A little sand in your canard is fine.
Pat's unofficial mantra for our trip was "Any fool can suffer." And he was no fool. In the weeks before we started, he purchased what he promised were deluxe rations and drove down access roads to the coast to place food caches along our route. Between our start in the tiny beach town of Carcans-Plage and our ending point, Cap Ferret, there's only one town, Lacanau-Océan, so Pat figured he'd stash food under the sand near our planned campsites. He called these resupplies "burials."

The week prior to our trek, the weather had been perfect: 70 degrees and, according to local reports, some of the best waves all year. But as we started out, it was 55 degrees and spitting rain. We trudged south, taking rueful glances at the junky and unsurfable 15-foot waves. The cocktail bars and Euro ravers of Biarritz were about 120 miles south, but here there was just the thrashing ocean, the beach, and wide dunes backed by vast pine forests the French government planted 150 years ago to dry up swampland and prevent erosion.

Around sunset, the skies began to clear, and Pat led us up a steep dune to our first campsite, a funky shack that he said an old fisherman and surfer named Bruno had built entirely from driftwood and flotsam. Pat dropped to his knees at an unmarked spot and started pawing at the sand like a dog digging for a bone. I joined him, and soon we pulled out our rations: two cans of roast duck, canned asparagus, vanilla yogurt, margarine, Nutella, a loaf of bread, Earl Grey tea, ground coffee, three bottles of Médoc wine, and a damp cardboard box of ziti that disintegrated in my hands. Pat had not used a bag—he'd just dumped everything in a hole. This was my first clue that, though the French gave us pasteurization, their ideas of food preservation have what Americans might consider some questionable wiggle room.

You can kind of ignore French law.
At least if you're with Pat. "In France it is forbiden to camp on the beach with a tent but it's legal to sleep on the beach withou a tent,"?he'd written me a few months before we started. "Anyway the fines are not expensives, and the French police less frightening than the chinesses."

Our second day had been as frustrating as the first. We'd woken to more big, sloppy waves, then been skunked at the legendary sandbars off the tourist town of Lacanau-Océan, site of an annual pro contest. Three miles farther south, it was dark when we pulled the rickshaw to the top of a dune in the Maison Forestière du Lion, a gov­ernment-operated park. We donned headlamps to search for the night's burial, frantically digging for a few minutes before pulling up fish soup, canned green beans, some cookies, and bottles of wine. It was like Survivor: Chez Panisse.

The next morning as our coffee was brewing, we heard a vehicle approaching from the north. Suddenly, a white park-ranger SUV charged up the dune, its tires spitting sand in the bright sunshine. Pat stood up and casually lit a cigarette.

A lanky man sporting a khaki uniform and a fussy mustache popped out of the truck. He actually looked like Inspector Clouseau, and Pat treated him accordingly, smirking as we got a finger-wagging lecture.

"What did he say?" I asked after Clouseau drove away in a huff.

"He said, ‘You are not allowed to camp. Look around: You have destroyed everything,'" Pat translated. "I said, ‘We are kind people. We didn't injure ny plants or herbs.' "

"Then what'd he say?"

"‘Tell the foreigners it's not possible to do whatever you want,'" Pat said, chuckling. "And that I should personally teach you these rules."

Hydration is more important than clean hair.
This should be obvious, but apparently not for Brazilian longboarders.

Every morning on the beach, we watched Bagé open one of the five dromedary bags we used to store our drinking water, hang it on the rickshaw, then kneel down and meticulously rinse his shoulder-length brown hair, with its sun-kissed highlights. At first it was funny—even endearing. Here was a professional surfer who, as he explained it, hated being sandy. The habit would have been harmless had the rickshaw not popped a tire during a short excursion into Lacanau-Océan. After we got it fixed, Pat declared our load too heavy and instructed us to empty three of the dromedary bags.

We knew we had a water shortage by the third day, but we ignored it because we finally had decent surf—clean, waist-high rollers that were perfect for Bagé's stylish longboarding. It was hard to begrudge his grooming habits after watching him hang ten over the nose of his nine-foot-one tri-fin.

By day four we were down to just one bag of water. Still, that morning Bagé poured what must have been a quart over his head, running his fingers through his locks to work out every last grain of sand. Martin, sitting next to me, muttered under his breath what we were all thinking: "What the fuck, dude?"