Mmmmm….. Photo: @ripitup.fr
La Nord sits with La Gravière atop France’s mountain of barreling beachbreaks. They are two of the first waves European tube hounds sprint to when the Atlantic lights up, knowing that the world’s premier big wave athletes are packing tow ropes and gassing up the Jet Skis en route to Nazaré.
That doesn’t mean a few skis weren’t in action at La Nord this past weekend though. The Basque beachbreak looked like a cartoon of picture-perfect waves on December 20, 2025. And that’s if you caught a frame of it all without humans in the picture. Then, to see a ski or a surfer cruising into a step-off for scale, the perfection of La Nord’s Saturday conditions really comes into perspective.
“Honestly, I’ve personally never seen it this big and this perfect. Blow after blow, almost every barrel,” videographer David Berthet told me in an email. “A lot of the local guys were away — either heading to Mundaka to sit 100 deep on one peak, or chasing swells in Ireland if they had the right gear to stay warm. That meant the few who stayed home were rewarded with truly historic waves, shared between friends. Something that’s becoming very rare these days.”
