Mikey Wright skipped the night antics in favour of turning upside down during daylight hours. Photo: Bastien Bonnarme/Quiksilver

The Morning After The Night Of The Opening Party

The Quik Fest must go on.

news // Sep 20, 2026

Words by Pedro Ramos

Reading Time: 4 minutes

TL;DR

No casualties after massive opening party, yet
Another grand, packed beach day in Hossegor
Hughie Vaughan posts highest score of the day after getting the highest score of the night

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Miky Picon has to have a dark sense of humour.

After making surfers go out in the most challenging (and best thus far) conditions of the waiting period at La Nord, they were still persuaded to join in on the festival’s nocturnal extracurriculars and its official opening party.

But he kept next morning’s 7:30am call in place.

More than half of the competitors showed up to the party. Some stuffed themselves with cured meat, cheese and the odd grape. Anonymous sources guarantee that many were even seen holding fermented grape juice filled chalices.

On their shoulders, angels sang lullabies on one side, while devils whispered to get on stage on the other.

The benign influence was easily subdued by the more demonic one.

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In the vein of Momentum Generation stars jumping behind the bar at Rock Food and serving patrons beer with too much head during the French leg of the tour, this new generation were playing as backup dancers and hype people during the sets of So Me and Busy P, before a sea of people that, for a handful of hours, took up every square metre of Place des Landais.

When La Nord rose this morning, it was a little wobbly from getting roughed up by the winds of the night. Cognac is cognac, but work is work, and work needs to get done. Starting at 8am, nine 30-minute heats were surfed. “Best combo” was assigned as the day’s theme.

The northerly puff made some of La Nord’s morning imperfections more noticeable, hence the decision to run a shorter day.

Nathan Fletcher chimed in to point out there could be a silver lining in making use of the potential air and tube sections the wind could offer.

Noah Beschen found them, but struggled to land them. Photo: Arthur Picard/Quiksilver

Combos were hard to come by and most waves saw no more than one turn for the first few heats of the morning. The first significant result of the day came from Aritz Aranburu, who put together a stylish and powerful couple of turns for a 6.3.

The vast majority of the playing field were having a shocker and it wasn’t clear if they were a bit hungover, or the ocean was.

Justin Becret, an exception during the entire day, was able to bring the first proper round of applause from the beach with an air reverse, followed up by pulling into a round, meaty closeout, and kept giving the people what they had come for with a solid reentry into the flats, all of these very, very close to the sand in classic French fashion. But does he even party?

No one seems to surf France quite like the French. Justin Becret. Photo: Arthur Picard/Quiksilver

At the comp area, during lulls, surfers were staring more and more to their right towards La Gravière, still maxed out but barreling and spitting hard, letting everyone know it’s still there and wanting to be surfed in the coming days.

Towards the end of the day, Hughie Vaughan, who, as far as we know, spent much of last night dancing on stage with friends, adversaries and the Ed Banger crew, walked down the beach wearing what has to be a new personal record in boardshort length.

In the water, the Stab High champ did Huge-y things to get the highest score of the day, a 7.5, bringing his team to sixth position on the leaderboard.

As the contest got called off, Mikey Wright and a couple of freesurfers went packing closeouts and punting over the churny mess that La Grav still looked like.

Plenty more surfing to come in the coming days.