Surf & Stories: Les Cavaliers Days with SISKA

Dear Passenger,

There are weekends you plan for months, imagining how every little piece will come together.

Les Cavaliers Days took place on a weekend in mid-September in Anglet, on the southwest coast of France, with the Atlantic right in front of us. We had imagined two days built around the things that brought SISKA together in the first place: surfing, being outside, meeting people, sharing knowledge and creating a space where conversations could happen just as naturally as sessions in the water.

SISKA was born as a community bringing women together through surfing, and naturally, that shaped much of the weekend. Creating more visibility for women in surf culture, sharing their experiences and giving space to their stories is an important part of what we do.

But Les Cavaliers Days was never about excluding anyone from that conversation. Quite the opposite. The weekend was open to everyone, because the questions we wanted to explore- about representation, the ocean, our environment, and the culture surrounding surfing - concern all of us.

Saturday gave us one of those perfect early-autumn days on the Atlantic coast: blue skies, sunshine and the ocean right beside us from morning to evening.

The swell was solid at Les Cavaliers, so when it was time for our surf coaching sessions with Gliss’Experience, we moved just down the coast to La Barre, where the conditions were better suited to getting everyone in the water.

The day began with yoga and the community slowly taking over the space. There were moments to learn about first aid and ocean safety, moments to slow down, and plenty of time simply spent talking to people we might never have met otherwise.

Later, watching everyone paddle out together at La Barre felt like a reminder of why SISKA started in the first place.

Not to create another surf school or another place telling people how they should surf, but to make it easier to find one another.

To have people to paddle out with.

To learn from.

To come back to the beach with.

Some of the most important moments of the weekend happened away from the water. Our first conversation explored the place of women in surfing, looking at how that place has evolved, how women are represented, what happens in competition and sponsorship, and also at the more ordinary experiences that happen every day in the line-up.

There wasn't one single experience or one single answer.

That was the point.

Creating a space for different voices to sit beside each other, disagree sometimes, recognise themselves in someone else's story and keep the conversation moving.

For us, making women more visible within surf culture matters. Not because women are new to surfing, far from it, but because the space given to their stories, experiences and perspectives has not always reflected the place they actually occupy in the water.

And those conversations become even more meaningful when everyone can be part of them.

Later in the day, our second conversation, Surf & Environment, brought us back to the thing that connects everyone who had gathered that weekend: the ocean.

Surfers spend so much time observing it - the swell, the wind, the tides, the banks - that it can be easy to forget to step back and think about the bigger relationship we have with it.

We talked about that relationship, about our impact, environmental responsibility and what protecting the places we love can look like in practice.

Earlier that day, part of the community had already put that into action.

Alongside Surfrider, we headed out to collect waste from the beach. What we found didn't disappear into a bin and end there. The pieces collected on the shoreline were later used by Photo From The Sun to create cyanotypes on site, turning what had been left behind on the beach into images made with sunlight.

Waste from the coastline became a record of the coastline. It felt like a small but powerful way of looking differently at what we leave behind.

As the day slowly moved towards evening, people stayed.

Boards were put away, conversations carried on, food was shared, and at 7pm we gathered for an open-air cinema by the ocean.

We screened four films, each telling a different story through women, surfing and the ocean, from different generations, places and ways of experiencing life in the water.

After spending part of the day talking about representation, there was something particularly meaningful about simply putting those stories on a big screen.

Women surfing, exploring, creating, pushing themselves and telling their own stories.

Because representation isn't only something to discuss. It is also about the stories we choose to show, the people we put at the centre of them, and the images of surfing we collectively create.

And there we were, watching those stories together, outside, with the Atlantic only a few metres away.