… and I’m on a surfboard, every single one of my muscles aching from paddling out into the mauve-tinted waves. To my left, Julia, a nineteen year-old German medical student is sitting up, scanning the approaching waves, and to my right, Carol, a twenty-three-year-old graduate from London is propelling herself out through the breaking waves to join us. Since none of us is wearing a watch or has looked at a phone in days, our best guess is that it’s about ten o’clock and that we’ve got roughly five minutes before the sun drops into the sea and the French town of Moliets et Maa is bathed in dusk.

With this in mind, all three of us catch sight of an approaching wave, simultaneously swing our boards round and start paddling. Long strokes hit the water, as powerful as we can manage, looking over our shoulders until the wave hits the backs of our boards and the we’re picked up and driven towards the shore. We pop up, one by one, hands tucked under our chests, pushing our bodies up, back legs, front legs forwards, until we’re standing, riding the wave towards the shore before it runs out of power and all we can do is grin at one another and agree that as highs go, surfing has to be the best drug in the world.

It’s also, without a doubt, the hardest sport I have ever learned.  Over my last two weeks with Star Surf Camps in their Moliets surf camp in France, I’ve spent most of my time being beaten up by the Atlantic Ocean, dragging my limp, salt-drenched body back up the beach and stuffing my face with enough baguette to feed a small French family in a desperate attempt to refuel after each session, only to find that not falling asleep in the middle of the afternoon is still more effort than I can manage.

Nonetheless, I’m still here. What started as a week-long holiday to a surf camp with a girlfriend has now turned into a month-long surf camp escape from reality and now, I find myself writing this from a hammock with the sound of skateboarders rolling up and down the ramp behind me and a semi-permanent stream of other campers and surfers coming and going to and from the beach passing by. Here in Moliets, my pre-work Pilates session has been replaced by an early morning run (on a good day), my oyster card has been replaced by a beaten-up skateboard that I like to think makes me look cool and my one-bedroom flat has been replaced by a one-room tent that, no matter how hard I try, always seems to be filled with sand that’s clung to me on the long walk back from the beach.

But perhaps most importantly, my nine to five day in the office has been replaced by a nine to five day on Moliets Plage. Countless hours of free-surfing make up my new daily routine, not to mention at least two hours of surf lessons with the surf camp’s own surf instructors relentlessly encouraging everyone to “shaka” as much as humanly possible.

It’s the latter who are to thank for the fact that I’ve gone from relentlessly face-planting into water that was barely knee-deep two weeks ago to (almost) confidently riding clean waves into the beach, and who are to blame for my reluctance to return to the real world.  It’s Gudi, Alex and Ash who, for every time I’ve found myself washed up on the beach, spluttering “I just can’t do it” through a mouthful of seawater, have met me with loud, overly enthusiastic whistles and cheers from the beach whenever I manage to avoid nose-diving head-first into a wave.

They’ve managed to get someone who despises learning new things, and who loathes several sports for no reason other than her incompetency at them, to repeatedly drag her aching body down to the beach every day; an achievement that speaks volumes about the very real enchantment of Star Surf’s own magical French forest.

“People come here on surfing holidays and never want to leave”, one of the surf instructors told me last week, and he couldn’t be more right; come here and you won’t want to leave. You won’t want to leave your tent under the stars, you won’t want to leave a sport that, at first, you never thought you’d be able to pick up but that you’ll eventually just about master, and you won’t want to leave a place where everything from surfing to skateboarding to watching the sunset in the Spanish town of San Sébastian, is only too achievable.

Until next time,

Morwenna