February keeps January's weather and takes away the reason to tolerate it. The swell is still arriving, the wind is still taking most of it, and the sea has slipped to 7°C, its floor for the year.
What that does to a weekend is arithmetic. In a 4/3 with a hood, February gives most people an hour before the cold starts making the decisions, and an hour is not much return on a four-hour round trip from Bristol or Birmingham. The people who surf the Gower in February are the ones who live near it.
There is one compensation and it is real: nobody else is there. The Llangennith car park in February holds four cars, and three miles of sand with nobody on it is a different beach from the one August knows.
