Is Paris Becoming A Surf Town?

There are currently 13.5K members in a private Facebook group called “Surfers From Paris”.

Created in 2013, the group aims to bring together closeted city surfers to organize day trips, weekends, and longer journeys to coastlines with rideable waves. Seems innocent enough, but there’s a catch — the city of Paris is landlocked.

Among the members are those who, despite growing up in coastal towns and surfing from a young age, moved to Paris to pursue careers, romance, and other metropolitan ambitions. 

Common sense might suggest they should simply pivot to less swell-dependent hobbies like yoga, climbing, or, Laird forbid, surf-skating. But it’s their stubborn nature that drives them onto the A14 — the asphalt strip responsible for burning the most rubber off their tires and chunks of change from their wallets.

That same highway lends its name to a short film directed by Guillaume Rouan and Aurélien Bacquet — founding members of Barbès Surf Club, a collective of landlocked gents striving to bring a touch of surf culture to their city through select events and screenings. While the act of surfing itself is largely absent, the film offers a whimsical ode to the most dreadful aspects of this pastime for the Parisian set: the endless drives, ice-cream headaches, and other unnecessary discomforts that never quite tip the scales.

The closest surfable wave — mediocre on its best day — is over 200 kilometers away in the English Channel and needs a bruise-colored chart to break. So these poor souls must lug their boards, backpacks, and puffy jackets through the Paris metro network, competing with overworked city dwellers for space, before embarking on a four-hour drive to Vendée. There, they’ll not only make up a significant portion of the crowd but also stand out unmistakably with their Parisian license plates. Still, a walk in the park compared to the Olympic committee’s 15,000-kilometer journey from the city to find kickout-worthy waves.

Yet from these grim but hopeful journeys emerges an ethos of optimism and gratitude. As Aurélien puts it: “I want to keep doing it; it’s therapeutic. Waking up in your bed, going surfing at the end of a very long street, and returning to sleep in that same bed in Paris — it’s amazing. I feel like the ocean is at the end of my street.”

These guys work tirelessly one day, take the next off to surf, and slip back into their city routine with the telltale tan lines and bloodshot eyes that betray their devotion. Guillaume likens the experience to a romantic relationship: “You develop a different relationship with surfing. Even if you only do it a few times, it feels amazing — even if the waves are onshore and crappy.”

So next time you stroll to the beach for your daily no-look paddle out, spare a moment of silence for those who spend most of their surfing lives along France’s most expensive toll road, trying to nap in the cold confines of a cramped car, amid the lingering stench of urine from their damp wetsuits.