Croyde: Brilliant For Two Hours, A Shore Dump For The Rest

Everyone in North Devon will tell you about Croyde, and they're not wrong. What they tend to leave out is that it works properly for about two hours either side of the right tide, and spends the rest of the day either flat or trying to fold you onto wet sand.

The wave

West-facing beach break, wedged between Baggy Point at one end and Saunton Down at the other. Those two headlands are most of the story. They shelter the bay from wind that has already ruined everything else on the coast, and they squeeze the swell in so it stands up short and sharp instead of rolling. Next door at Saunton you get a long, mellow, forgiving wave you could learn on. Croyde is fast, hollow and considerably less interested in how your morning is going. On a good one it barrels. On a bad one it detonates in a foot of water.

If you are still at the Saunton stage, that is not an insult, it is the correct order. The things that get you from one to the other — picking a peak, timing, a pop-up that does not take three goes — are in our book, How To Surf. Read it in the car while you wait for the tide.

When to go

• Swell: West to southwest groundswell. Consistent enough year-round, but autumn and winter are when it has real size and shape. April is the quiet one worth knowing about — statistically the cleanest month of the year, and nobody has arrived yet.
• Wind: East to southeast is offshore. Baggy Point buys you more shelter than the compass suggests, which is why Croyde is often the only thing still working when the rest of the coast has gone to mush.
• Tide: Low to mid, pushing. This one isn't a preference, it's the whole game. High tide turns Croyde into a shore dump breaking hard onto dry sand. That's where most of the beach's injuries come from, and it isn't a wave, it's a punishment. Check the tide before you leave the house, not while you're stood in the car park with a wetsuit half on.

What it'll cost you

Water bottoms out around 8-9°C at the start of March and tops out at 15-18°C in mid-August. In practice: a 5/4 hooded suit with boots and gloves from November through April, a 4/3 either side of that, and a short window in late summer where you can get away with less and feel unreasonably pleased about it. What you wear under the suit matters more in a punchy beach break than a mellow one, because you'll be taking more of them on the head — chafe is a choice, not a rite of passage. Full breakdown in our winter kit guide.

The honest bit

It's the most famous beach in North Devon, which means that on a sunny Saturday in August with a clean three foot running, the line-up is a car park with waves in it. If that's not your thing, Saunton takes the overflow and is genuinely nicer for it, and Putsborough round the corner is more sheltered and usually quieter. Neither will give you what Croyde gives you on the right tide. Neither will drop you on a sandbar in front of forty people either.

Then there's the changing. Croyde's car park is exposed, the wind comes straight off the bay, and there is no dignified way to get out of a wet 5/4 in it. Something to stand on helps more than you'd think. So does not doing it under a towel.

More UK breaks in the Guide to Spots. If you want Cornwall's version of the same problem, that's Fistral.

Kit built for exactly these conditions, not the brochure version. svrf.uk

Header photo: Croyde Bay by Ethan Wilkinson on Unsplash.