Kirsten and I have made a conscious decision to force ourselves to take time-outs on life when it warrants. What that means is, if we don't force ourselves to stop and look around, we'd both stay in the house and work 12 to 13 hours a day. That's fine for some days — the work is rewarding and it needs to be done. She's working on the house, gardening and preparing for a massive renovation. All-consuming, and a lot of work. Me? I'm doing a solopreneur gig daily to get TestVentures off the ground — 60 days old. Revenue's coming in but not enough yet to hire, so I'm doing senior software dev work I shouldn't be doing because there are people better suited to it than me. I don't really have the time to do the sales and marketing to land a few more clients to make the CTO hire — the guy I already have lined up, waiting for me to give the nod.
Yesterday was the time. The waves were excellent. There was swell, something like 5 to 6 feet and a 12-second period. For non-surfers: swell height is roughly how big the open-ocean wave is before it hits the beach (the face you actually surf is usually bigger). Period is the time between wave crests. Short periods (under 10 seconds) mean wind swell — choppy, weak, disorganised. Long periods (14+ seconds) mean a proper ground swell that's travelled hundreds of miles from a distant storm, heavier and cleaner. Twelve seconds isn't a thumping ground swell, but it's a solid mid-range — real waves with energy and clean faces. We knew this ahead of time and had set the date. 4pm, drive to Bidart in the Basque Country to surf, then moules and rosé.
We live in Seignosse, France. It's on the fringe of the Basque Country, but it's a newer area. The surf scene here came together in the 1980s once it got pulled up the coast from Biarritz. A Hollywood screenwriter, Peter Viertel, showed up in Biarritz in 1956 to film The Sun Also Rises. He brought a Californian board with him and started surfing at Côte des Basques. A handful of locals — Joël de Rosnay, Michel Barland, Georges Hennebutte, Jacky Rott — got hooked, started making their own boards, and became known as the Tontons Surfeurs. The scene grew out of Biarritz and Guéthary in the 60s and 70s, then migrated north to Hossegor and Seignosse in the 80s, mostly because the beach breaks here are world-class and the surf brands (Quiksilver, Rip Curl, Billabong) set up their Europe HQs in the area.
People who live here talk about going down to Bidart — 45 minutes away — as going to the Basque Country. That's because as soon as you pass Biarritz, the architecture and scenery change dramatically. The Hossegor area is beach country: miles of dunes and pine forests. Those pine forests, by the way, aren't natural. They were planted on purpose, and the story has two Napoleons in it. Under Napoleon I, an engineer named Nicolas Brémontier was already fixing the coastal dunes by planting beach grass and then maritime pines behind it, to stop the moving sand from burying villages inland. That was the early 1800s. The bigger forest — the Forêt des Landes, now the largest man-made forest in Western Europe at about a million hectares — came later. Napoleon III signed a law in 1857 requiring the communes here to drain the marshes and plant maritime pines, partly for sanitation (the area was a malaria-ridden swamp) and partly to make a usable economy out of land that was basically wasteland. Two centuries later, the entire region is pine forest.
Going to the Basque Country, even though it's so close, was the kind of afternoon we'd both been talking about for weeks but never booked. When we first moved to Europe in 2015, we used to come to Bidart, Guéthary, Biarritz, San Sebastián — we checked out all the areas to see which we liked best. I have a lot of good memories of the back roads and the small towns, and we knew of a lovely spot for waves, moules, frites and rosé. That was exactly what we needed to pull our heads out of the laptops for an afternoon.
It was hot — 36 degrees Celsius. Dog days of summer kind of heat, but without the summer crowds, which by July are unbearable. We've vowed to always be away from Europe between July 10th and August 25th. Beaches packed shoulder to shoulder, queues for parking, restaurants you cannot get into. This time of year? Maybe one of our favourites, because it's usually cooler — not today — and far less crowded. We've been in France since April 27th. We finished the Patrouille des Glaciers, went to Madrid, and drove straight here.
Since then, while I've been surfing plenty, the quality of the waves hasn't been great. At this point I'm mostly getting in the water for the pleasure of being in the water. The peace of sitting in the ocean, the cold of the Atlantic working through the wetsuit, rinsing the week off with each paddle, duck-dive, or push through the foamy shore break to reach the line-up. I love it all, and if I get some waves, that's bonus.
The waves in Bidart yesterday were proper waves. Overhead, breaking cleanly, with rocks in the line-up you had to duck through that gave just enough of a rush to make the session excellent. I only caught 5 or 6 waves, surfed for maybe 60 to 90 minutes, but it cleared the week. Then walking up to a little shack restaurant 50 metres from the beach. White-boy reggae playing, a shaggy Basque surf-shop owner running the place, and moules-frites that you can't mess up in this part of the world. Instead of rosé I had a bière blanche with a lemon — the French actually do bière blanche the best, and with the fading guilt of a keto diet, I indulged in two delicious glasses with the moules and frites.
As we drove back to Seignosse, I couldn't remember the last time we'd done something like this. Kirsten looked over and said: every two weeks. We're doing this every two weeks.
Monthly Revenues $9,200 | Clients 2 | Prospects, not too worried about
Day 62 of 365.