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THE 2XS WAVE CLASSIC 2025: ONE TO REMEMBER!

The 2XS Wave Classic at West Wittering was more than just another contest…it was a reunion, a revival and a reminder of everything that makes windsurfing magic. Over one unforgettable weekend, generations of riders gathered where the sport’s heart still beats loudest…the South Coast! The wind howled, the waves rolled in and good times were had! Legends returned from retirement, rising stars threw down world-class moves and a new crop of groms proved the future’s in good hands. 

We’ll hand it over now to the writing talents of Ruaraidh Somerville, who’s captured the spirit of the event perfectly in his write-up below.

Photos: John Carter and Henning Von Jagow!!

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SHOWDOWN AT WEST WITTERING

Ruaraidh Somerville: “The beating heart of windsurfing was laid bare for all to see down at West Wittering for the 2XS Wave Classic this weekend, the final leg of the biggest UK windsurfing tour we’ve seen in decades. The first day came in like a lamb, a small wave and not a lot of wind threatening to turn things sour. But the wind came, and the day went out roaring like a lion. Average sail size of choice, 4.2m to 4.7m. Waves weren’t huge, but big enough. The eighty or so competitors and many more spectators cheered and whooped as Lucas Meldrum, young local hotshot and world tour hopeful, launched a good thirty foot into the sky just upwind of the comp zone and dropped into a late, ballsy stalled forward.

George Grisely, world tour freestyler, went through a sail, mast and board sending double forward loops in his heats. Local heroes, underground names, unsponsored and known only by those in the know, showed up and proved themselves serious contenders.

Legends of the sport like Jamie Hancock and Chris Audsley made appearances at the socials, nursing injuries. Other legends like Timo hauled themselves out of competition retirement and made it to the losers final in firing form, just losing out to his old sparring partner, BWA hell-man James Cox. 

MEN’S FINAL: NEW GENERATION VERSUS OLD GUARD

In the end, it would be Andy “Bubble” Chambers, the godfather of the British scene, and Lucas, who would duel it out for the top two spots. They traded off stunts in the air and on the wave face, until it came down to the dying seconds of the heat.

Lucas put together a solid wave, and as he laid into his final bottom turn, a bowly section appeared and he pinged round a frontside 360 that was as perfect as perfect can be.

The crowd went wild… as Bubble on the wave behind eyed up his own section and went for a last ditch 360 attempt. The section flung him round the move and we cheered and groaned as he disappeared into the white-water. Close, but not enough. So perhaps you can imagine how we cheered when his windswept blond locks appeared out of wave, hauling the sail back up. With just seconds left on the clock, the tour veteran pulled the 360 out of the jaws of defeat. All eyes went to the judges. Seconds stretched into minutes and for Lucas and Bubble, years must have passed. In the end, it was Lucas who took the win, a well-deserved end to an uncharacteristically rocky year on tour. 

HIGHLIGHTS

The full range of emotions on show that day made for the kind of narrative sports documentary directors dream of. Lucas’ clutch victory, Bubble’s 360 recovery, Timo’s return to competition. Grisely’s double. Nick Welsh’s epic ankle-snapping backloop crash.

I sat on the beach in my wetsuit as the sun set on a wonderful day of competition, hiding my face while the tears flowed. I didn’t get it together in my heats, losing badly to come last and top off a year of injury and competitive setbacks that have hurt my soul deeply. But there is nothing special in my pain. Lucas has been in the same boat, Bubble and Coxy too.

Everybody invested in these competitions and in the sport itself have found themselves at rock bottom somewhere along the way. It’s these lows that make the highs so high, that makes that beer on the podium taste the sweeter and the praise of our peers all the more sincere. When I shake Lucas’ hand and congratulate him on his victory, I know how much the win means to him because I’ve seen him at his own rock bottom, questioning his place on the tour and in the sport. There can be little better reassurance of his own belonging than such a decisive win in a stacked event just a few miles from his front door. 

NEXT GENERATION RISING: WOMEN AND YOUTH DIVISIONS

It wasn’t just the men’s pro fleet who earned the cheers of the crowd either. Izzy Adcock, ex-racing legend and wave tour convert, earned a solid win for the kind of consistency she’s making herself known for. In second place was Tiree adopted local Liath Campbell, putting together her signature wave rides to add the expression session trophy to her collection.

I’ve never seen Timo Mullen more stoked than when describing her performance at the prize giving, except maybe when he explained why the expression session prize was being split between Liath’s wave-riding, Bubble’s 360, and the overall performance of Mikey McLean, youth winner. I’ve known Mikey since he was in nappies, watched him follow his older brother’s footsteps into competition and make a name for himself in his own right. Mikey’s 12, Eddie’s 15.

There’s a good rivalry brewing there, but until recently Eddie has been firmly on top. A loss to his younger brother at a recent surfing competition was the first sign of the rivalry, and Mikey’s clear victory at the weekend showed just how hard he’s fighting to knock his big brother off the top spot. With perfectly timed airs and flowing turns, nobody was beating him on his day. Rumour has it Nik Baker’s writing up a lengthy contract where Duotone owns him in perpetuity, and Lucas has had his deal halved to make room for Mikey’s expense budget (he’s blown it all on chocolate buttons and a new iPad already). Even his prize money for the expression session immediately went onto a round of Appletizer shots for the bar at the afterparty.

WINDSURFER MAGAZINE LAUNCH

Away from the heat of competition, was the other event everybody had gathered for – the Windsurfer Magazine launch. Now, everybody knows print is dead. Instagram, YouTube, AI and the algorithm reign supreme. You can’t open social media without being bombarded with targeted ads, angry political discourse, brain-rotting AI videos and worse. Buried somewhere beneath this noise are updates on genuine milestones in your friends’ lives, maybe their kid’s first steps or their wedding. Maybe there’s a picture of one of those friends, a windsurfer, doing something really special. A thirty-foot stalled forward. A huge turn. An aerial you’re pretty sure they didn’t make. You suspect, but you don’t know. The mystery is enticing. The algorithm refreshes, you scroll on by, and it’s gone. Where did it go? Lost into the digital ether, a needle in a haystack of pointless noise. You sigh, put your phone down, frustrated, and glance over at the coffee table. There’s a wild picture of Marcilio Browne launching into the cavernous abyss of a huge Jaws barrel, one wrong move from broken gear and oblivion. A moment seared into his brain, an experience he will replay day after day and take with him to his grave. A moment briefly marvelled at by his Instagram followers and quickly forgotten amidst the bombardment of information from the platform. You glance at the shot and think that was pretty cool. Glance back at your phone. You look back up, and Brawzi’s massive aerial is still looking back at you. It’s not going anywhere, and you can see it, again and again. You look at it again and realise just how thick the lip is that he’s hit. You can see the tracks of his bottom turn and you keep realising over and over again how impressive his feat really is. You get lost in the repeated joy of discovery. In this black and white picture, all stark contrast and high focus, is a life-altering moment straining to be set free in our imagination. To look at, to pore over, to realise every time you look at it just how impressive the moment in the picture is. I don’t care that I can see every second of twelve consecutive wave rides from a GoPro on Instagram. It’s too much, so much so that it numbs you. Laird Hamilton speaks of needing days and weeks to process the all-consuming experience of a single big wave adrenaline rush. The constant fix of a Nazare clip, then scroll to a POV of a Pipeline wave, then a clip of a double forward loop in Gran Canaria, is just too much. How can we possibly hope to understand and appreciate the depth of what’s happening in any of those moments through such a medium, when it takes the person who lived the experience so long to process it themselves? 

 

In the diaries of Brian Eno, one of the most musically gifted men of our time, is a very moving piece on “the sound of failure”. Eno writes that much of modern art concerns the beauty of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. Think of Merry Clayton’s strained, breaking vocal on the Stones’ track Gimme Shelter which accompanies Levi’s part in the first Windsurfing Movie, or the fuzzy distortion of guitars run through amps that are being pushed past breaking point. Recall the grain and shakiness in an old home video of a long-forgotten childhood experience. Eno calls it “the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them”. Brawzinho’s brilliance stares out at you from that little A4 picture, daring you to imagine just how grand that moment must have been to witness through his eyes. A beautiful mystery, unattainable and all the more magnificent because of it. The joy of experience is not getting to know and understand everything you could possibly want in one horribly glutinous splurge. That way addiction and destruction lie. Windsurfing, the world’s greatest sport, is perhaps so wonderful because of its impermanence. The knowledge that no two waves will ever be the same, and the wait between swells and storms, the silent days and nights of the doldrums, every moment spent not windsurfing making the precious seconds we have on the water that much more special. A print magazine couldn’t ever hope to contain as much content as Instagram’s servers process in a single minute. And yet, who cares? That’s the question asked by a handful of renegade malcontents in the UK with a dream of reviving windsurfing in print. To the enlightened, to the windsurfers, less is more. 

From that idea, came Windsurfer Magazine. A rage at the dying of the light, a bonafide middle finger to Zuckerberg and Musk and the cheap, drip-fed Matrix these Bond villains want us to live in. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and John Lennon’s Imagine have long been technically surpassed, their creators dead and gone and their mediums replaced by newer and flashier genres. But we remember them. Those opening chords of the Fifth send shivers down your spine and Imagine makes my mum cry. Creating something worth remembering is all anyone can hope to do. If Brawzi remembers his best air at Jaws, and a 12 year old grommet or two remembers that photograph, and channels Brawzi’s spirit into their first turn, first aerial, first hit of a closeout, then we have a sport that is alive and well. And it sure was alive that Saturday night down the Witterings. Peter Hart, elder statesmen of windsurfing known to all, and the finest journalist our sport has, introduced the group of legends who put together the mag to the assembled crowd. Lucas Meldrum, event winner and mag graphic designer, Tris Best, editor, Daniel Macauley, marketing man, and Oli Sargent, the guy bankrolling the whole thing. James Cox, far too humble and mysterious to admit to being their web guy, lurked in the background. From there, as the beer flowed and the good times rolled, Harty moved the crowd through to the boardroom where a veritable arsenal of vintage windsurfing boards had been assembled. Their owners were interviewed, their storied histories brought forth to the crowd and a slice of our sport’s history made into legend. The night, I must admit, gets a little hazy from there. I must be getting old, or maybe I had one too many knocks on the head during my post-defeat windsurf on Friday. There’s nothing else it could be…

Windsurfer

THE SPIRIT REMAINS

At the 2XS classic I saw friends, old and new. I saw sparring partners I’ve grown up windsurfing with reach new heights, watched my heroes prove why they’re my heroes, and witnessed a kid I saw learn to walk earn his stripes as a windsurfing champion. I remember hanging around with Peter Hart as a kid hoping to get some tips on my carve gybes. I hadn’t seen him since 2019, and I felt so lucky to be part of the crowd who listened to him spin his magnificent yarns and charm a room with the kind of wit only Sinatra could match. I got to see genuinely world-class windsurfing, to cheer and celebrate with a band of like-minded individuals in whose company I feel glad to be alive. This event will not be forgotten. Here’s to the magazines and the people that make sure of that. 

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