There were two methods of attack. One was you got the stuff you wanted and simply walked back out the way you walked in. This worked a treat until they cottoned on and posted a big, bald fella in an ill fitting suit near entrance for most of August. This left the only way out as being the actual way out. So you’d drink your YOP while shopping, put it back in the aisle go and pay for your emmental, or whatever, and hope that what you had in your pockets didn’t fire up the security barrier.

Needless to say things escalated a little so that teams were going in mid summer with huge winter jackets. More jackets equal more pockets. It was a trend that transcended national barriers and essentially focussed on getting a prime filet steak out of there for the cost of a packet of chewing gum. Things reached a head when a couple of the older boys invited a gaggle of well–spoken, ultra hot German chicks around for a barbeque at Muscle Ranch.

The challenge to impress was on. The lamer ones amongst us popped a steak down the Y-fronts as usual but the real champions had the parka jacket pockets full. Stigg walked out with 3 bottles of Jack Daniels and Chuff with a stack of CD’s. But the winner had to be Sprock who at 5’2” took on the largest fish in the shop. I think it was a salmon. As Sprock walked up to the counter a the rest of us were bent double at the yoghurt aisle in hysterics. The tail of the thing was coming straight up through his parker giving his ear a little tickle, just about hidden by his lion like locks. At the other end the salmon’s tongue was popping out the bottom of his 100% Mambo shorts.

Hossegor was and is a learning experience. Like snapping your leash and swimming in and having 2 fully naked, shaved and oiled men hand deliver your board. It was about the whole team getting beaten up at the Fete De Tyrosse and having Tyrosse 1 – Geordies 0 plackarded on the side of the van for the weekend.

Those first summers were an adventure of allsorts, way beyond just the surfing. Robbie Hildreth and Chris Eyre, the kings of Saltburn Pier, put a bag of crabs in Gabe Davies’s radiator, the smell of which kept going long into winter. It was about trying to speak all sorts of foreign languages, about getting canny good at ordering croissants and confident with inappropriate chat up lines but not much else.

The scoring of occasional classic days and always having some sandbar waves to play on. Seeing ‘magazine surfers’ for the first time, naked girls asking you for the time and ‘sharing’ a beer with a legend. It was about the drive down in anticipation and the drive home with tongues full of tales made up from all that went in between.

There’s something about that sweet pine smell that screams freedom. It’s a powerful aroma, one that wafts just as strongly today as it did in 1993.