Does everyone start a health retreat this way, I wonder, downing a large glass of wine, eating a Bounty and whizzing off work emails as I sit waiting for my delayed plane at Gatwick. Three days later I am doing a sun salutation, feeling the rays on my skin and looking over a vast, near-empty beach filling the horizon.
It is my first visit to Jersey – for a yoga and surfing weekend. I have a vague sense of it being sunny, small and populated by tax-averse businessmen and the odd suave detective, all pootling around in luxury cars. A bit of research suggests it might be nirvana for hard Brexit Tories. “Fiercely independent, yet deeply loyal to the Crown” (according to Jersey Heritage), it’s not part of the EU, there’s no NHS and the only way a non-Jersey resident can buy property or work freely is by proving they earn over £625,000 a year. There is a phalanx of private aircraft parked beside the runway when we land.
It is, however, wildly beautiful. Drift Retreat is housed in a converted 19th-century Martello tower by St Ouen’s Bay. The tower perches, squat and rotund, on the shoreline between the five-mile beach and a nature reserve. Inside, there are granite walls, tasteful furnishings and a vast vaulted brick ceiling. The view from the roof is spectacular: wide-open horizon, windswept gorse and seaweed-strewn sand. This, the Atlantic-facing stretch of coast, is the island’s only surfing beach.
Drift was set up by Jersey native and keen surfer Rebecca Coley, who, after a decade slugging it out as a filmmaker in London, wanted to come home and reconnect with the sea. Noticing that “wellness” – that ubiquitous tourism trend – had been slow to come to Jersey, she and two friends (surfing and yoga instructor Natalie Fox and nutrition expert Gemma Bartlett) launched the island’s first residential retreat.
The idea is that, over three days, you do at least one surfing or paddle-boarding session and one yoga class every day, go offline, and eat only organic, veggie wholefoods – “a detox without realising it”. Yoga and surfing are, Fox explains, symbiotically linked – the positions you hold are often the same and, done properly, you have the same “mindful” focus for both. (Lots of pro-surfers go on to teach yoga when the retire.)
I am nervous that Fox might be a ‘studio yoga’ dervish - the sort that has multiplied lately in boutique urban gyms, teaching a sped-up ‘power’ version of yoga over super-loud house tunes.
Happily, she turns out to be a kind of pick-and-mix yogi (and an excellent instructor). On the first night, we (there are four other, 20- and 30-something women here, pretty much all in retreat from some hideously stressful job) do yoga nidra – meditation, essentially. On the second day, yin yoga (holding challenging stretches for long periods) and, on the third, overlooking the beach, vinyasa (poses in a flowing sequence). I finish on a yoga high – the calm elation that comes from giving your spinal nervous system a thorough workout.
I’m on far less certain ground with the surfing sessions. On the first morning we wake up in our circular dorm room (there’s a definite girls’ boarding school air to this weekend: bunkbeds, hearty sport, communal teeth-brushing) to howling winds and ocean spray hitting the tower’s walls. But once the tide is out and turning, we force on our wetsuits and carry our boards the 50 metres to the beach. After cowering under a brief hailstorm, while Fox runs through basic instructions, we enter the foaming surf, which is surprisingly warm (because – duh – it’s been heating up all summer). It’s like trying to surf in a washing machine.
The following day is another story. The sun is glorious. There are other surfers dotted along the waves carving and wheeling, like silhouetted birds on the swell. I progress from riding the board on my belly to – whoop – a wobbly kneel! It’s a totally different way of engaging with the sea: swimming in the ocean, waves are to be avoided, jumped under or over; surfing, you read the potential, size up the energy of each curving crest. I am terrible at it, but I completely see how thrilling and addictive it can be.
On paper, the food part of the weekend seemed a bit of a gamble, but it turns out that a natural, almost all-raw diet can be moreish and unpredictable. While we’re off exercising, Bartlett (who runs a health streetfood van and catering business) performs culinary alchemy, turning vegetables, fruits, pulses, nuts, seeds and leaves, plus the odd bit of cheese, into sculpted portions of roasted sweet potato salad, or dehydrated vegetable crackers (that are delicious), or to-die-for millionaire’s shortbread that contains neither sugar nor biscuit.
Despite a vague, nagging headache on day one (sugar or caffeine withdrawal? I can’t decide), I am full after each meal and have tons of energy. This would be the perfect, most nourishing way to eat, always, if only one could spend every waking minute sourcing and preparing food.
The days are busy (I would have welcomed some time to just do nothing). We even squeeze in an afternoon’s hunting with local forager Kazz. Luxuriantly dreadlocked, he is the type of guy you’d want around when the apocalypse comes. He offers us slimy samples of the seaweed he sells to Michelin-starred restaurants in Jersey and London. Then he cooks us buttered limpets on the beach.
I go home feeling enjoyably exhausted, mentally tranquil (despite failing miserably at the digital part of the detox – I manage just one night, my phone silently summoning me from a drawer downstairs) and inspired to make simple changes to my family’s eating habits. And, if I close my eyes, I can still see that empty beach.
Essentials
The holiday was provided by Drift Retreat, St Ouen, Jersey (driftretreat.co.uk). The next retreat is May 2017. Prices from £400 for a three-night weekend. Flights courtesy of Visit Jersey (jersey.com); prices start at £80 return from Gatwick. Rebecca Coley’s surf documentary Point of Change will be released in 2017.
