The big wave scene in Europe has been relatively quiet this season, which is typically when the region gets its heaviest waves. A big purple blob fires through the Atlantic Ocean, people scramble to book flights, and images of hundreds of people on the cliff overlooking Nazaré fill our inboxes. When the dust settles, we see that the same swell lit up Basque country beachbreaks or Portuguese point breaks while tow teams were busy taking over Nazaré.
But while there haven’t been many XXL swells to talk about since the November and December start to Europe’s big wave season, people have still kept busy getting barreled recently.
Three swells swung through the Atlantic last week, first hitting the UK and Ireland and appearing on the French coastline once the second pulse of energy started to reach Europe. It set Basque surfers up for about a week of nonstop waves as things swung perfectly into the Bay of Biscay.
“I do not know if we ever had a winter with this quality of waves,” filmmaker and photographer David Berthet says. All those quality waves have left him with a lot of footage, which he admits made it difficult cutting highlights down to just a few minutes of action for this February 10 session.
