Scotland’s junior wave riders score best ever EuroSurf result
The perfect waves at Lost Shore are helping Scotland’s surfers compete with the best in Europe, writes Roger Cox
Almost exactly ten years ago, a posse of highly promising young Scottish surfers made their way to Agadir in Morocco for the 2016 edition of the EuroSurf Junior championships. The trip wasn’t all work, work, work – the gang rode camels, got some freesurfing in at the legendary Anchor Point and made lots of new friends, even picking up the award for the competition’s friendliest team. When the heats started, though, they showed that they weren’t just there for the mint tea and good times, finishing a none-too-shabby 9th place out of 16 competing nations.
Among their number were Iona McLachlan, who went on to claim a Scottish Open title in 2019; Finn Macdonald, who, following early competitive success in the junior divisions, has subsequently morphed into one of the north coast’s most stylish tube-riders; and a certain Ben Larg, who is now kind of a big deal in the big wave surfing world, having starred in a full-length documentary Ride the Wave in 2021, picked up a coveted Red Bull sponsorship deal for his exploits in mountainous surf in 2022 and finished third at the World Surf League Big Wave Challenge at Nazaré in Portugal in 2025.
The members of this golden generation were only able to compete in the 2016 EuroSurf Juniors at all thanks to the tireless work of William Watson and Mark Boyd at what was then called the Scottish Surfing Federation (now Scottish Surfing) who, after chewing through their own bodyweight in paperwork, had finally managed to get Scotland accepted as an independent surfing nation by the International Surfing Association (ISA) in 2014.
Over the last decade, it has started to feel as if the 9th place finish McLachlan, Macdonald, Larg & Co pulled off might turn out to be a high-water mark. Team Scotland finished 15th at the EuroSurf Juniors in 2018, then 10th in 2022 and 11th in 2024. This year, however, at the EuroSurf Junior 2026 event in Bundoran, Ireland, they finished 7th, and in a bigger field than in 2016, too, with 20 nations taking part. Ireland, the hosts, enjoying home field advantage at the famous reef break at Bundoran and the nearby beach break at Tullan Strand, finished just above them in 6th, with Portugal edging out Spain to claim top spot.
The Scots posted solid results across the board. In the boys’ divisions, Ansel Parkin made it to the third round repechage in the U18 longboard category, Tam Hood and Charlie Pugh made the third round repechage of the U18 shortboard and Kai Cruikshank reached the same stage in the U16 shortboard. In the girls’ divisions, meanwhile, Rosie Moore and Erin Paterson also made the round three repechage in the U16s.
One surfer stood out, however, and that was Callie Cruikshank of Fraserburgh, who pulled off the best individual result by a Scottish surfer, making it as far as the round five repechage in the U16 girls division and the round four repechage in the U18 girls. She could easily have gone further in the U16s, too. Finding herself locked in a tight heat with two French surfers, Charlie Leguay and Carla Mendez Acebo, she took things right to the wire. As the seconds ticked down towards the final buzzer, with her two best waves scored at 6.47 and 6.17 compared to Mendez Acebo’s 6.9 and 6.67, Cruikshank just needed a very getable 7.1 to move into second and progress. In the end, her final wave – a 4.13 – wasn’t the score she needed, but on another day, with a bit of luck on her side, things could easily have turned out differently.
The fact that Leguay made it to within one round of the U16 shortboard final and Mendez Acebo was only knocked out in the round before that shows just how close Cruikshank now is to the very best in Europe. Plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the 2028 EuroSurf Juniors, then, when she will still be eligible to compete in the U18s; and of course, these days the surfers of Team Scotland have something of a secret weapon up their sleeves, with a world-beating, state-of-the-art training facility sitting right in their back yard in the shape of the Lost Shore wave pool just outside Edinburgh.
Historically, developing young surfers in Scotland has always been an uphill struggle, and there are good reasons why, say, the Portuguese tend to do better than us in junior contests. Partly it’s down to weather: persuading a primary school-aged kid to give surfing a try is a lot easier on a warm, sunny day on the Iberian peninsula than it is on a storm-lashed Scottish beach in the middle of January. But the consistency of the waves on offer is also a factor, as is their accessibility – Lisbon has dozens of good surf spots within an hour’s drive, some of them offering 300-plus surfable days per year. Getting good waves in Scotland, particularly in the winter, is all about picking the right window in between named storms, and most of the best spots are in the Highlands and Islands, far from our biggest cities. Nobody in the Central Belt nips up to Thurso for a quick surf after work.
The artificial wave at Lost Shore, however, with its guarantee of perfect waves 365 days a year, has very much levelled the playing field. Team Scotland are already using it for training camps for seniors and juniors, which may partly explain this year’s Euros result, and after a couple more years of honing their skills in the pool, who knows where the class of ’26 could end up?
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