The sun splashes off the lagoon and I shield my eyes to see the wave rushing up behind me. I’m lying on my big foam surfboard in perfect position as it arrives. “Three big paddle strokes to catch the wave,” is what my instructor, Owen, had told me. I do just that, pop up and voilà: I’m surfing, arms out, gliding, grinning, sailing, slipping, falling flat on my face, hard into the water.
I stand back up, unable to suppress a seismic smile and shake myself off like a wet dog. Owen gives me a high five and a few tips on my dodgy footwork, and I paddle back out to try again.
I’m not on a beach in California, though the kids curving around the promenade on skateboards could convince you otherwise. I’m somewhere much more exciting – in what was, until recently, a disused quarry in Ratho, 25 minutes from Edinburgh city centre, at Lost Shore Surf Resort.
This £60m, 25-hectare (60-acre) site is Europe’s largest wave pool, pumping out perfect, artificial waves for surfers of all abilities. It’s made possible by a wave generator and complex bathymetry, and water is sourced from the local canal, treated and eventually returned cleaner.
Lost Shore is Scotland’s first inland surf resort, with luxury pods and lodges, a waterfront bar and restaurant, and a wellness centre. Dog walkers potter past stacks of surfboards, curiously eyeing up the new attraction, while surfers done for the day flail around, yanking off wetsuits (there is no flattering way to do this) and make a beeline for the sauna.
The elephant in the room here is that surfing requires you to be in a body of water, and bodies of water in Scotland are famously chilly. I’m an Edinburgh local myself, and it being November, this had crossed my mind. The thick (plant-based!) wetsuit, boots and gloves provided made me forget this concern quickly. Surfing is a physical sport: wading, paddling, balancing, crashing. I got so warm during my session that I actually ditched my gloves.
The next question to arise might be: why build a wave garden in a coastal city?
“Mother nature goes to sleep fairly often,” founder Andy Hadden explains. “Here you can organise your lives around perfect waves. The surf community is desperate for a place like this, for when the ocean goes flat. The best waves you can surf are barrelling waves. These are a rarity in the ocean, but we can push them out at the touch of a button.”
The same is true for intermediate and beginner waves, Hadden says. “We’re going to see a huge influx, we hope, of people surfing who never would have ordinarily thought they would.”
I am very much a beginner, although I have had a couple of day trips out to the Coast to Coast surf school at Belhaven Bay in Dunbar, just east of Edinburgh. Being out in the ocean, in the same water as whales, looking at the endless horizon and catching waves birthed in distant storms, will always be unique. But there are few better places to learn how to ride a wave than in a controlled environment.
Curro de Laca, head of surfing operations at Wavegarden, who designed the lagoon, says: “This is never going to replace the ocean. It’s not intended for that. But it’s the best surfing fitness gym you’re going to get. You have to repeat to build muscle memory. Then you can go back out into the ocean and your body will know what it has to do in the wave.”
Lost Shore is more fun than most gyms, I should add. There are more shaka symbols and spontaneous whooping, and significantly fewer protein shakes – but Curro’s point stands. The existence of a wave pool such as Lost Shore doesn’t make me less likely to go back to Belhaven Bay in the future. Quite the opposite. As I bob around in the water watching surfers far more proficient than me, it’s hard not to dream of trying this again out on the open sea.
I try to pop up on a faster wave, and fall off my surfboard in a comical mess of limbs. This may sound gruelling, but trust me: surfing is utterly addictive, whether you’re good at it or not. It’s not just the transfer of energy you feel when you catch a wave, but the immersion of it. When you’re surfing, you think of nothing except the next wave, partly because you want to catch it and partly because if you don’t, it’s going to hit you in the face.
I’ve got a long way to go to become a decent surfer (as a supercut of my crashes would show), but as the final set of my session draws in, I stand up on “the speedy wave” and cruise back to the promenade, dreaming of what waves may lie beyond.
“The north shore of Scotland has some of the best waves on the planet,” Hadden tells me. “Ask any Hawaiian surfer about the difference and they’ll say there’s no difference apart from the temperature. On the east coast, we have some of the best learning waves out there. We want to be encouraging people to go out to the ocean and learn with these clubs and schools.”
After drying off, I head to the waterfront pod I’ll be spending the night in. It’s a delightful little thing, designed by Edinburgh’s Armadilla, a name that reflects the shape of the pod. It looks out on to the surf. There is a comfy king-sized bed, an immaculate speaker system, local Machina coffee inside and enough lighting options to create a new coded language model.
You might wonder what there is to do at a surf resort once you finish surfing. The Edinburgh International Climbing Arena (EICA), Europe’s largest indoor climbing centre, is just next door, but I am simply too exhausted for that, so I opt to do something else instead: eat. The canteen here has three, seasonally rotating dining options. I eat the largest slice of pizza I’ve ever seen, from the Edinburgh staple Civerinos, and follow it up with a large plate of roast potatoes (and a refreshing cucumber salad), from Glasgow’s Five March. At the table next to mine, surfers analyse tapes of their waves, while I chow down on a steak taco from Rafa’s Mexican diner, before plodding to my pod to watch Point Break (what else?).
Keanu Reeves’s Johnny Utah pins down the allure of surfing: “I’m drawn to it, or something.”
The resort calms down at night, as the waves go silent and the daytrippers go home. When I wake in the morning, it’s 9am, and I open my pod door to find a new crew already riding big barrel waves. The sight itself is exhilarating. My plan had been to grab breakfast and a coffee, go climbing at the EICA then go home. I book myself on to another surfing session instead.
Stuart Kenny was hosted by Lost Shore Surf Resort. Surf sessions: £55 adult/£45 child for 60 minutes. Surf lessons: £60 adult/£50 child for 90 minutes. Waterfront pods are £175 a night and waterfront lodges £250
