Surfing in Greece? 0
BOLTS of lightning flashed in cobweb patterns overhead, the gray and storming sea sending wave after wave that crashed on the beach behind us. We paddled our borrowed surfboards furiously southward to avoid the whitewash, then, one by one, turned into the arching faces and rode them to shore.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. There is no surf in Greece, fellow boarders had told me when I was planning my Greek surf safari. Yes, they said, Greece is surrounded by three seas and boasts nearly 10,000 miles of coastline and about 6,000 islands and islets that could be suitable for surfing. But this is the Mediterranean — too sheltered for wind and water to produce waves any bigger than a foot or two, none of which would be surfable.
And yet a quick Internet search suggested otherwise. About a half-dozen Greek Web sites advertised photographs of big, beautiful waves crashing on both the Ionian and Aegean coasts. Not storm-ripped slop but smooth, Hawaiian-style breaks with not a soul in sight.
In mid-September, during a trip to Greece, I decided it was time to see for myself. I selected a beach on the Ionian Coast at random from a tourist map, threw my swim trunks and some surf wax into my rental car, invited two new friends along, and headed west from Kalamata to the tiny port town of Pylos.
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