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When I moved to Hamburg two decades ago, I did this because it was the closest, I could get to some kind of ocean within Germany. With windsurfing still being my main obsession back then I was eager to significantly improve my water time on nearby Baltic Sea and especially the North Sea. I had already started surfing back then but did not expect any surfable waves in the North Sea let alone the Baltic Sea.
Around the millennium weekends and summer evenings were planned around wind forecasts – and they came over the radio and were very unreliable back then – with the mission to get to windsurf as much as possible, preferably within some waves. During my first season in the north (May until October, wetsuit technology miles behind nowadays standards), I only spent a handful of weekends in Hamburg and not at the sea.
Due to the unreliable character of weather forecasts back then I occasionally found not enough wind and, on some selected days at the North Sea was surprised by windless beaches with hip to shoulder-high waves which turned out to be very surf-able. I considered this an absolute exception as I believed that there had to be strong local winds to create any waves in the North Sea.
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