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BIG WEDNESDAY: K-BAY REDEMPTION

After their last Kimmeridge mission spectacularly backfired a few weeks ago, John Carter and Timo Mullen, returned to the scene of the crime, chasing redemption. This time around, K-Bay duly delivered…sunshine, wind and proper epic waves.

Photos: John Carter and Phil Long…Click on any shot to view full size and scroll through the gallery! Head to your big screen to properly view these!

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EASTERN FLOW

With relentless easterlies sweeping across the UK for weeks on end, we felt absolutely zero shame in returning to the same haunts… especially when the run of conditions was clearly saving the best until last. From the start of the week, one standout day was brewing and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out where the action would be. This south west swell was being talked up in all the right places and plenty of surfers were headed over to Ireland to hit some of the big wave slabs.

Only a few weeks earlier I’d been stood in the same place, chasing similar promise, only to be served up a heavy cross-onshore battlefield instead. This time, though, the stars seemed to be lining up with a better wind direction. Call it instinct, call it blind optimism, but I had a gut feeling this was a session you did not want to miss. My Decision was made early: all-in, full commitment. Redemption or bust!

EARLY KICK OFF

Getting it right meant an early start. The alarm went off at 4am Wednesday morning in order to catch the 6:05 ferry off the Isle of Wight. By 8am…after a boat, a bus and a train…I was touching down in Poole, sipping coffee with Timo Mullen at ‘The Goat’ like it was all part of a relaxed morning routine. The Goat incidentally, also have another Coffee shop in Wareham, the closest town to Kimmeridge…the owner is a keen windsurfer so worth dropping by en route to the beach if you fancy an excellent coffee!

Timo reckoned K-Bay would turn on around mid-morning, so we fuelled up, soaked in the rare promise of sunshine, sandwiched between days on end of relentless rain and geared ourselves up for what was shaping up to be a full-tilt day of winter wave sailing at its best. That was the plan at least!

MISSION ON

And finally after our caffeine fix… the mission was on. As we rolled into K-Bay the usually suspects…Ian Whittacker, Max Metcalfe and Mike Byfield were already in the car park wetsuits half on and rigs ready. The same crew as the last time out were all back for more. Clearly nobody had learned their lesson…Or was it time for proper redemption? If you persist gambling on the perfect conditions, you will eventually hit the jackpot at some point…right?

Out to sea, solid sets were already marching in, and the forecast was for it to get bigger with the peak of the swell around midday. The wind wasn’t quite there yet, but every chart, model and gut instinct said be patient. Timo was probably the most relaxed out of all us. He knows K-Bay like the back of his hand and knew that the tide would play a key role for the best window of opportunity.

I was joined by fellow photographer Phil Long for the day and made the decision to hike up to Clavell Tower as the tide was right up to the base of the cliffs below. It was a tough climb, especially coming back from injury and in slippery mud but from our vantage point we had a front row view of the sets and Kimmeridge’s raw, brooding coastline stretching off into the distance…Epic!

Not a bad office. As the crew hit the water…the swich flipped…the sun started to break through the clouds, the wind kicked in and the waves started to turn on big time. Timo had made a gutsy late decision to switch boards from the trusty 106L down to the 94L Ultra Grip Quad D/Lab paired with a 5m D/Lab Super-Hero, as he clocked the wind was picking up fast. The gambit paid off as once on the water he was well powered and able to cut lose harder in the waves.

EPIC ACTION

For the next two hours the conditions peaked with up to mast high clean sets, opening up for multiple turns, along with a few chunky sections begging for airs. Lucas Meldrum joined the crew midway through the session and wasted zero time getting involved.

 

Timo was charging his home spot, selecting the best sets and scoring some epic rides. He even threw down a crazy forward loop off the lip just to spice thing up. Max and Ian were both taking some big ones and even rode one wave together…a bit like the old days with Polakow and Naish criss-crossing on the wave at Ho’okipa…maybe not quite with the same level of panache as the legends but it made for good photo!

Meanwhile Mike Byfield was in the thick of things as per normal and fearlessly dropping into some waves of consequence.

By mid-afternoon, the wind was howling, the sun was blazing and while the sets weren’t quite as big as earlier, there were still plenty of quality waves to go around.

Tris Best, editor from Windsurfer Magazine and Scottie Stallman also joined the party, armed with 2026 wave boards for testing. If you’re going to test new gear, you’d struggle to script better conditions than this.

Ian Whittacker was one of the first in from the water, wearing the unmistakable grin of someone who’d just had ‘one of those days!’. He reckoned it was the best port-tack session he’d ever had at K-Bay…and that’s coming from someone who’s been sailing there for 35 years. High praise indeed. Lucas was equally fired up, calling it better than anything he’d experienced during his recent three weeks in Cape Town. Not a bad benchmark.

Timo came back to the beach to grab a snack and was also in seventh heaven after scoring some of his ‘best ever’ waves at Yellows! It is hard to tell with Timo sometimes as it always seems like he is scoring his best session ever but this time, he did seem genuinely on top of the world after riding those waves! I thought Timo was done and dusted after his session, but after doing some quick maths he realized he could squeeze in another thirty-minute session…was he going to go back for more…Hell yeah! This time he switched to the trusty 106L, with the sole intention of going out and busting some big airs! It did not take long before it was mission accomplished and we all cheered as he launched into a massive air straight out in front of the car park at the ledges…he even threw in another forward off the lip on the next wave for good measure! 

IT’S A WRAP!

We finally wrapped things up around 2:30pm, mainly because Timo had a far more important mission…school pickup. Leaving behind sunshine, steady side-off winds and clean peeling waves felt deeply unnatural. I don’t usually walk away from conditions like that, but we’d already put in a solid shift and scored the prime, bigger stuff earlier in the day. We had scored the best of it and sometimes you have to put other priorities first!

Timo dropped me back at Wareham station just as my train home rolled into the platform…Bonus! Some days luck just swings your way and everything goes right. A spree of luck like this is quite rare for the Motley Crew but today the stars had aligned for us! Big Wednesday, did not necessarily have massive XXL waves but it was big enough and just a beautiful and memorable winters day of windsurfing in the UK! To me it was true a celebration of UK wave sailing at its finest…redemption at last!

So…the question remains… will this stubborn easterly airflow keep delivering, or will the weather gods inevitably drag us back to the southwest ready for the upcoming Cornish Wave Classic? Either way, K-Bay had spoken…and this time, it spoke loud.

TIMO MULLEN

“There was a big southwest swell forecast everywhere on any southwest Atlantic-facing coast. That’s a real key indicator for Kimmeridge to be big. K-Bay loves a southwest swell. I could see that Ireland was going to be huge. All the pro surfers were heading to Eileen’s and Riley’s that all need the same swell.

I knew it was going to be pretty big and when we got there in the morning, yeah, for sure it was full high tide and normally at high tide the waves aren’t so big, but it was pumping like well over mast high! We waited a little bit just for the tide to drop, so the waves weren’t sort of bouncing off the cliff so much! I knew it was going to be one hell of a day.

I opted to rig a 5.0 because it did look pretty windy. My 5.0 has a good wind range if the wind drops, I can still use it! And just as I was launching, I had my 106 Duotone Ultra Grip Quad D/Lab, which is basically what I use in everything. I just thought about the last day we had that was epic in the same direction. I remember my board being just a little bit too big when it got really good, so I ran back to my van and quickly changed down to my 94 Ultra Grip Quad D/Lab.

And boy was I glad I did that!

At the start, the wind was a bit lighter and it was a bit hard to get out, but man, as soon as I dropped into that first wave it was mast high and perfect. That 94-litre board, just being a bit smaller, it’s like having a surfboard underneath your feet. The board is incredible. I knew from that moment on I’d made the right decision. As the tide pulled out a little bit more, the swell built and I have to say it was probably the second-best, just by a small margin, of how good I’ve sailed Kimmeridge.

Some of the waves were just epic…like, just epic. I think the fact it was sunny as well, made the day feel even better. We’ve had pretty miserable weather the last couple of weeks in the UK, so it was the first time we’d seen sunshine in a long time.

I probably had another hour and a half on Yellows, which is the reef upwind t K-bay! It was simply just some of the best sailing. I was so tired because it was just relentless…maybe five or six proper top-to-bottom turns and cutbacks on every wave.

Then the wind started to go a little bit more offshore and we drifted down to Ledges, which is kind of where we would normally sail most of the time. It doesn’t need as big a swell to work and yeah, it was a lot trickier. It was hard to find the right ones, so I came in for a quick rest, grabbed some lunch, and then I thought if I grabbed my bigger board now, it would be easier to manoeuvre around the break and kind of beat the rip current.

Then I sailed for about another hour and Ledges was sick for aerials. It’s a lot throwier wave, a lot more hollow than Yellows, and yeah, I had some incredible aerials. It’s such a treat to sail this place.

The wind and the waves started to drop a little bit, and the crew from Windsurfer Mag turned up. Good to see those boys out testing all the new gear.

And yeah, then we went home…no disasters. In fact, JC managed to catch the train perfectly in Wareham, which is the closest town to Kimmeridge, and yeah, it’s one of those days I’ll remember forever.”

IAN WHITTACKER

“I have been sailing K-Bay for 35 years and never had a day like this there! I had a gut feeling it could be an epic day so headed on down to Dorset and wow it didn’t disappoint! Logo to mast high sets but also a massive tide, which made a tricky launch where we had to hike round the cliffs with all our gear and navigate our way out through the boulders.

I managed to get out on my 4.5m Ezzy Taka and my 100L custom Quatro board which loves big waves! My third wave was epic two big bowling sections that reminded me of Margaret River. The next wave went a bit round as I was going for the aerial and I was a bit late! It was a super heavy wipe out but I didn’t break anything… just a half hour swim to retrieve the gear. After many more waves I came in buzzing.”

LUCAS MELDRUM

“I was struggling to get the timing right at the start and it was the first time using my dedicated down the line wave board for a while, so I was slowly getting back into it. I realised the key was going deeper and later than you’d think. Once I got into the groove there was probably a magic hour, where it all came together and caught some of the best waves I’ve had this winter. It’s quite funny because I was in Cape Town for three weeks but first session back in the UK was probably better than anything I had out there!”

MAX METCALFE

“Been trying to score K-Bay in this direction now for a while and a few times the swell was there but the wind wasn’t or the wind wasn’t cross off enough or it was to light. But then I saw this forecast and was really debating whether to pull the trigger or not, in the end I said screw it and loaded up the old Volvo and headed down and oh my god did we score!!! I was riding a 4.7m and 84L all day and it was perfect!”