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Until recently it's only been a small band of exteme surfers who've braved the harsh conditions of the North Sea in places like Tynemouth and Hartlepool.

Some surfers describe it as more a 'spiritual movement' than a sport.

Surfing the waves

Great Waves

The North East has already spawned British Pro Surfing Champion Gabe Davies who grew up surfing in Tynemouth with his brothers.

"You can travel round the world," says Gabe, "and you can come home and sure enough you would get better waves in Yorkshire or Northumberland than you would in Indonesia and Hawaii"

And those waves are now attracting increasing numbers of surfers. An international company brought听 a national surfing competition to Tynemouth and say they had a much better response than they'd had to anything on the south coast.

There are half a million surfers in Britain today ... fifty thousand of them on the North East Coast.

Mixed Blessing

Some of the North East surfers fear that the area's increasing popularity will ruin what they have with too many people chasing too few waves.听 Even Gary Rogers, who runs The Saltburn Surf Shop feels popularity is a mixed blessing. He likes to go surfing in quiet places and says,

"The new people coming into surfing, they won't know of all that unless they find somewhere where they can go and sit on their own and ride a few waves of their own"