SURPRISE CALL
I’m a pretty keen wave sailor, I’ve been sailing Bigbury for longer than I care to remember, my early days sailing were with Timo and Finn Mullen when they were (barely) at Uni in Plymouth. We’ve had some epic days sailing at this classic spot; massive NE days, life threatening days on a big SW where I’ve almost drowned, as well as awesome Summer days blasting down to Hope Cove and along the coast on slalom kit. I get out on most good days at the beach but running my own business and employing windsurfers means I miss a few too!
Timo has called me the last couple of times when he was due to be down with JC, but I’ve been tied down and unable to make it to the beach. Sure enough I get a call from Timo’s broad Northern Irish accent, “We’re coming down to shoot Bigbury with JC, are you up for a sail, we’ll be down in an hour”, err, “I’ll give you a call back”. My shop guy James was in Cornwall sailing , Gwen my shop girl was fresh back from Bali and without her phone, my only option was to phone the wife and see if she can cover me last minute? Fortunately I’ve got a fantastic wife who after cancelling a long standing social engagement last minute for me held the fort in Reactive base camp. With cover in place, I was now in transit, beach bound. I’d sailed a couple of days previously but the temp had plummeted significantly to around 6-7c, a bit cool for me unless it’s really firing, (I’m a bit fussy in my old age these days). Upon arrival at the beach I’m greeted by JC who’s wrapped up like he’s going snowboarding and Timo’s half rigged and scurrying around to get out on the water like usual. The wind was howling cross shore and it was sunny too. The waves were looking pretty smooth, around shoulder high, but it was looking a bit more promising and punchy downwind in the river mouth. There were already a handful of local sailors out: Ed, Allen, Tim C and a couple of others, (they’d been chatting on Facebook all morning and I knew Bigbury would be the venue of choice today).
