OH BEAUTIFUL ROUTINE
Lisbon, Portugal. The beaches and streets are getting emptier, the cold is reaching us very shyly and the ocean is starting to wake up.
The arrival of Autumn is always a good signal: It’s time to say goodbye to the (extra) crowded peaks, the mediocre waves and the big amounts of trash left at the beach by tourists and locals, mainly the second ones.
I found in Portugal one of the most inspiring places so far in terms of surfing photography. It’s coastline features some of the best waves of Europe in a really short distance and rare is the week where the sun doesn’t appear for at least a couple of days. These facts and my beautiful girlfriend, made me decide to move to Lisbon last year, and that was one of the best decisions I ever made.
Lisbon’s area has a big amount of high-level surfers, but there’s a lack of people doing anything other than high performance surfing, which I find kind of boring. It’s difficult to find people drawing different lines with different styles and boards. This, among other reasons, is why I found a great connection with the Appleton family (Diogo, Ria and Duarte), Euri- co and Brad Flora. Logs, asymmetrical boards, finless, stretched twin fins... a long list of interesting boards that would lead to different and amazing choreographies in an ocean dominated by thrusters and the competition surfing.
Autumn arrived to Portugal and so did the waves. The tides became the basis of our day-to-day routine and Wind- guru became our laptops’ home page.
After hitting mid-October, swells started to come and the next 20 days would become some of the most glorious I remember. In three weeks, we had Carcavelos, Coxos and Cave firing and we scored some of the best log waves I’ve seen in this area of Portugal.
Just a few kilometers separate these waves, but they look like they could be in completely different oceans. Cave is one of the scariest slabs in the world: it breaks on top of a shallow (almost dry) reef just in front of a big rock. Just a few guys surf it when it works. Coxos is one of the best rights in Portugal, but also one of the most crowded waves. Carcavelos is Lisbon’s pearl, a versatile wave that works with almost any kind of swell and produces some of the best beach break waves in Europe.
The following pictures are a selection of five different sessions we scored during that intense period of good swells and feature three of the best alternative surfers in Portugal.
Shot over consecutive mornings during the long, recent run of North Coast autumn swell, In the Family of Things is Dave Rastovich in his element, doing his thing.