Glowing lines cutting through the darkness, waves at Chambre d’Amour lit up like a stage and 18 surfers diving into a non-stop tag team event: the Anglet Night Surfing 2026 once again transformed the Basque coastline into a full-scale board sports spectacle.
Originally scheduled for Thursday 27 August, the 2026 edition was postponed by 24 hours due to weather conditions. It finally took place on Friday 28 August 2026, in front of a large crowd on Club and Sables d’Or beaches.
But reducing Night Surfing to a few LED-equipped boards would miss what makes it so compelling. In Anglet, this competition has a history, a distinctive competitive format and a real technical challenge: once the natural light fades, reading a wave, choosing your timing and committing to a manoeuvre become radically different.
© ONE MOOV / YouTube
Anglet Night Surfing 2026: the essentials
The programme wasn’t limited to the competition. Local associations were there from 5 pm, with a skate demo scheduled for 6:30 pm and an autograph session with the surfers at 8 pm. The tag team event started at 10 pm, followed by the awards ceremony at 11:45 pm.
This sequence is key to understanding the spirit of the event: Night Surfing isn’t just a competition you watch from the promenade. It’s an evening dedicated to board sports culture, with surfing, of course, but also skating and the chance to meet the riders.
What exactly is Anglet Night Surfing?
The idea seems almost unreal when you first discover it: getting professionals to surf after dark on illuminated boards, while the spot is lit up from the beach.
The concept has been around in Anglet since the 1990s. The city’s official history dates its beginnings to 1995, at a time when today’s LED systems didn’t yet exist on boards: early participants used glow sticks, among other things. The setups later evolved to include LED-equipped boards and much more spectacular lighting across the water.
LED boards in the waves at Chambre d’Amour
The lighting isn’t just there to create beautiful images.
Each competitor uses a board fitted with LEDs so spectators can follow their line. Meanwhile, powerful lights make the competition area visible from the shore.
Visually, the result is striking: the rider becomes a line of light that accelerates, carves and changes direction sharply on a wave where the whitewater is the main thing you can make out.
For the surfer, the experience is far less comfortable than it looks from the beach. By day, the eye constantly analyses the wave's slope, its shoulder, closing sections, changes in texture and the position of other riders. At night, some of these visual cues disappear.
Artificial lighting helps, but it never fully recreates the visibility of a daytime session.
© Jérémie Gabrien
A tag team event with 18 surfers and six teams
The 2026 format brought together 18 competitors split into six teams of three. For 1 hour 30 minutes, the riders took turns in the water to catch the best waves and rack up points for their team.
The tag team format completely changes the strategy.
In a standard heat, a surfer mainly manages their own wave count and the time remaining. Here, every minute used affects the whole team. Waiting too long for a potential bomb can therefore hold back the two teammates still on the beach.
You need to strike a balance between wave quality, quick decision-making and efficient changeovers.
That is precisely what makes the format exciting for spectators: there is virtually no downtime.
Another distinctive feature of the event: each team represents a charity, and their prize money is donated to the charities they represent. The competition thus retains a charitable dimension beyond the sporting result.
The HAWAIISURF tip
Watch a Night Surfing event with an eye on the lines rather than just the tricks. The LEDs make it remarkably easy to see how speed builds: bottom turn, climb towards the lip, rail change, then drive into the next section. It is almost a lesson in reading lines drawn directly on the wave.
© Jérémie Gabrien
Why did the 2026 edition take place on 28 August?
This is the key detail to remember to avoid confusion between schedules published before the event and reports afterwards: the Anglet Night Surfing 2026 was originally scheduled for Thursday 27 August.
The forecast of storms and rain led the organisers to postpone the event by 24 hours. It therefore took place Friday 28 August.
This postponement is a reminder of a fundamental reality of all surf events: the schedule remains dependent on the ocean and the weather.
A spot can be perfectly surfable one day and far less suitable a few hours later. For a nighttime competition welcoming thousands of people and using extensive electrical and lighting equipment, the weather also matters for much more than just wave quality.
Who competed in Night Surf Anglet 2026?
The lineup brought together surfers from across France and Europe, including Pauline Ado, Tessa Thyssen, Maud Le Car, Vincent Duvignac, Romain Laulhé, Juliette Lacome, Uhaina Joly, Mathieu Agnes and Colin Doyez.
After the event, the French Surfing Federation listed six teams: Banque Populaire, Surfing France, Groupe Clim, Carlbreak, Oxbow and City of Anglet.
This mix of generations and styles is particularly well suited to the tag team format. A powerful rider, a surfer used to hunting down aerial sections and an extremely consistent competitor do not rack up the same scores in the same way.
Nighttime adds another variable: surfers need to commit despite having a less precise read of the wave.
Results: who won Night Surf Anglet 2026?
© Jérémie Gabrien
The 2026 edition was won by the Oxbow team, made up of Maud Le Car, Erwan Blouin and Vincent Duvignac. Their victory secured €1,500 for the charity Save La Mermaid.
The City of Anglet took second place, securing €1,000 for The Blind Surfer, while Carlbreak rounded out the podium and earned Paddle Paddle Surf Project €500.
Beyond the podium, the charity format adds a welcome dimension to the results. Sporting victory translates directly into support for a charity, giving the final relay legs even more meaning.
Why is Anglet the natural spot for Night Surf?
Floodlights and LEDs could be set up at plenty of beach breaks. Yet Night Surf feels particularly at home in Anglet.
A town deeply connected to the history of French surfing
Anglet is one of the places that shaped French surf culture.
Anglet’s first surf club opened at La Chambre d’Amour in 1964. Four years later, La Barre hosted the World Surfing Championships, featuring Nat Young and Wayne Lynch, among others. Then Night Surf arrived in the 1990s.
That continuity matters.
The nighttime competition is not a spectacle artificially grafted onto a seaside resort: it is rooted in decades of local surf culture.
La Chambre d’Amour, a natural arena
The layout of the area is also a major advantage.
Spectators can spread out along the beach and promenade with a direct view of the floodlit area. Once night falls, the sea literally becomes a stage, and the glowing trails remain visible from shore.
This proximity partly explains the event’s popularity. Previous editions have drawn huge crowds: in 2018, for example, Euronews reported that nearly 25,000 people came to watch the competition.
For someone unfamiliar with surfing, the concept is still instantly clear: a dark wave, a white line of foam and a glowing board tracing the rider’s path.
© Jérémie Gabrien
Surfing at night: what really changes on a board?
Watching pros pull off manoeuvres under the floodlights can make it seem as though surfing at night is simply a matter of adding LEDs to a shortboard.
Technically, it is much more complex.
Reading the wave becomes much harder
An experienced surfer never looks only at the few metres in front of their board’s nose.
They read the wave ahead: how fast it is breaking, the height of the shoulder, whether a section is soft or fast, approaching whitewater, another surfer positioned farther down the wave and whether the peak is about to close out.
In full daylight, some of this wave reading becomes instinctive after years of practice.
Nighttime reduces the information available.
This particularly affects:
- anticipating the take-off;
- judging the speed of a section;
- choosing when to initiate a bottom turn;
- awareness of other riders;
- the ability to spot a closeout quickly.
Surfers at the Surf de Nuit event benefit from a setup installed specifically for the event. This is nothing like an improvised nighttime session.
Our team’s take
Watching a nighttime competition should not encourage you to paddle out alone after sunset. Outside a supervised event, reduced visibility makes it harder to read the sets, spot other surfers and get back to shore. Add currents, obstacles and the difficulty rescuers or other surfers have in spotting you clearly.
© Jérémie Gabrien
LEDs do not turn a board into a “night surfing board”
There is another misconception worth clearing up.
A board’s performance is still primarily determined by its geometry: length, width, volume, rocker, outline, rails, tail and fin setup.
The lighting used during the competition supports the nighttime setup and the show. It obviously does not replace the hydrodynamic qualities of the board’s shape.
That's exactly what makes it so fascinating to watch: under the LEDs, you can see the differences in lines very clearly. A long, smooth turn, an abrupt rail change or a burst of vertical acceleration towards the lip each creates a different light signature.
To better understand these differences, the selection of shortboard, longboard, fish and funboard surfboards offered by HawaiiSurf lets you compare the main families of shapes. View HawaiiSurf surfboards
Which board should you choose to surf Anglet's beach breaks?
There is no single “best board for Anglet” that works 365 days a year.
Beach breaks can offer relatively approachable small summer swells, then change completely with more size and power. The surfer's skill level therefore matters more than the spot's name.
| Profile | Suitable shape | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Beginner | Large, stable board / funboard | More volume, easier paddling, earlier take-offs |
| Intermediate | Progression funboard or forgiving fish | A good balance between ease of use and manoeuvrability |
| Intermediate + | Fish / high-volume shortboard | More speed and freedom through turns |
| Advanced | Shortboard suited to the conditions | Responsiveness and control in fast sections |
| Looking for glide | Longboard | Paddling, early take-offs and long lines when conditions allow |
A common mistake is trying to use the same gear as a pro.
A highly technical shortboard under a competitor's feet can look incredibly fast. Under the feet of an intermediate surfer who doesn't get out often enough, its low volume can mainly mean tough paddling, late take-offs and far fewer waves ridden.
At an intermediate level, a few extra litres are often far more useful than a radical shape.
For a practical comparison of volumes, lengths and intended uses, the guide Which surfboard should you choose? helps you start with your skill level, build and wave type rather than the board's looks.
Check out the HawaiiSurf guide to choosing your board
The HAWAIISURF tip
When you're torn between two boards to improve your surfing, ask yourself which one will help you catch the most waves. A slightly higher-volume board that lets you get into waves earlier will often help you progress more than a high-performance shortboard you struggle to get moving.
© Jérémie Gabrien
How to make the most of Night Surfing in Anglet?
The first tip is simple: don't turn up at 9:55 pm for a 10 pm start.
Night Surf draws big crowds, and the evening gets going well before the first take-off. In 2026, activities started at 5 pm, followed by skating at 6:30 pm and a meet-and-greet with the surfers at 8 pm.
Arriving early also gives you time to get a feel for the spot before it gets completely dark.
To follow the competition, try to find a spot with a wide enough view of the water rather than standing directly in front of a single peak. In a tag team event, watching only the rider means missing part of the show: keep an eye on the incoming sets, the competitor's position and their return to the relay zone too.
Amateur photographers, meanwhile, are better off focusing on the light trails rather than trying at all costs to freeze the rider in motion. The contrast between the dark ocean, the whitewater and the LEDs is precisely what gives Night Surf its signature look.
Finally, keep an eye on official updates right up to the day itself. The 2026 edition was the perfect example: a surf competition still depends on the weather and sea conditions, and a last-minute postponement is always possible.
An event that shows surfing in a different light
Anglet Night Surf achieves something quite rare: appealing both to surfers who dissect every bottom turn and to spectators who have never set foot on a board.
The former watch the technique, lines and riders' ability to adapt to unfamiliar reference points. The latter discover a sport that becomes especially spectacular when every turn is traced in light.
The 2026 edition proved it once again: despite a weather postponement, 18 surfers and six teams competed for 1 hour 30 minutes in the heart of Chambre d’Amour, with a charity element that gave the final result real meaning.
And if watching those lines mostly makes you want to get back in the water, take the right lesson from the show: LEDs don't make a good board. What matters is the right shape, enough volume, a suitable fin setup and, above all, a board that matches your level.
The range of boards suited to different types of surfing lets you compare fish, shortboards, longboards and more forgiving models before choosing. Explore the HawaiiSurf board collection
And before focusing solely on the length listed in the specs, the guide to find a board suited to your level helps you choose based on volume, body size and the type of surfing you want to do. Read the “Which surfboard should you choose?” guide
© Jérémie Gabrien
