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LATEST NEWS
BELHAVEN SURF CENTRE REVIEW 2023
We now have six established organisations based out of the surf centre, tenants Kosa Yoga, Wilder Outdoor Education, Coast to Coast Surf School and Wave Project alongside clubs Belhaven Surf Club and Dunbar Surf Lifesaving Club. You can read more below about what each organisation was up to in 2023 but its fair to say the building is now matching the expectations and vision the directors had prior to opening in 2019 which is very exciting!
We also opened our doors to a wider network of organisations for courses and one off events. On the safety side, the surf centre hosted Surf Coach and Beach Lifeguard surf safety courses with H2O Training, DSLSC and the RNLI (via Martin at Momentum). The Scottish Surfing Federation also ran ISA Surf Instructor courses and East Lothian council used the building for Inclusive cove lessons for children with communication and additional support needs.
The directors also wish to thank BeGreen and the Scottish Government for supporting the installation of Solar Power on the centre in May 2023 and we are stoked that its already working with almost all of our summer energy needs for the building being powered by the sun!
We look forward to an even better year in 2024
KOSA YOGA 2023
KOSA YOGA loved teaching Iyengar Yoga classes from the Belhaven Surf Centre in 2023. Our students love the clean, airy simplicity of the education room, with the comfort of underfloor heating and access to all necessary equipment. Our classes this year where suitable for complete beginners and more experienced practitioners and where welcoming, friendly and supportive for anyone looking to include yoga as part of their overall wellbeing.
Over the winter we ran a series of very successful Winter Wellbeing Evenings – offering restorative yoga, meditation, Ayurvedic refreshments and beach fire. We will definitely expand these sessions in the coming year alongside a new series of ‘Yoga Journeys’ events incorporating outdoor yoga in woodland, beach and rocky environments.
In the warmer months we headed outside to run beach yoga sessions at Belhaven Beach and run yoga classes in stunning views on the local clifftop trail – that saw us watching Dolphins, sun-bathing grey seals and even basking sharks right in front of us!
KOSA YOGA also supported the Scottish Surfing Federation’s crowdfunder for Rio by donating 2 x 8 person restorative yoga classes with refreshments. We also partnered with Coast to Coast on their Stand up paddling and Yoga experience days.
WAVE PROJECT 2023
2023 Was a great year for us. We welcomed 100 new young surfers across our two projects for new surf therapy courses which ran three times a week in Spring and Autumn. Our surf club now has over 130 surfers, and we ran more sessions than ever last year. We especially loved the addition of popcorn surfs, where we head to the surf centre after the beach for a movie night!
One of the best things about Wave project Scotland is our volunteers. We have over 200 active volunteers who give up their time, enthusiasm and love to work with our surfers. Our volunteers help us in the water, capture the magic in photos and video, with our bake sales and with our fundraising events. We are very much a big family where everyone is welcome. If you would like to join our team you can sign up at waveproject.co.uk – we can’t wait to meet you!
Our favourite event of the year is our Superhero surf and 2023 was no exception. We had over 100 people join us for a surf, music, BBQ and raffle. The costumes are fantastic and we are already planning for this year! We also had a team raise over £7000 in an epic London to Paris cycle, what an adventure that was. We are very grateful to be able to impact the lives of our young people with our beautiful surroundings and fantastic community.
WILDER OUTDOOR EDUCATION 2023
2023 brought lots of new adventures for Wilder! Our popular Woodland and coastal adventure programmes continued to offer unique adventures in local woodlands and Belhaven Bay for 7-14 year olds. With support from Dunbar Community Council, Wilder ensures that at least 25% of these camp spaces are fully funded to make our courses available to Dunbar Ward, low income families. We also continued to work with partners such as East Lothian Young Carers. Our camps have welcomed well over 200 children with many children attending for all 4 days at each camp.
Wilder ‘Forest School Friday’ celebrated its first birthday in October 2023 – this has been a very successful partnership with Active Schools to ensure all families can access regardless of income. Forest school offers an inclusive space for boys and girls to experience nature through exploration, creativity, physical play, skill building and becoming part of our friendly Wilder community. Over the year, we had about 100 children attending with many children attending for multiple blocks through all the seasons.
Wilder launched their new family beach session ‘Beach Bairns’ in September 2023. With funding from Dunbar and East Linton area partnership we aim to support coastal outdoor play and learning for 2-6 year olds and their families. It’s been amazing to see families delight in our sessions and discover new ways to discover, play and learn together.
Wilder have also worked broadly with East Lothian primary schools to support schools with staff training around delivering outdoor learning and to support schools deliver curriculum related outdoor learning programmes, forest and beach school nurture programmes to their pupils.
Wilder successfully partnered with Coast to Coast surf school to support a number of Secondary schools deliver their activity weeks. These weeks are great fun providing a whole host of activities including beach games, outdoor skills, health and wellbeing practices, exploration and creative activities.
Wilder were also delighted to partner with Coast to Coast, Wave project, Belhaven Surf Club, Dunbar lifesaving club and East of Scotland Surfers aGainst sewage to organise community beach cleans at Belhaven and the coast around Dunbar. We intend to maintain these cleans regularly to promote the impact of plastic pollution on our coastline and to encourage local and visiting communities to care for and protect our coastline.
BELHAVEN SURF CLUB 2023
2023 has been a great year for Belhaven Surf Club, the dedication of the young Groms and their parents along with the great support of Coast to Coast coaches has seen the club go from strength to strength.
The Scottish Surfing Federation (SSF) Junior Series saw four events taking place between April to October. Competition was tough for the Groms but the club’s talent shone through with seven of our Groms taking podium positions at the end of the series. Huge well done to Joel, Rosie, Ansel, Tam, Charlie, Ebon and Joel Carleton.
Ansel claimed the U14 and U16 National title for the second consecutive year as well as going on to win his age category in the Junior Series. Charlie also won his age category in the Junior Series and both him and Ansel were selected to join the Scottish Team and compete at the World Championships in Rio, Brazil. An experience they’ve learnt so much from. 2024 has also started well with Ebon, Charlie, Ansel, Tam and Rosie all being invited by the SSF to attend a high performance training camp in Portugal. With such strong determination and the additional training opportunities coming through we’re excited about what the next year will bring.
The juniors and adult members of the club combined to come 2nd in Scotlands club team competition Gathering of the Clans at Pease Bay. Belhaven narrowly losing out to North Coast Surf Club from Thurso. Standout performances where from Ansel 3rd U18 boys, Sylvie 4th U18 girls, Clover 2nd Ladies, Sam 1st Masters and 2nd Longboard.
The surf club would also like to thank the Local Area Partnership for their contribution to the mobile surfskate ramps which have already helped create a unique surf training program with Coast to Coast coaches – working on specific technique improvements this winter at Dunbar high school.
COAST TO COAST SURF SCHOOL 2023
2023 was again a very successful year for Coast to Coast. Our tours to both the North and West coast of Scotland surf camps sold out. We also ran classes for locals on the islands for the first time to spread the stoke.
We had a lot of local surf through the year at Belhaven as part of this years El Niño weather patterns. It mean’t we never stopped teaching surfing this year to all levels. Our Junior programme has gone from strength to strength with our general public junior holiday courses selling out again. Our secondary and primary school courses touched thousands of kids this year and we are now seeing real success in the pyramid structure showing success at a national level with local juniors winning national titles and representing their country (with the high performance Belhaven Surf Club team). We also continued our strong relationship with the Wave Project offering inclusive lessons in partnership. In 2024 we will have helped Wave Project for over a decade a real celebration. And we also expanded our offering to schools partnering with Wilder for the first time, offering more in depth outdoor education and environmental understanding to our school customers!
Paddleboarding was again stunning, we are so lucky to have such an amazing coastal location to paddle and it allowed a lot of variety in the paddles we could offer this year. We were stoked to add some beautiful new tours around St Abbs which we will definitely be taking forward in exciting plans for 2024. We also added to our group Paddleboard fun – with Dragon boards – 4 person race boards to our group offering – and now can offer something for everyone from families to groups of advanced racers.
Coasteering again had highlights from witnessing Octopus (unfortunately washed up) and basking sharks (very much alive) in Dunbar and we had a lot of small surf days making all the adventure zones super playful!
Staff wise in 2023 two of our junior Dunbar school pupils, who have been assistants (for 4 years) graduated, Quentin and Lachlan joining the Surf Instructor team and also Dunbar School pupil Sylvie and Victoria joined the admin team. The rest of the team had an awesome year and we even managed an elite staff training surf camp in November with South African high performance coach Llewellyn Whittaker which was so good for personal development and coaching knowledge in our full team.
On the competition side we also hosted the biggest Longboard surf competition in Scotland ever at Belhaven in September with over 60 entries – 32 in the mens division alone. And Sam and Clover represented Scotland at the European Championships, Ansel and Charlie (assistants) representing Scotland in Brazil at the World Juniors. Sam also won the Gathering of Clans Masters title and 2nd in Longboard at GOC and Nationals. Clover was 5th in British University ladies division (out of 140 competitors) and was 2nd in Ladies shortboarding at Nationals and GOC. So a very good year for the team.
Environmentally we are also stoked to announce a donation to help Friends of Winterfield at our local park, just behind the surf centre plant over 350 trees on behalf of our customers. And we are also going to trialling natural rubber wetsuits in 2024 as part of our continued move towards better environmental practice and a carbon neutral position.
Looking forward to 2024 with so much planned www.c2csurfschool.com for more updates.
2022 UPDATES
November 2022 Congratulations to Belhaven Surf Club team members Rudi Forrest winning the U12 series title and Ansel Parkin winning both the U14 and U16 series titles. The series are the best 3 results combined from the 5 national competitions in Thurso, Tiree, Pease, Sandend and Fraserburgh. There are 6 titles overall and it is a real honour for our new club to win three.
October 2022 Belhaven Surf Club get 2 national winners Ansel taking the U16 boys title and Rosie taking the U14 girls title. Congratulations to the clubs other finalists places Ebon, Rudi, Freya and Tam.
April 2022 Coast to Coast Surf School, Dunbar Surf Lifesaving, Belhaven Surf Club, Wilder Outdoor Education and Wave Project all kick off 2022 courses again. Coast to Coast Instructors Clover and Sam Christopherson so well at the Senior National Championships with Sam winning the longboard event and Clover coming 3rd in the ladies in Thurso.
Jan 2022 Kosa Yoga Iyengar courses have kicked off for the new year! Search @kosayogadunbar on facebook or instagram for more details. The Belhaven Surf Club has joined the Scottish Surfing Federation as a fully affiliated club. The club has taken on the combined responsibility with Edinburgh and Borders surf club for running the Junior Series 1 competion at Pease Bay on May 21st/22nd. The surf club also congratulates Ebon Parkin on his selection for the Scottish Junior Surf Team at under 16 level, for this summers European Juniors in Portugal. Ebon is one of the leading lights of the new junior development club team and also a junior assistant with Coast to Coast Surf School.
Nov 2021 A permanent “Thank you “Wave” mural has been unveiled. A wonderful Wave designed by artist Tim Cottee was shown off by BSC directors Alasdair Swan and Brian Allen in a recent photo shoot. The Wall Mural, in the centre changing room hallway, has a wave at Belhaven Beach created with the names of everyone who has supported the centre financially including all those that helped in the crowd funding and building funders. Alasdair said “Its a wonderful statement to thank all those that supported this community building, being on show as a permanent record for all to see for years to come. Tim is a talented artist and we where exceptionally thankful for the work he put in here!”
A limited number of prints are available to buy with all profits going to the centre. Just get in touch.
Oct 2021 Congratulations to Ebon Parkin who finished 2nd overall in the Junior u16 division of the National Junior Series. With the development team of the Belhaven Surf Club only kicking off in April this is an amazing achievement. We also had finalists in events in Fraserburgh, Thurso and Pease Bay. With the majority missing series 1 in Tiree and series 5 in Sandend. Finalists wher Tam, Rudi, Ansel and Ebon with a special mention to Ansel who won the U12’s in Thurso. With our squad expanding to 20 juniors aged 8yrs to 15yrs we hope this success will get better in 2022.
Sept/Oct 2021: The surf centre has approved a cautious re-opening of the education community room to named users and tenants. This means we will see more activity from the Wave project, Coast to Coast Surf School, Kosa Yoga, Wilder outdoor Education, the Dunbar Surf Lifesaving Club and Belhaven Surf Club.
Changing facilities will unfortunately remain closed to the public during this period. Opening only for severe weather and or disability or disadvantaged groups.
Sep 2021 We also welcome Kosa Yoga and Wilder Outdoor Education who will be joining the Wave Project and Coast to Coast Surf School as resident tenants taking over the board room on a permanent basis from start September 2021.
Sep 2021 Congratulations to Belhaven surf team members, Tam Hood and Rudi Forrest who made the U12 final at Pease Bay (round 3 of the SSF JUNIOR SERIES), Ansel and Tam who made the final of the U14 and Ebon that made the final of the U16yrs boys division.
Aug 2021 Congratulations to young Ansel Parkin who trains with the surf club development team and won the U12 division in the recent Thurso (ROUND 2 of the SSF JUNIOR SERIES) division of the surf club. His brother Ebon also joined him with the pair making 4 finals in 4 divisions.
June 2021 This year we are excited to announce the formation of Belhaven Surf Club. This will initially start with a junior development team in April where we will partner with Coast to Coast coaches to help local talented juniors take the next step up in their surfing – supporting the performance level of the sport. Juniors have been identified from 2020 already however if you are a talented junior surfer aged 9yrs to 17yrs, from the Lothians or Borders, please feel free to send us a wee video of you surfing (please note there is an expectation of unbroken wave riding with control as a minimum level to be considered for the team and age will be taken into account). The surf club has plans to open up to families and adults later in its development for social and competitive purpose too. Please note all general surfing enquiries should still go to Coast to Coast Surf School and inclusive surfing to Wave Project Scotland
