Someone Else's Cheese
Evening came and we feasted on prawns and fermented grape juice and just as we thought we had reached Nirvana, a wrath of thunder came down in righteous fury upon us. A wise man once observed: "Millions of people in every millionth fraction of every second, meandering in chaotic Brownian motion. Accept it and go with it, for you cannot control it". So when the sun came out again we hit the beach.
From the cliff top above 'Bee'd Art' beach we witnessed a huge swell rolling in. I stood transfixed, my jaw dropped, I muttered "It's outrageous!" A scruffy guy in a cheap boiler suit looked up from rummaging in the garbage bin and said; "Eeets nussink, eet eez zee citron next to zee croissant". Eight to ten foot faces were washing surfers back into the sand. I looked down at my 9'8 and thought about the 'Perfect Wave'.
The Sappy Pompiers were looking nervous, but I approached one anyway.
"Monsieur", I said.
"Wee", he replied but I didn't need one.
"Ou est le Perfect Wave" I boldly asked (my Foreign was improving like a fish carcass left out in the sun the dry).
He leaned toward me and whispered conspiratorially "Get Arry".
It all suddenly clicked into place; in order to find the 'Perfect Wave' I would first have to find 'Arry'!
"And where can I get Arry?" I pressed.
He pointed to a small town on a cliff top some way in the distance. I gave him back his seadog and left the beach.
The town was called "Guethary", which reminded me of something... Yes, it sounded like "leathery" and that made me chuckle. We searched the town high and not so high for 'Arry' (for it was a cliff top town and had no low parts to speak of), but could not find him. Dejected, we ambled to the cliff edge and gazed with melancholy out to sea. It was there we found the 'Perfect Wave', a heavy looking peak breaking over a rock slab a half mile or more out into the ocean. The wave peeled left and right with no thought of closing out. It looked to be breaking at over 6 feet. I resolved to find our travelling companions and return to this heavenly spot.
The 'DARK LORD' however, was in turmoil. When we returned to camp to take him surfing he had suffered "crab's claw" whilst frolicking in the Milady shore break. He was also walking gingerly due to a gonad inflation brought on by the incorrect application of coconut oil, so it was some days later that we returned to Guethary.
Fortunately the surf was pumping again at 4 to 6ft with a light onshore breeze. During the paddle out we stopped for coffee and croissants, and admired the waves peeling down the line a mere 10 yards from us. We got to the line up and sat there in wrapt attention, waiting for one of the walls of water to peak sufficiently to take off. I didn't have to wait long.
A grinding six footer came in, which I took with casual ease (if a definition of casual ease is crapping yourself as a mountain of sea picks you up and spits you down the face like a stunned furry mammal out of its natural environment). I slid along the face before making the first of a dozen or so cut-backs.
I paddled back with a grin like a piano keyboard and was then swatted by a set wave and dragged 100 yards inshore. An hour or so later we returned to the beach, with a swagger that comes from the knowledge you have taken it on and come out mostly unscathed! That night we drank, danced a curious jig I had made up and resolved to squeeze in a dawn patrol before leaving this beautiful place, not knowing when or whether we would return.
We awoke at the crack of dawn the next day as the sun had been up for some time. Scraping ourselves off the dusty floor, we piled into our transportation device and headed back to Guethary, where the surf was pants. The swell had dropped and the impressive peak of the previous day was replaced by small peak chaos. We drove off and stopped at 'Bee'd Art' beach, which was 3ft and clean. The wave peaked offshore on a sandbar and then off loaded into a small barrel as it passed the bar.
It was not ideally suited to our longboards but we surfed and got worked over, all the same. I claimed a barrel but the 'DARK LORD' denied it with the logic that he "didn't see it and therefore it didn't exist"! I made a mental note to think about this during the next time I was stuck in a French traffic jam (as luck would have it, I became stuck in a traffic jam later that day).
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