Day plus one - Saturday surfing

No lie-in on the first day after finishing - alarm went off at 8am for an early start! Quick breakfast before hitting the road for the 1h15m drive down to the absolutely stunning Seileboste beach down on Harris. Golden sands, crashing waves - the only thing missing was the blue skies; the weather was pretty overcast but wouldn't make too much of a difference as we were going to get very wet anyway! Minor panic when we overshot the turn off to the beach, only to round the corner and be greeted with huge waves smashing into the rocks... Alice said "Oh yeah, it'll be down there" to which I replied something on the lines of no flipping way was I getting in those waves! 5 mins doubling back and we located the correct beach with much smaller, more amenable waves for beginners!

Scary big waves and rocks - not the location for beginners!

Met up with Cheggs and Nicola from SurfLewis for our surfing lesson, 3hrs for £15 including all the equipment, pretty good value! Sized up the boards/suits, got kitted up and carried everything down to the beach. Alice opted for wetsuit gloves but as it turned out we didn't need them. Had a really good little education snippit from Cheggs about waves, rip currents, safety etc - made me realise that there's a lot of similarities between teaching surfing and delivering DofE/mountain leader stuff, all outdoors based education with lots of similar techniques. Quick bit on how to catch waves, position on board and starting off by just catching the wave and arching back without standing up and we were into the water! Not cold at all (the 5mm wetsuits may have had something to do with that!) and the bottom of the beach was beautiful smooth sand. Even about 50/100m out I could stand up, albeit to my chest on a smooth sandy bottom. Once in the water the waves looked a lot bigger!

Got practiced at catching the waves and bodyboarding them before another quick beach session on methods of going from back arched to standing - 3 types: the pop-up being the best but hardest, the step up or the kneel up. Main thing = don't split the knees! Back into the water for the main bit, must have spent over an hour practising and it was brilliant fun, everyone was really supportive of each other, cheering when we caught the waves! There were 8 of us there, all beginners. I managed to catch a few waves, although was definitely cheating by splitting my knees sometimes! Think the slackline balance helps a lot, and my board was so humungous that I could stand on it all day!

SurfLewis surfing lesson - my board was humungous!

Truly shattered we made our way back to the van, stripped off and got warm with spare clothes from the car. What a great morning! Driving back it just started to rain - we had timed it perfectly!

Back at the flat we were both knackered! Massive lunch before skyping my folks, not too long before I'll be back in Kendal and get to see them again now. Chilled out and started to pack up all my stuff in the afternoon.

Over to No 13 to see the Aberdeen lot - turns out the helicopter hadn't flown this morning so good job we'd gone surfing instead! Had a chinese takeaway for dinner, good beef chowmein. Turned into a bit of a send off with booze/homemade truffles/brownies out in the flat - delicious! Andrea had made these superb Oreo truffles - incredible. Then the other lot of students rocked up with homemade carrot cake and more booze, fuelling a games night in - salad bowl game, rapidough, even a round of blind man's buff which was pretty hilarious at times. With no early start the following day it was a pretty late night, good celebration to cap off the placement!