History of surfing in Europe
The history of surfing in Europe is relatively short. In addition to influences from the USA and Polynesia , the sport was developed in various places with available funds.
Regional developments
France
Young forest workers from the Dax area in France , who bathed in the sea after working in the forests on the Atlantic Ocean, invented a water feature in 1896. It happened that sailing ships returning from the African coast lost part of their timber cargo when the sea was bad, it went overboard and was washed by the current towards the coast. Some of the young people knew how to ride such trunks driven by the waves. They had the idea to cut these trunks in half lengthways to improve swimming ability. The spectators who watched these young people named these floating devices "Coungates" and those who rode them "Coungatataous".
Adrien Durupt, an architect and engineer who worked with Gustave Eiffel and who crossed the world as part of his work, is considered to be the first true European surfer. Among other things, he had been to California in 1907, from where he had brought a surfboard . He regularly navigated by sailing ship on the sandbanks between Baguenaud and Evens near La Baule-Escoublac in order to be able to surf. A few years later, the cameraman, film producer and filmmaker Peter Viertel returned to the Basque coast for example. B. Biarritz brought.
Great Britain
In Great Britain , Nigel Oxenden, who had learned to surf in South Africa, Australia and Hawaii, founded the Jersey Island Surf School in 1923 . It was probably Europe's oldest surf club.
Jersey's early surfers were bodyboarders . Some of the very first balsa boards made in Jersey in the 1930s were made by Oxenden. The boards were painted with heraldic motifs and all had board leashes .
The occupation of Jersey by the Germans during the Second World War put an end to surfing as the beaches were mined. The sport was not revived until the arrival of a group of South African lifeguards in the 1950s.
Spain
In the Spanish Basque Country (Euskadi), José Luis Elejoste developed planking (small boards of fine wood with a curved tip) during the 1940s and 1950s and made it popular right away. He thus laid the foundations for surfing in the Bay of Biscay near Biarritz . In 1955 he was the first Spaniard to make a two-and-a-half meter wooden surfboard.
In Bilbao , José Luis Elejoste saw films and documentaries about the Pacific in the cinema, where he saw people riding waves upright on a board. He asked friends who were seafarers to bring him a surfboard . In 1944 he read in Reader's Digest that there was a surf club in Hawaii and another in California. Since none of his friends brought him a board, he decided to write to these clubs but never got an answer. Therefore, around 1955, he built himself a board out of wood. This was a huge plank weighing 22 kg, which turned into more than 30 when he got out of the water.
It wasn't until four years later that he got to know real surfboards on a trip to Biarritz. Vilallonga loaned him his 3.25-meter wooden board, and it was the first time he had surfed upright on a surfboard.
Germany
There was no surfing in Germany until the mid-1950s. At that time, some lifeguards on Sylt began to ride waves on self-made paddleboards that weighed around 50 kg. In 1964 Uwe Behrens, also a lifeguard from Sylt, brought the first real surfboard from a trip in France to Germany.
Surfing was only gradually becoming established in Europe. The surfing industry now has tens of thousands of jobs, and surfers are a common sight on many coastlines.