(one of the "smaller" waves) Sunday 25th February saw my second trip this year to find big surf due to a lack of water in the rivers. Once again I dragged fellow boater Rick Foster out of his pit at an ungodly hour of the day and feeling a little worse for the night before we set off with the predictions promising a minimum of 7-9 feet of clean swell.
We arrived to the car park at Hells Mouth, full of surfers bumming out in their vans. Expecting that we had missed the best of the surf again we hobbled down to the beach to find roughly 14 foot of surf dumping on the beach in sets of 4. After about 20 minutes of hardcore tea drinking we decided to follow some others to a remote beach that was “more sheltered.”
That is where it started to go wrong! The roads got worse and worse until we were simply rallying though fields and mud filled ditches. My vehicle is a light ended rear wheel drive van which doesn’t really do anything but tarmac and we were soon doing about 5 MPH in third rearranging most of the Llyn peninsular. With Rick holding on for dear life and screaming like a baby every time we went near the cliff edge, I did my best to keep control of the van as it slithered around in the mud like Bambi walking on ice. After 10 minutes of muddy toil we reach our destination.
A super clean average of 12-foot waves barrelling perfectly greeted us. I managed to time my sprint to the backwater perfectly and made it out the back with just one near miss. The others we not so fortunate and 4 beatings followed with one swimmer. Once out back I started picking my waves and quickly became aware of the shear scale of some of the waves. Rick later said “that on one wave I picked up I had 2 boat length ahead of me to the trough and one behind” if true that wave would have been a staggering 18 feet roughly and I could believe it when I got nailed by the wave and got forced deep to the sea bed. The next wave I took after a long recovery picked up beautifully and I threw my biggest ever airscrew unfortunately the wave collapsed below me and I free fell to the pit and ruining my back for the rest of the day. Three more waves that was me done or should I say one nice barrel and two beatings.
“Sweet, back to vans for tea and medals” I proclaimed but, no we still had to get the vans back off the farm, a further 15mins of hells mud and then we were homeward bound with tales of freak waves and sick moves.
Just another day in North Wales.
Keep paddling, keep smiling guys.
