About Freeport Surf Travel
Octagon:
Perhaps the most popular surf destination in Surfside Beach is Octagon. Known affectionately to some as “Octaslop,” or “Sloptagon,” it is little more than a stretch of open beach with sandbars between 150 to 300 yards offshore. When you first hear about Octagon, you might think about extreme fighting or ultimate fighting… or, at least, something with eight sides, right? Not quite. The spot gets its name from a dilapidated, five-sided, dome-shaped house on stilts. Talk about bad break names. No matter. The landmark ultimately fell in the water — resulting in a new name variation, “Octa-Gone” — but a slew of multi-sided domes on stilts perpetuate the memory.
So, where is Octagon? The best way to go about finding Octagon is to drive into Surfside from the causeway that links it with the mainland. Drive up to the last street before the beach, and then travel southwest along the beach until you see all of the parked cars with longboards on their roofs. Walk up onto the beach, and you will see a large set of wooden steps that cross the dune-line, with a portable toilet and a freshwater shower, where surfers will often congregate to check on the surf.
Octagon’s sandbars provide long, mushy, but workable and sometimes large, walls that take well to longer crafts. The whole Octaslop/Sloptagon title comes from shortboarders who generally find Octagon to be unfriendly and weak; however, it certainly attracts large numbers of surfers on both longboards and shortboards from Austin, Houston and Dallas, and all points in between. Also, on huge swells, the inside of the ship channel just to the south will chuck out a large, crumbly wall.
Quintana:
Across the jetties that protect the Brazos River is the town of Freeport. Where Surfside has more of a coastal-community feel, with summer cottages and a few scattered beach-rental joints, Freeport has a more industrial feel. Seriously: from a distance, Freeport looks like one giant refinery.
If this isn’t enough to deter you, then there is one primary surf spot in Freeport that you can check out: Quintanas, which is just south of the Brazos River Jetties. It has been known to provide some hollow, punchy surf on the right (and strong) South, South-East or East swell. You certainly won’t find any intense crowds here, but you’re not going to get the wave of your life – or anything close to it – either.