quote:

---

FREAK WEATHER MAKES EUROPE 60FT-WAVE SURFER'S PARADISE
By Maurice Chittenden, The Sunday Times, 20 April 2003



BIG-WAVE surfing, the sport that has been the almost exclusive preserve of Hawaii, California and Bondi Beach, was yesterday forced to take a new kid on board: Europe.
Freak weather conditions have seen some of the biggest waves in memory lashing the Atlantic coastline this spring. A 20ft-high wave was surfed in Guernsey last month. But the "daddy" of them all was a wave the height of a six- storey building, ridden off the French coast by two surfers who had tracked satellite weather pictures of the swirling front of an intense low pressure system across the ocean from Newfoundland.

The storm sent a 25ft swell racing ahead of it at 35mph towards the coast of Europe. Its waves peaked in height as they hit a reef off the coast in the French Basque country.

The Americans are not amused. The French feat was greeted with boos yesterday at an international awards ceremony for surfers in Anaheim, California. Photographs of the wave were studied for three hours by judges who measured it at 64ft high. It was just 2ft short of the season's record, a 66-footer successfully ridden at a famed spot for ferocious waves, nicknamed "Jaws", off Maui in Hawaii.

The ceremony was held as an offshoot of the Billabong Odyssey, a three-year-old hunt sponsored by a surfwear company to capture a 100ft-high wave for a $500,000 (£318,000) prize.

The Americans are scornful of the waves surfed last month at Belharra Reef, two miles off the French resort of St Jean de Luz. The audacity of France at seeking to take the surfing crown from America at a time when the Iraq conflict was brewing has upset sensitivities on the beach.

"The French have a lot of good things, but military backbone and big waves aren't included," said one of the postings on an internet message board set up by Surfer magazine.

Eddie Rothman is a Hawaiian surfing icon whose 18-year-old son Makua won $66,000 yesterday for riding the winning wave off Maui. "The French wave is beautiful but there's no trough on it," Rothman said. "It's mushy. I'd take my nine-year-old son out to tow into that wave. I'm 55 and I want to ride that wave. But no way would you get me out at Jaws."

The French are unmoved at suggestions that their wave was less dangerous. Fred Basse, one of the French surfers, said: "Riding this wave, it was like going down a huge ski slope. But with an avalanche behind you."

So can surfers in Cornwall this summer expect such high waves? "Not quite," said Dave Reed, a director of the British Surfing Association, which estimates that 250,000 Britons will go surfing this year. "The highest wave ridden in the UK is about 16ft. The Atlantic shelf around the coast protects us from a massive swell."

---