When I left for France I took my new surfboard along with me. I knew that there were not really any waves in La Rochelle, but I had done tons of research and found that there was surf on a couple of islands right off the coast. I love surfing so I assumed I would do anything to get out there but that wasn’t the case. Since moving to France I surfed one time. Only one time in 4 months!
There are many reasons for this as well. First, the lack of motivation was a big one (as explained in “Motivation Downfall”). But also because I didn’t have a car and the trip to the surf spot would have taken about 2 hours on a bus to get there and 2 hours to get back…
So my surfboard sat in my basement for a couple months before I heard word of my school having a “surf weekend”. I immediately signed up knowing that there would be transportation to get to a surf spot. That’s literally all I wanted was to paddle out, catch some waves and meet some people that maybe I could surf with in the future. Unfortunately, I figured out that the surf weekend was more for people that didn’t know how to surf and wanted to learn. They had set up surf lessons for everyone… Luckily, I talked to the instructors and they let me go off on my own. Man, the feeling of just being back out in the water was insane. Honestly, I know this is kind of cheesy but it brought me back home and kinda reminded me about that part of myself that I had been missing. It was great. But then huge grey clouds rolled in and it thunder-stormed for the rest of the weekend. That didn’t stop us from surfing though, we still paddled out in the rain on day 2 and tried to get a good session in. But the wind was howling though and the waves were pretty crappy. That was the only time that I surfed in France. Though it was awesome, the circumstances didn’t really make me want to do it more…
I guess also I didn’t surf because it wasn’t exactly in the culture as much. Living in LA there are tons of surfers. The LA culture and the surfing culture are kind of blended together. Even the accent that people have in LA or California in general is that of a “surfer” (says all my french friends). So when I moved that sort of shock of not having the surfing culture all around me made me lose sight of my love for the sport. I’m sure that if you go down to Hossegor or Biarritz the surfing culture would be more present but in La Rochelle it’s definitely not…
When I got back home one of the first things that I did was go out surfing. It’s no surprise that my arms and back are much weaker which made it hard even to paddle out past the surf. But it was amazing. I had forgotten how awesome it feels to surf and I’m hoping to find a way to surf more when I get back.