Surfing in Sri Lanka in November

The north-east monsoon establishes itself through November, so the offshore returns to the south and west and the run of breaks from Hikkaduwa to Mirissa starts working again after five months off. The east coast is finished until May.

It builds rather than arrives, and that shape is the thing to plan around. The first two weeks can still look like October and the last two like January. If your dates are movable inside the month, take the back half: the same coast, the same villages, and a monsoon that has settled rather than one still making up its mind.

Prices have not caught up with conditions, which is the argument for the month. The camps are reopening, the bay at Weligama holds a fraction of the boards it will carry at Christmas, and the sea is at 29°C. For a first week this is the best ratio of conditions to company in the whole year, and it costs less than February for the privilege. Getting there is easy in a way Arugam Bay never is: Weligama is two to two and a half hours from Colombo on the expressway, the shortest transfer of the five villages, and the coast train to Ahangama and Midigama runs beside the water for the last stretch.

Seven coasts are at their own peak in November, and the warm ones are Senegal at 27°C and the Canaries at 22. Sri Lanka is good rather than excellent and it is 29°C, which is the trade the month offers: two degrees of water and a season that is still assembling, for a coast nobody has arrived on yet.

Midigama in November is the season restarting, and where an experienced surfer gets this coast six weeks ahead of everybody else. Plantations gives four days out of seven and Lazy Left is working again on the returning offshore. The variable this month is the wind rather than the swell: just under half of November is blown out, which is why the second fortnight is where it becomes worth the flight and the first is where it is merely cheap.

Midigama is the base for the same reason it always is, and the reason is room. Four reefs share two kilometres, they all break on the same south-south-west swell and the same north-easterly offshore, and Plantations carries the lowest crowd factor of the four. In November there is nobody to share them with anyway. Lazy Left is the softest entry to reef, Rams Right the only expert wave on the island, short and shallow over rock, and Coconuts at the eastern end is the first to go ragged when the wind turns, which makes it a useful morning indicator. Kabalana, twenty minutes west off Ahangama, is the other reef worth the drive: both ways, any tide, several hundred metres out.

The east is finished until May. Pottuvil Point is down to one day in seven, the town is shut, and there is no reason to drive across the island. Everything worth surfing in November is on twenty minutes of the south coast road, the train from Colombo stops in the middle of it, and the whole stretch is emptier than it will be at any point between now and April. If you already surf and you want this coast without the season on top of it, the last two weeks of November are the best trade in the Sri Lankan year.