February blues

Constantine Bay, north Cornwall

It was a hot day on the north Cornish coast, the sun beating down on the curl of golden beach below, with surfers bobbing like a colony of seals on the swell. Four or five kids rolled out of a van, their boards strapped to the roof. It looked like the south of France, so turquoise was the sea as it pooled beside the cliffs.

This was the last time I came to Polzeath – summer half-term. I arrived in the car park overlooking these English sands – at what I thought to be an enthusiastically early hour – and queued, jostling for space with what appeared to be west London’s entire population of Porsche Cayennes.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by the gathering crowds, for even under a blanket of humanity, Polzeath is picturesque. But then I’m not used to English beaches in high season; I’ve been put off them because of where I live – near Lyme Regis, on the Dorset-Devon coast, where from May to September I conspicuously avoid the stew of tourists who make the shopkeepers short-tempered and cause the quality of fish and chips to slip.

Scott Fairhurst, co-founder of Perfect Stays, a new north Cornwall agency for high-end holiday rentals, doesn’t say anything about cod portions getting smaller in June. But he’s only half joking when he says it’s not the summer parking at Polzeath that’s the issue; rather it’s finding space to swim in the sea. This slither of north Cornwall – by road, a 22-mile stretch from Polzeath west to Watergate Bay on the outskirts of Newquay – gets more popular (and more moneyed) each year.

“I first came to Polzeath as a small boy in the 1950s, and then with my own children in 1997. Since then the area has changed,” says David Mills, a London businessman with a house near Daymer Bay. “We’re noticing how more people, including ourselves, are visiting year round. There has always been a strong resident community. But that’s something I don’t think everyone understands, that north Cornwall isn’t just a holiday playground.”

There is certainly a smart hotel to almost every fishing village or beach on this golden threaded coast. They include the St Moritz Hotel near Polzeath; the St Enodoc Hotel, close to Rock; St Petroc’s Hotel and St Edmunds House in Padstow (both co-owned by TV chef Rick Stein); the Scarlet Hotel in Mawgan Porth (adults only); and The Hotel and Extreme Academy at Watergate Bay, which is currently redeveloping the pool area into a beach spa for the summer (more for surfers than the Botox crowd).

Michelin stars also twinkle on the coast – Nathan Outlaw at the St Enodoc Hotel has two. In Padstow, Stein’s Seafood Restaurant and Paul Ainsworth at Number 6 are so-far unstarred but greatly acclaimed, while Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen Cornwall at Watergate Bay is an essential stop off on any gourmet tour of the county.

Some on this list of places to eat and sleep have closed for winter when I visit in January (though most reopen from February onwards) but even without them, pre-season north Cornwall is a very fine thing indeed. Take Polzeath – unrecognizable from my previous, summertime visit, and completely empty save for one brave surfer in the water, his terrier chasing spume as wind carries it up the beach.

To come in such weather admittedly means one’s children won’t be making sandcastles or eating ice creams with quite the same aplomb (in tiny Padstow, we look for 30 minutes before finding a café selling cones). With the hotel choices much reduced in winter, one’s options much improve by renting a private house instead. There are many, with new luxury properties on the market including Sea House outside Newquay (super-mod, all very eco, with interiors on this side of bling), Marver in Mawgan Porth (where I stayed) and Treverra Cottage in Rock (where I intend to go next – but only in winter, when prices are £1,800 as opposed to high season’s £5,000 a week). Of the three, Sea House is the most luxurious in winter, with a heated indoor pool.

A bedroom at Marver House with sea view

Marver is majestic – a mixed contemporary style, sleeping 12, with a bubbling outdoor hot tub that looks over the Atlantic rollers as they crash against mussel-carpeted rocks. It must be said that I don’t much care for the optics that light up the Jacuzzi. Nor for some of the mis-matched interior fit, with the kitchen designed more for a chef (which Marver can provide) than as a place for everyone to eat. But the whole works very well indeed – the house warm, with underheated floors, endless flatscreens (one to every guest room), an outdoor fire-pit and surfboards for the kids. Indeed with the sea raging outside, there’s nothing more romantic than sleeping with the shutters pulled back.

But still, Treverra Cottage is the house I like best with its almost monastic white-walled simplicity, impeccable cashmere blankets, Artemide lighting and elegant antiques, the look more Axel-Vervoordt-on-sea than Cornish cliché, even if the sea itself is a 15-minute walk. Its style is not unlike owner Liz Berman’s other rental property, Chalet Kernow in Verbier, which is one of the ski resort’s most chic.

But while flatscreens and Jacuzzis are great distractions in winter, one also needs to like rain that, unlike city rain in winter, makes one feel alive, the clouds flitting down the coast to make Cornwall’s rugged cliffs and sand turn slate and gold by turn. And when the sun emerges, even if it’s just for a moment on the headland out in front, it makes the colours – the green fields, the scarlet-painted hulls – seem even brighter against the inky backdrop of the sky. Atmospheric and always beautiful, it is small wonder Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall-based novels talk more of winter than of June.

For even if the daylight hours are short, the winter walking is spectacular. I visit empty Constantine Bay, its slick of yellow stretching a half-mile with not another person in sight. An early morning stroll on Mawgan Porth is equally desolate, save for two South Africans in shorts and windsheeters standing over an errant, headless tuna they have found washed up on the beach. At Daymer Bay, which lies in a sheltered spot on the Camel Estuary – the beach backed by grass-topped dunes, with the fishing village of Padstow on the other side – there are four or five locals taking their Sunday afternoon walk. I watch a kitesurfer do his leaps, while on the coast path I come across a lady wearing a felt-brimmed hat. She has just come from 3pm Evensong at the little church of St Enodoc – a favourite of the poet Sir John Betjeman, whose grave lies looking out to sea.

Treverra Cottage in Rock

Of course there are trade-offs in winter, chief among them the fact summer’s night water taxi doesn’t ply the Camel Estuary (Rock to Padstow by road takes 30 minutes; by water, it takes five). There is a public passenger ferry but the hours are short, stopping at 4.30pm, which means that well-practised summer rubric – staying in Rock, dining in Padstow – isn’t quite so tempting in the winter months. Indeed mid-afternoon at this time of year and I’m one of only four passengers on the ferry, and this despite it being the weekend. “I’ve been doing this for 18 years,” says the ferryman: “In summer, the queue begins at 10.30am and I don’t see the back of it till late.”

But then winter in north Cornwall isn’t about “occasion” eating but something much more easy and relaxed. This is because good gastro pubs – chief among them the St Kew Inn, three miles inland from Rock – are preferred by locals over and above the white tablecloth set. Nathan Outlaw might be away during my visit, but instead I walk in to Rick Stein’s Café on Middle Street in Padstow. In summer, people will queue an hour for this simple restaurant that takes no reservations for lunch. In winter, I’m immediately ushered to a table in the window with room for our party of six. On the menu there is a £9.95 moules marinière and frites – a “winter special” that includes a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. Such keen prices reel in the locals, along with a spectacular £12.50 grilled sea bass stuffed with lemongrass and spiced shrimp paste, served with Kuchumber salad and steamed rice. Last time I ate at Stein’s, I admit, I was concentrating less on the food than the presence of various celebrities who’d made it down from Medialand for their hit of summer Cornish chic. This time around, the local sea bass was the star, which reminds me of a simpler life in Cornwall, before the Porsche Cayenne.

.......................................................................

Details

Sophy Roberts was a guest of Marver House (www.marverhouse.co.uk), which sleeps 12 and costs from£2,500 per week in winter, or £6,500 in summer. Treverra Cottage (www.ckrock.com) sleeps eight and costs from £1,800 in winter, or £5,000 in summer. Perfect Stays (www.perfectstays.co.uk) offers a week at Sea House, which sleeps 10, from £3,600 and has a range of properties from £850 a week in winter, rising to £6,500 in summer, both including concierge service.

.......................................................................

But if you would rather escape the cold: The fast-track route to surfing success

It’s during my last lesson at Surfer’s Point, an aptly named beach in Barbados, that everything finally clicks, writes Matt Barr. For one thing, it’s raining. For many, this would be the stuff of holiday nightmares but it’s something a local surfer named Mike Parker has told me I should be praying for.

“All the tourists will leave but that’s when the waves get really good,” he says. “The wind will drop and the waves will get really consistent. They’re the sessions we live for here.”

All week I’ve been having intensive coaching from Chris Thomson, a professional surfer who runs surf travel company Errant. Offering one-on-one lessons in warm, uncrowded waves, its fast-track courses promise to turn anybody, no matter how inexperienced, into a proper surfer. The week with Thomson has given me a new-found confidence, so when the clouds darken, the heavens open and Parker grabs his board and paddles out, I follow.

The rain is torrential but the waves have, indeed, taken on an eerily calm and glassy appearance. Suddenly a “set” of head-high waves, bigger than anything I’ve previously tackled, appears on the horizon. I turn around and paddle as hard as I can, trying to remember everything Thomson has been teaching me.

Suddenly I’m on one of the biggest waves I’ve ever caught. The difference this time is that I seem to know what I’m doing, rather than hanging on for dear life. Before I know it, I’ve covered the distance to shore in 20 exhilarating yet controlled seconds. Unable to keep the grin from my face, I turn as quickly as I can and paddle back out for more.

“That’s why I haven’t been home for years,” says Parker, as he rushes out to catch another wave himself. Parker is the type of gnarled, bronzed expat surfer you meet on beaches all over the world. Eight years ago he came to Barbados from London for a holiday but ended up buying some land on the island and now runs the café at Surfer’s Point.

It’s easy to see how he became attached to the place, especially when you compare the conditions to those back in the UK. As I know all too well, it takes a special dedication to surf during winter in the northern hemisphere. At my local surf spot on the south coast of England a thick wetsuit, hood, gloves and boots are essential but, even on the coldest days, the water can be so crowded with good surfers that beginners – and even intermediates such as myself – are all but relegated to the scraps that roll through.

This year, unable to face yet another winter of blue toes and crowded waters, I took decisive action. Surely it was possible to surf somewhere friendly, where the water is warm and the surf consistent? On the southern tip of Barbados, Surfer’s Point is a world away from self-contained resorts such as Sandy Lane and the Royal Westmoreland on the island’s west, or so-called “platinum”, coast. There are rum shops, sun loungers and picnic tables sinking into the sand, thatch-roofed cafés selling fried fish with rice and beans, and several surf shops nearby. Accommodation here is largely self-catering apartments, some basic, others luxurious but most just metres from the shore, meaning you can check surf conditions almost from your bed. And you are unlikely to be disappointed – according to Errant, the beach here offers 350 days of rideable surf per year.

My coaching starts with Thomson filming footage of me surfing and forcing me to watch it with him back on the beach. Throughout my surfing career I’ve had problems generating enough speed once I stand up on the board. Looking at the footage, Thomson immediately pinpoints the problem. “You’re looking at the nose of your board. You need to look where you want to go and use your arms to get you there.”

Next, Thomson has me looking for what he calls “power pockets” – steeper parts of a wave that enable good surfers to generate more speed and, thus, longer rides. My week quickly settles into the type of routine that evidently caused Parker to burn his passport. If the swells are too big at Surfer’s Point we take a short drive around the headland to Freights, a smaller beginner’s wave that breaks right on the beach. As the week goes on I begin to get familiar with the consistent nature of the waves. Having reached a plateau for years, I feel my surfing improve with every session.

In the evenings I join other surf students and head into Oistins, a nearby town full of shacks selling freshly caught tuna and red snapper served with “macaroni pie” or grilled potatoes. The temptation to stay out late is there – particularly on “Fish Friday”, the town’s party night – but I’m in bed early, up at dawn and surfing as much as possible.

By the time I follow Parker out into the rain for that final surf, I’m glad of all those early nights. The bigger waves come quickly but, because there’s only the three of us in the water, I get the chance to adapt to their size and put what I’ve learned into practice.

Short of moving to the Orkney Islands or going back in time, it’s a surf session that simply wouldn’t be possible at home. I’ve had to travel across the Atlantic to experience it but, for the first time in eight years of trying, I actually feel like a surfer.

Matt Barr was a guest of Errant Surf Travel (www.errantsurf.com), which offers a week’s surf course at Surfer’s Point, Barbados, from £635. He flew from from London with Virgin Atlantic ( www.virginatlantic.com ), returns from £614. For more information on Barbados in general, visit www.visitbarbados.org