In November, two of our staff Clover and Sam travelled north to Thurso for the adults Scottish Nationals.
The surf was horrendous on the first day onshore 3ft but it was all about survival with Sam getting through heats and quaterfinals in both the Senior Shortboarding (over 35yrs) and the longboarding. Clover in her first national as a senior, surfed exceptionally well winning both her heat and semi finals pretty comfortably in the ladies event.
The next day the waves pumped with 4-6ft barreling Thurso, with semi finals and finals of the 4 events running back to back, Sam surfed in 2 semi finals running into 2 finals with only 15min breaks between. Sam qualified for both finals. Picked the wrong strategy in the longboarding final aiming for the barrels which didn’t play ball to come third behind legends Chris Clarke and winner Malcolm Finlay. Sam then lead the senior shortboarding for more than half the final with an excellent barrel only to fail to find a quality second wave (through exhaustion too) after both Donald Peace and Mark Cameron (first) had found the gems to overtake his score. Another 3rd. But an excellent result for the senior Instructor.
Clover entered the final of the ladies as one of the favourites but unfortunately chose this time to show her inexperience, getting pulled out of position by a strong sideways rip for the sets allowing the two local surfers to gain advantage. Clover ending up 3rd to iona 2nd and Phoebe 1st. In a very positive note Phoebe was also part of our junior development team a decade ago and moved to Thurso and won her second national title and she recently came 5th in the UK championships against some of the top UK girls. So gutted for clover but delighted for Phoebe in what was the best standard of ladies surfing in the Scottish Championships to date.