In brief: A Jersey woman who took up surfing just five months ago has launched a free winter surf meet-up group, open to all abilities, as part of Laneez Surf School. Victoria Channing-Turner, who discovered the sport weeks before her 40th birthday, says the group is about community as much as catching waves.
From first lesson to founding a community
It began, as many great adventures do, with a sibling dragging you into something you hadn’t planned. Victoria Channing-Turner took a single surfing lesson with her sister, expecting little, and found herself utterly hooked. The BBC reports that this happened just weeks before her 40th birthday, and within five months she had gone from complete novice to the driving force behind a new social surf group in Jersey.
“We’ve bonded, we’ve made friendships. It’s been brilliant,” Channing-Turner told the BBC. It is the kind of quote that sounds almost too wholesome to be true, yet here we are.
The group is free to join and runs as part of Laneez Surf School. It is open to people of all ages and abilities, whether you have never stood on a board in your life or you are a more experienced surfer simply looking to stay connected with the water and with like-minded people through the colder months.
Surfing through the Jersey winter
One of Channing-Turner’s central aims is to challenge the assumption that surfing is a pursuit best packed away with the sun loungers come September. Jersey’s Atlantic-facing beaches, after all, do not stop producing waves just because the temperature drops. The group plans to keep meeting throughout winter, adjusting sessions to suit whatever the sea and sky decide to throw at them.
“If it’s a bit rough, we’ll just play in the white water,” she said, which is both a sensible approach to conditions and a reasonable philosophy for life in general.
The BBC reports that the social element has become just as important as the surfing itself, with members regularly staying on after sessions for a chat. For anyone who has spent a grey Jersey winter wondering how to stay active and avoid the creeping isolation that the short days can bring, this kind of informal, low-barrier community is exactly what the doctor ordered.
Why it matters beyond the beach
Jersey is not short of sporting clubs and societies, but initiatives that are genuinely free, genuinely inclusive of all abilities, and genuinely focused on wellbeing alongside physical activity are always worth highlighting. Channing-Turner herself told the BBC that surfing has become much more than a hobby, helping her build friendships and become part of a supportive community. That is a significant thing to say about a sport she discovered only this year.
For residents who may have looked at Jersey’s surf beaches and assumed the scene was the preserve of seasoned wave-riders in expensive wetsuits, the existence of a group explicitly welcoming beginners and built around connection rather than competition is an open invitation worth taking seriously.
Source: BBC News
