some ghost riding at the campsite (had never heard about this before!), we headed back to London in good time. 

It was a great weekend of warm weather, great food and lots of good waves. I feel like we managed to fit in a weeks worth of activity in such a short time. 

Thanks to Max & Emily for driving us, thanks to Sarah for the legendary banana cookies. Thanks all for great company.