THE SETUP
Despite the fact Redcar is a pretty remote beach. On all my previous trips I’ve met a pretty die-hard bunch of enthusiastic and very capable wave sailors. Most of the guys are forward-looping and, on one previous trip, I even bumped into ex British Wave sailing Champion Mike Birt. It turns out Redcar is his local beach so I guess that’s one of the reasons why the level is so high!
Redcar is your typical windsurfing beachie. The waves break best at the Northern end right in front of the public car park. The shoreline here is massive, stretching north for about 2km. Right at the top end of the beach is an Estuary where you can also score bump and jump conditions if you don’t fancy the waves. We were here though to score some down-the-line (DTL) riding and today had cherry-picked the perfect storm. After a crazy drive through the night to score the slab two hours away we still had plenty of daylight left. In fact, pulling into the public car park at Redcar, the time was only 11am – hard to believe we’d already scored World Class waves with probably 5-hrs left before nightfall, bearing in mind this was December!
