Coastalsurvey

On Sundays the French countryside wakes slowly. The ponts across the Loire slept on a bed of mist. One patisserie in Montsoreau was open. An old man stood chatting in the doorway, a pair of baguettes under his arm. The road turned south over the swell of low hills that marks the edge of the river valley. Hunters trod over turned fields in wellies, shotguns shouldered, dogs sprinting ahead. Farmhouses built from stone the color of apricots sheltered under spreading oaks centuries old. It rained. Near Poitiers the road straightened to a black line, pasted in spots with red and gold where leaves had fallen. Detoured through the vineyards around Bordeaux and the towns of St. Macaire and St. Emilion, the road turned west below the Dordogne into the vast pine forests of Les Landes. It was dark then and raining again. Tiny towns, shuttered tight, pressed close to the road. At one crossroads — Villandraut, Pissos? — two men glimpsed through the window of a bistro shared a drink. One of the men raised his hand to pluck an invisible grape from the air. Between the sleeping towns a few big sawmills were lit up like white cities.

Saumur on the Loire

I stopped the van beneath some tall pines in Biscarosse Plage, some 30 kilometers south of Cap Ferret. The rain had passed, the air was warmer and the ocean was nearby; I could hear its surge over the quiet ticking of the cooling engine.

The coast of Les Landes is one long beach, broken in spots by rivermouths and jetties, but otherwise at the mercy of Atlantic winds. Biscarosse, and the neighboring towns of Mimizam, St. Girons, Moliet and Vieux Boucau share the holiday sprawl of condos, tennis courts, and golf courses as well as surfing conditions. It’s often big and blown out.

The next morning I drove into town, but town was closed. The restaurants, the discos and the ecoles du surf were all boarded up for the season. I parked near the Cinema Atlantique where a tongue of sand had slipped under the marquis and went looking for a cafe. Three shops huddled on one street were the only signs of life in Biscarosse Plage. One of them was a cafe. Inside the patrons were drying out over cups of cafe au lait and watching a tennis match.

Up on the boardwalk, near where a white hotel had dug into the dune like an Art Deco ocean liner run aground, I gazed down at the surf. The wind was blowing hard off the sea and the waves were a hash.

I spent a week in Les Landes, waiting for the wind to come around. Whipped by the constant gale, the sea took on the consistency of a stiff meringue. At night, the van rocked on its springs in gusts of damp air. At last I drove down to Hossegor and rented a small apartment. At least that way I could get some work done while I waited.

Hossegor has more surf shops per capita than anyplace else in Europe. Given its location at the apex of the Bay of Biscay and the end of a deepwater canyon, Hossegor may have more quality waves than anywhere else in Europe. After August’s inundation of sunseekers and contest surfers, after the greasy tide of Ban du Soliel has receded, Hossegor in October assumes an air of waiting. Surfers wait in cheap hotels and rented bungalows for the waves to come good, while retirees wait in better appointed homes for their last waves.

Before dawn on the morning after I arrived, the wind that had been rattling the window covering suddenly stopped. I dressed quickly and left the apartment. A cool rain was falling and the wind had gone offshore. In the grainy half-light the waves peaking over the sand banks looked near perfect.

I got in the van and drove to La Graviere, a set of sandbars on the north side of town. There was one guy out, paddling up and over waves that were well overhead. It looked like heavy going — the peaks shifted with each set, the wave faces were concave and the falling edges of the walls clapped on the flat water with a fearsome crack. To the south, the first light of day began to play over the Pyrenees.

Too much thinking in a situation like this can lead to paralysis. I thought, if I was quick, I might make it past the angry white ridge and the guillotine-like crash of seawater to the smooth gray hills beyond and, if I was too slow, that it would be a good day to die.

With the shorebreak behind me, I paddled hard for the first bar until I saw that I had been too slow. The wave was folding over on itself; its face buckled inward and I saw the curtain of falling water before everything went black. The board was wrenched from my hands and as I tried to curl into a ball, I discovered that my limbs were not at my command. Getting ragdolled by a big wave is a bit like being in a high-speed car wreck. There’s that helpless feeling of being a small projectile in a larger physical process and there’s also the distorted perception of time that comes with rapid acceleration. As the violence of the passing wave subsided, I still had no idea which way was up. I began to count as a way of biting down on the panic. “One Mississippi. . . two Mississippi . . .” I reached ten before I surfaced in the foam, drew one ragged breath and got hit with the second wave.

Lying on the sand with the rain washing the salt from my face, I looked again at the mountains to the south. Sunlight warmed their flanks and filled their valleys. The lone surfer was still paddling up and over the incoming waves. It was, I decided, good to be alive.

Five kilometers south, at Cap Breton, there was another break beside some WWII blockhouses that had tumbled into the sea. This spot was more sheltered than La Graviere and the waves somewhat smaller. There were three guys out carving long lines in the waves when I arrived and thirty when I left, but I managed to grab a few great rides there.

Blockhouse, Cap Breton

The next day the wind was onshore again. The swell mounted steadily throughout the following week, however the winds made it unrideable.

With my work more or less done, I continued south to Anglet and pulled off the road that evening at the first decent looking restaurant I saw. As luck would have it, this was Chambre D’Amour, the section of Anglet where southbound surf caravans gather every autumn. The parking lots behind the dunes collected a ragtag convoy of Mercedes buses, Leyland trucks, Japanese vans and VW campers. The surfers came from Holland, France, Germany, New Zealand and Great Britain with the largest contingent being the Australians.

Luck smiled again on the next morning when the wind finally shifted offshore. It was the beginning of four days of excellent surf with the last day being the smallest at about shoulder-high with near perfect form. Some days were crowded, but Anglet with its comb of jetties along two miles of beachfront distributed the crowds well.

Chambre D'Amour, Anglet

Just south of the Adour River, Anglet is the beginning of La Cote Basque. Biarritz, Bidart, Guethary, St Jean De Luz and Hendaye are the other towns on France’s Basque coast. Unlike the breaks to the north, the surf spots of La Cote Basque are a mix of reefs, points, coves and beaches. The towns of this region are also older than the resort communities to the north, a fact reflected in the architecture, a funky mix of gothic revival, Victorian, deco and art nouveau.

My neighbor in the parking lot at Anglet was an Australian named Geordie. He had driven an old Renault bus down from Normandy, where he worked as a carpenter and raced bicycles with a local team. Geordie had been living in France for the better part of six years so he spoke the language well, albeit with a horrific Australian accent. With his gap-toothed grin and no-worries attitude, Geordie was a good guy to surf with and an even better drinking companion.

Two nights before Halloween, Geordie and I toured the bars of Biarritz by bicycle. You can cover a lot more ground on a bike and nobody’s going to arrest you when you wobble home after last call. Biarritz was at its fairytale best that night. The casino was rocking, the grand hotels were lit up like Bavarian castles and the esplanade was haunted by covens of witches and packs of werewolves. Late in the evening we settled in a bar with a good band, a trio down from Paris for the weekend. Geordie started chatting up the blonde sitting next to us in his ozzified French. It was hard to tell from her smile if she was amused or appalled. Eventually the blonde left, Geordie shrugged, “C’est la vie, mate”, and the bartender bought us a consolation round before closing the joint down.

The next morning I took my hangover and a cup of coffee down to the beach. It was big. Anglet was closed out, but one of the reefs or points further south might be working.

Geordie already had the boards on the racks when I got back. The normally sheltered breaks of Biarritz were awash with whitewater when we drove past, but Bidart, a little gem of a beach set in a deep green valley, looked plausible.

In the time it took us to get our wetsuits on, the channel that led to the outer bar had vanished with the retreating tide. Geordie was ready to give it a go, but the prospect of being pummeled by tons of white water didn’t appeal to me. “Let’s try Guethary,” I suggested.

Built on a series of terraces overlooking a deep-water harbor and two excellent reefbreaks (a right and a left), Guethary has a touch of magic about it. The atmosphere was enough to draw legendary American misanthrope Mickey Dora, who lived in Guethary at one point in his expat travels. It’s also the place a lot of lesser legends call home.

Paddling out in big surf at Guethary is like going to see the elephants at the zoo. You can get right up close to them from the safety of the channel, but if you climb into the cage to try to ride one of the beasts, you could get stomped.

It was crowded in the lineup. Ten guys were jockeying around the sets at the peak and another 15 were spread out along the edge of the whitewater in the channel. A lot of the surfers were old – 30, 40, even a couple grizzled fifty-something vets in the lineup.

After dodging one behemoth set, Geordie made the French gesture for “afraid” — fingertips pursed together over an upturned palm — to a tough-looking Basque beside him.

The Basque shrugged. “This isn’t so big,” he said. Judging from the nine-foot gun he was sitting on, maybe it wasn’t.

As the tide ebbed, the sets started to swing further over into the channel. After the pack had scrambled to avoid a clean-up set, Geordie was left in position for a monster wave. He took the drop. Two-thirds of the way down, Geordie’s rail caught a piece of chop and he disappeared under an avalanche of whitewater. It looked bad, but Geordie surfaced in the foam a few seconds later, laughing. My wave was less spectacular and I made it to the shoulder after a fast, bumpy ride. That seemed like enough.

Afterwards Geordie and I sat in a café on the hillside, drinking pastis. The sunlight flooded the terrace with warmth. Beautiful women in light cotton shifts chatted in melodious French while children played at their feet. Across the street the dry remains of summer’s leaves clattered softly in the breeze. And the pastis tasted like bitter licorice on the tongue.

Geordie took it all in. “La vie est bonne,” he said.

Yes, I agreed, it is.