Roger Cox: St Andrews has a great university, great golf courses, and occasionally, great surf

A few years ago, running around St Andrews looking for a last-minute graduation present for my little brother, my eye was drawn to a poster in the window of Auchterlonies, the century-old golf emporium on Golf Place.

"Golf Courses of St Andrews," said the text at the bottom, and the image – a stunning aerial photograph, taken on a crisp, clear winter's morning – did indeed show off the town's hallowed golfing pastures to their best advantage. However, by happy coincidence the picture just-so-happened to have been taken on a day when the surf was absolutely cranking, so it also showed thick lines of swell processing majestically towards the town's various reefs and beaches.

It was a surreal shot – as if someone had taken the coastline of one of the Hawaiian islands and superimposed it onto a picture of the 'drews. I ducked into the shop, bought the poster and asked the guy at the counter if I could borrow a pen. He looked a little nonplussed, but handed me a black magic marker. I put a big cross through the words "Golf Courses", then scribbled "Surf Spots" instead.

Handing back the pen, I detected a distinct whiff of disapproval in the air, but this being St Andrews, the man was far too polite to say anything about the act of sacrilege he had just witnessed – either that or I ran out of the door so fast he didn't have time to wrap an eight iron around my fisog.

The thing that made that poster so remarkable was the size and quality of the waves. Due to its sheltered position, St Andrews only gets decent surf vanishingly rarely. A six-foot NE swell can produce fun four foot waves in East Lothian, yet it might only amount to a couple of feet in the Home of Golf. And when good days do come along, they usually arrive in the middle of winter. Once in a blue moon, though, a decent swell can come lurching out of the summer doldrums and make every Fife surfers' day – and that's exactly what happened a couple of weekends ago, when, by accident rather than design, little bro and I found ourselves back in St Andrews for the first time in years, just as a ferocious storm system was working itself up into a frenzy off the coast of Norway.

The 12 foot swell forecast for Saturday arrived on cue, but with howling cross-onshore winds tearing it to ribbons, it was anything but surfable. In the evening I wandered down to West Sands, perched on top of the Elephant Rock and watched two brave souls trying to paddle out through the churning foam. I didn't envy them. After duckdiving walls of whitewater for about half an hour and getting nowhere fast, they decided to call it a day and made for the beach. I headed for an early night and hoped the wind would change direction by morning.

Sure enough, at half seven a gentle breeze was wafting in from the southwest, and waves that had been random and rowdy 12 hours before were now on their best behaviour. On West Sands, the shallow angle of the beach meant that a hefty paddle-out would still be required, so I moseyed along the Scores to examine other options. The reef at Castle Sands was producing thumping, hollow waves that raced along invitingly for 30 metres or so before imploding on almost dry reef. One day, at low tide, I thought to myself, somebody should go down there with a few sticks of dynamite and level things out a bit. In its current state, though, Castle Sands isn't far off a suicide mission, so I carried on down the coast to see what else was on offer.

At East Sands, things were looking more manageable. True, a 100-metre closeout was whumping along the sandbank beside the pier, but over in the far corner of the beach, big, fat, juicy-looking lumps of water were cannoning off the rocks, then pinwheeling invitingly towards shore.

There were a surprising number of people out first thing – four guys throwing themselves into the unmakeable waves by the pier and a group of beginners getting hammered in the shorebreak – and by the time we joined the fray the beach was mobbed. So mobbed, in fact, that we had to drive out into the 'burbs just to find a parking place. Stripping off in the middle of a residential street felt a little strange, to be sure, but I'd happily run naked down the Royal Mile to get East Sands that good again.