Photo: Testemale

Remember the early 90’s? Recent biting recession, cancelled summer surf comps in France, flat spells leading to hot car park despair? Well for a short while at least this year in early July, the 90’s were back! What was perhaps most remarkable though wasn’t the lack of swell, rather the short term thinking of everyone, verging on panic. “I’ve never known anything like it” said many a surf checker on day nine of no surf, as if their measly decade or so of empirical observations somehow constituted some kind of climatic record on a 3.4 billion-year-old planet. Indeed, in these days of horizontal time and instant gratification, patience may be a virtue, but a rare one. Fortunately, man’s ingenuity means that waiting is an unnecessary inconvenience for some, and inevitable talk of an inland wave in a Basque field not 40 minutes drive away from the postponed Roxy Pro Biarritz became reality. Here, Sally Fitzgibbons, perhaps the one ASP Women’s World Title Race frontrunner who would’ve voted to hold the event in tiny surf, shows off a sharp slop technique in front of Steph, Rosy and Bianca.