By Peter Walker
Newquay, England - The teenage girls squint into the sun, watching the surfer expertly ride a rolling wave into the shoreline. "He's good," one says to the other. "And cute," comes the giggled response.
California? Sydney? No, this is all taking place off the generally tepid coast of Britain.
While not known to the layman as a surfing hotspot, Britain has seen an explosion in the sport's popularity over recent years, one aided by the increasing penchant for surfing-linked clothing among the country's youth.
It is centred around Cornwall, southwest England, and in particular Newquay, an already well-established tourist town where powerful breakers rolling in from the Atlantic now attract surfers from around the world.
Fistral Beach, where a round of the Rip Curl Boardmaster event was taking place earlier this month, is now full of surf-friendly hostels and cafes, many packed with Australians and South Africans escaping the Southern Hemisphere winter.
The industry is so big that two British universities have begun to offer undergraduate degrees in surfing business and technology.
The British Surfing Association (BSA), which regulates the sport, estimates the country now has around 250 000 regular surfers, a number which doubles during the summertime.
Such has been the demand to learn the sport that the BSA holds intensive coaching courses for those wishing to teach surfing virtually every weekend, spokeswoman Karen Walton said.
It is undeniable that the popular image of surfing - often involving devil-may-care, ripple-muscled men risking their lives in huge swells to an admiring audience of young women - has enormous power.
At the Newquay tournament, while several dozen people lined the shore to watch competitors perform, around 10 times as many were crammed into a specially-erected bar at the back of the beach, most wearing the latest surfing-style leisure gear.
"Because the surfing clothing has become mainstream, I think people can associate themselves with the sport without necessarily taking part in it," Walton conceded.
"The most annoying thing from a surfer's point of view is not that people want to be associated with the sport, but that people give the sport a bad name, because they pretend to be associated with it and then they go out and act like drunken hooligans. It does rub off on the surfers a little bit."
Despite the hangers-on, Britain is an increasingly serious surfing nation, coming 10th out of around two dozen nations at the World Surfing Games in Ecuador earlier this year.
Additionally, far from being the laid-back party animals of repute, many surfers are ardent about not only their sport but the environment in which they pursue it.
Since being formed in 1990, the Surfers Against Sewage group has won a series of notable campaigns over cleaning up Britain's beaches and coastlines.
Last week, a group of male activists from the group donned high heels and wigs before carrying their surfboards to meet British environment minister Elliott Morley.
The self-styled "gender bending" surfers were hoping to highlight what they say is the harmful effect of hormone-imbalancing chemicals pumped into the water supply, which, research has found, is causing some male fish to exhibit female characteristics.
"I think we've gradually turned the surfer stereotype around," said Surfers Against Sewage campaigns director Richard Hardy.
"We campaign on all sorts of things, including safer shipping, toxic cargos and the harmful effects of everyday chemical which get into the water through the sewage system."
As well as the activism, there is, of course, another particularly British characteristic to its surfing scene.
Despite the August heat, far from donning the baggy shorts displayed in the bar, all the surfers off Newquay were wearing wetsuits - something listed as compulsory, whatever the season, under British Surfing Association rules.
