Its seems kind of ironic that having lived on the Gold Coast in Australia for most of my life its only now when I’m living in England that I have felt inspired enough to take a surfing lesson. Jenny, Sandra and Catherine were also surprisingly up for the lesson so on this technically last weekend of summer slash first weekend of spring of we headed out West for a girl’s weekend by the coast. Although London is fairly close (about an hour or two) from the southern and eastern coast of England the waves are all on the west coast which is quite a drive away – the surfing lesson was at Harlyn Bay which is near Padstow in Cornwall. Being the last weekend of summer finding room for the four of us in a B&B was darn near impossible in Padstow so I had to extend the search to Newquay, about a half an hour drive away. It was just as well we’d gone with the hire car for the weekend (thanks to Sandra for doing all the driving – especially the 5-6 hour drive to and from London which freed the rest of us up to snooze in the car 🙂 ) otherwise I’m not sure how we would have made it around.

Newquay is a strangely popular place for stag and hen does and as a result the high street was lively and heaving with energy at night. It was quite entertaining to watch all the various groups stumbling and strutting up and down the streets. It seemed also that everyone went the extra distance to come up with the most outlandish costumes they could imagine.

As for the surfing, well the weather this weekend wasn’t the best, with mainly gray clouds and cooler temperatures, but at least it wasn’t raining. We were all pretty nervous about the lesson, though I think I was more worried about donning the full-body wet suit!, but the waves weren’t all that big in Harlyn Bay so that made it a little less nerve wracking. We’d gone for an all day lesson which was in fact a two hour lesson in the morning and in the afternoon with lunch at your expense in the middle so the group changed a bit in the afternoon. Overall there were quite a few people taking surfing lessons this weekend – I think we had about 10-15 people for our two instructors for each session – and not a lot of waves so it got fairly crowded out in the water.

The key to learning to surf is basically getting out there in the waves and just getting the feel for your board and the water. Sure our instructors (who were suitably surfer dude like) taught us a few basics about paddling out to the waves and getting up on the board but it wasn’t until you were out on the water that you could really understand what they were trying to say. I think we all managed to get up on our boards at some stage – even if it was only to immediately fall off but hey I didn’t even think we’d get that far so I was fairly impressed. In the afternoon, when the surf had gone way out (I couldn’t believe how far the tide had gone out from the morning – about 500 metres I reckon which is a loooong way to be carrying our giant surf boards), the waves got really tiny and the sea fairly flat so we had to work very hard to even get a hint of a break. In the mean time we entertained ourselves with building barges with our surfboards and climbing on top. Ironically every time we did this we got some of the biggest waves we’d seen all day!

The biggest lesson I learned was that surfing is a lot of hard work and is no where near as easy as it seems when you watch all those surfing movies. We were all very tired and weary at day’s end that’s for sure. Having said that it was a lot of fun and I can’t wait to try it again when I’m back in Oz.

More photos here.