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Boardmasters is the UK’s preeminent extreme sports festival, and this year festival-goers and adrenaline junkies alike hit the Cornish coastline for a major blow-out in British waters. Ben Ainslie would have been proud!
This yearly mass gathering is held on the idyllic Newquay coast and seeks to create the perfect combination of music, creativity and extreme sports – all in the name of good fun.
What started as a boutique festival on the waves is now a stalwart on the festival scene, and this year Boardmasters welcomed a crowd of 20,000 punters to enjoy the surf, skating and merry-making.
The competition can be intense during the games, but afterwards, when the dust has settled and the sun is shining, it is smiles all round for the hordes who had travelled far to be a part of this spectacular synthesis of music and sport.
Ed Sheeran and Maverick Sabre were among the headlining acts, and their soothing sounds were the perfect antidote to the chaos on the waves and in the skate-parks.
But if you didn’t fancy unwinding with these two and wanted to keep the tempo up, Dizzee Rascal was in attendance with his energetic brand of hard-core grime to assault your ear drums and keep you pepped up.
The festival was split into two sites – Watergate Bay for music and the infamous Fistral Beach for extreme sports.
Hours flew by watching energetic athletes surf, skate, BMX and generally push themselves to their limits, performing huge tricks and jumps against the backdrop of dazzling coastline.
The festival sponsored by the energy drink Relentless kicked off with a 6-Star Surfing Series, as well as 3-star Longboarding and the Vans Summer Sessions.
Although mainly fashioned for the extreme sports fanatics, Boardmasters was also a big draw for the creative community.
Weird and wonderful stages, art installations and musical masterpieces took pride of place in prominent locations around the site.
Undoubtedly, it was the Denture Disco which stole the show – a huge, 3-metre tall giant set of dentures, which opened wide to reveal a DJ booth inside, complete with sparkling disco ball.
A set of 28 individually crafted, flashing fibre-glass pearly whites held the crowds in awe.
And with the DJs throwing out nonstop crowd-pleasers as the sunlight dwindled, this stage certainly raised the bar for music and art collaborations.
Where’s Nana the art collective which created the masterpiece, travelled to the site all the way from North London, and have got tongues wagging from the Capital to the West Coast.
Ben Weinreich, co-founder of Where’s Nana said: “This was our first festival with the stage and we really couldn’t have asked for more – everyone involved in the festival was great. The crowd was amazing and what more could you ask for than a festival overlooking the Cornish coast!?”