Around the Coast in Eighty Waves

Living in an ancient, unheated campervan for fourteen months, including the coldest winter for thirty years, Jonathan Bennett travelled clockwise round the country, surfing every beach there were waves – and several where there weren’t.

From Cape Wrath to the Lizard Peninsula, from Orkney to Anglesey, he shared the waves with seals, sewage and fellow surfers, meeting friendly locals, and not so friendly ones, and taking a snapshot of the nation from a unique perspective, fifty metres off-shore.

Along the way he dragged his board for several miles over the Scottish hills to surf the most isolated beach in Britain, fought for waves at surf-mecca Newquay, took on the legendary Thurso (and lost), cooked road-kill, saved sea-birds, survived sub-zero nights and snow-bound days, avoided dogging in Redcar, tried to wife-swap in Whitby (without success), got stranded on a domestic desert island, went shark-hunting with a surfboard in Penzance, Viking-hunting in Orkney and soul-searching everywhere. And all without going near a campsite, sleeping instead with the sound of the waves (and once, a snow-ball fight) whispering in his ears.

Aimed at regular surfers and desk-bound dreamers, Around the Coast in 80 Waves is a British coastal road trip. Along the way it explores the exhilarations and frustrations of surfing, taking the reader on a beach-by-beach journey around Britain. It will appeal to the general reader, and has a particular but not exclusive focus on anyone who has surfed or wanted to surf, or just wondered what it would be like to leave everything and travel round Britain, surfing or otherwise.

Book Author

Jonathan Bennett studied at Cambridge, where he first developed a taste for early mornings, strenuous exercise and cold water, first rowing and later as a half-blue in Modern Pentathlon. All of this would help with the trials and tribulations of surfing. Somehow he also managed to pick up a degree in French and Latin. After a brief flirtation with office life in London, he bought a motorbike and fled to Barcelona, where he wrote a series of novels and screenplays, supporting himself first as an English teacher and tour guide, and later as a magazine editor and columnist, film critic and tr...
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