Conditions:
Air-temperature: 17° Celsius
Water-temperature 16° Celsius:
Wind: north-east, onshore
Short report about a surf trip in germany…
number of participants: 5 (teka, flo, björn, hanni, boris)
Not much is known about remarkable surf sessions in the baltic sea. So when my brother checked that picture on a webcam located at the roof of a seaside hotel in zinnowitz we decided spontaneously to extend the rare and few examples of people surfing the baltic sea, for another chapter, and drove the 250km from berlin to zinnowitz in his old white bmw. The way took us about 4 hours and we arrived at night to take a nap on the beach.
The sound we could hear and the white-water that we saw when we arrived made us quite optimistic for the upcoming morning. We woke up with the sunrise and immediately checked the conditions… strong on shore breeze from the north-east, about 19km/h – colder than expected - belly to shoulder high bumpy brown waves rolled unpredictably and permanently ashore - no sets where to identify. We where beside our self’s with joy: this is probably the best we’ve ever seen of the shy apologetic baltic sea! Normally it behaves just like a bathtub. So now we were about to surf it for our first time, hell yeah!
The pier that you see in the picture helped us to decide where we wanted to be and how we could get there. The spot was located on the right hand side of the pier about a hundred meters away from it. We grabbed our longboards for our first approach and tried to paddle out in a straight line towards the line-up – shortest way. This was when we discovered the strong current that pushed us overwhelmingly to the pier. “Damn it aint gonna work like this! Hmm...” So we decided to try it again, this time several hundred meters away from the pier with the current still coming from the right side, but in a more diagonal line... no way... no one of us made it over the first 2 or 3 white-water wave-sections and we ended up at the pier. Damn! Ok, next try on the left side of the pier – again no one made it over the lines of white-water barriers. We made a couple of tries from different points and different directions until the last of us were cold and fatigue. We admitted to ourselves that it aint gonna work out like this. And while eating fresh fish sandwiches we discussed the opportunity to jump from the pier on its very end. But since it was a hassle to even hold the board at this wind speed – we dropped that idea quickly.
Maybe you noticed the little white shed on the lower right of the picture. That’s where the lifeguard is. We gave it a try and asked him if he can give us a ride out there with his boat. But he just smiled at us and said: “No sir, no rescueing today...” Too bad - we thought and realized that there won’t be any surfing today either. But we aint gonna give up like this. This time the sea defied our attempts to get a ride, but we’ll be back. That’s for sure!
In the afternoon we were back on our way to berlin, glad that we at least introduced our boards to the local environment.
boris.