School leaver SIENNA MAC ANNAheaded to a surf school in Portugal, with friends, for her post-Leaving Cert holiday
FIRST IMPRESSIONS weren’t promising. The Portuguese town of Peniche looked like something along the lines of 1950s Roswell.
There must be some mistake, I thought. After a merciless 4am start in Dublin, and six hours of travel by plane and bus, the last thing I expected was to find myself on the set of The Prisoner.
It didn’t help that my only coherent memory of our first hour on Portuguese soil involves a half-naked woman slaughtering chickens in her front yard.
The surf school’s transfer bus had come to meet our group of five at the airport in Lisbon, where we’d already found a fellow Irishman, determined to go surfing as a remedy for his latest ‘mid-life crisis’, despite his deathly fear of water. Yep, this was going to be interesting.
Unfortunately on this first day the famous coastal breeze of Portuguese had brought with it grey clouds and chilly fog, effectively ruining the vision of bright sun and long days on the beach that had sustained my four friends and I throughout that slow, institutional torture that is the Leaving Cert.
It got better when we saw the waves. Even my untrained eye could recognise good surf when it saw it. And, even without the sun, the long, white sandy shore was idyllic.
Unfortunately, what none of us realised is that even though we couldn’t see the sun, that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. By the end of the first day the whole camp had well and truly learned the value of suncream. One poor Swiss surfer ended up with such severe sun-stroke on her legs that she spent the rest of her holiday in hospital.
We had two surf lessons a day, each roughly two hours long, and our evenings were spent engrossed in the competitive violence of Junglespeed, a French card-game that we hoped would break the ice with our housemates. Instead, we were told quite bluntly by Swiss and Australians alike that it was far too vicious for their liking. Fair enough.
Food was easier than we’d anticipated. It turned out that for five people to survive on €15 there was one, wonderful word: toasties. With a panini maker in the kitchen, all we had to do was buy bread, cheese and occasionally ham with Oreo cookies as a substitute for vegetables on the side.
Our first surf in Peniche was not uneventful. Having surfed for years, I made the mistake of assuming I was any good. With my borrowed but still brand new Roxy wetsuit and snazzy Animal hardboard in tow, I was in the water for all of 10 minutes before I had a bruise the size of New Mexico on my hip. It would stay with me for the rest of the week, earning gasps of disgust and astonishment every time I dared remove my wetsuit.
After that first disastrous day the instructors took over our surf sessions and doggedly began the momentous task of filling in the gaps or, in my case trenches, in our surf-education.
With hasty, sand-drawn diagrams and elaborate hand gestures, Nico and Luis taught us how to identify a sand-bank and so choose the cleanest waves to catch. We drew wonky surfboards in the sand to practise the all-important “pop-up” while Nico schooled us in surf-etiquette. And we also learnt how to identify and manipulate the rip current when paddling out in order to conserve energy for tackling the monster green waves outback and last, but definitely not least, we had a blast.
Not only did the instructors take us patiently under their wings, they provided constant entertainment. There was the beautiful Carlo, affectionately known as the “slow German”; the topless, Argentinian Gabby, who makes fantastic carrot cake and leads the most punishing warm-ups known to man; and our instructors Nico and Luis whose catch-phrase is fast becoming legend among his students, “Why is this? It’s because…” And there is nothing like surfing to bond a group of people.
The highlight of the week was the Medieval festival in the town of Obidos, one of Portugal’s best kept secrets.
Held over 10 days in the shadow of an impressive 15th century castle, the festival features jousting, sword fights, pigs roasting on spits and recreational costumes for rent but most of our night was spent at the apothecary where you can drink Angels’ Tears and Blood of the Cow from skull-shaped cups while being blessed by a mage. And all for €1 a drink.
By the end of the week the sun had made its presence felt and we all sported fashionable hand and neck tans (the parts not covered by the wetsuits).
And even if we did wake up each morning still covered in sand – having flipped head over heels 10 times the previous day or, like David, collapsed breathless on the sand after swimming valiantly back to shore when the leash was torn clean off his surfboard by a deadly swell – it was worth it.
In every photo we saw in the slide-show, no matter how big the wave or how hard the fall, all you see are smiles. Every time.
- The surf holiday costs €495 each with surfholidays.com ( includes all gear, lessons and accommodation) but not flights. We stayed at Baleal Beach House, a surf school hostel that fits 18 people (balealsurfcamp.com). We flew Aer Lingus from Dublin to Lisbon, which cost €260 return. A transfer from Lisbon to the surf house cost about €17 a person each way.