Today is International Surfing Day, a worldwide celebration of the sport whose aim is to encourage everyone to head to the coast and catch a wave or three. From California to Costa Rica, surf-themed coastal events will be taking place.

Most will focus on fun, pure and simple, topped up with a dash of eco-awareness: participants are urged to undertake a clean-up of their local beach after they surf. But on the Jurassic coast of Dorset

International Surfing Day takes on a more radical hue. A mass paddle-out of surfers, led by the environmental group Surfers Against Sewage, will take place at Kimmeridge Bay in a peaceful protest against a decidedly capable foe: the Army.

Andy Cummins, the campaigns manager for a group whose acronym is unintentionally bellicose, explains the reason for what SAS calls “the Gathering”. “Kimmeridge Bay is the home of

Broadbench reef, one of Britain’s best waves, but unfortunately it falls on the outer boundary of an MoD firing range,” Cummins says.

“For years surfers enjoyed a good relationship with the MoD. They’d ring up and check whether the firing range was in use and if it wasn’t they’d go surfing. But recently the MoD changed its rules.

Access to Broadbench has become extremely limited.” SAS, which is spearheading a Protect Our Waves campaign, believes a compromise is possible at Broadbench.

“We’re not asking the MoD to reduce their use of the firing range,” Cummins says, “but we are calling on them to revert to a previous firing station. This would result in a changed firing direction, leaving Broadbench outside the range.”

Local surfers would, in surf-speak, be stoked if such an agreement was reached, not least Guy Penwarden, formerly a competitor with the British surfing team and a man who has played a key role in mobilising support for the Broadbench campaign.

“Broadbench is a world-class wave, with perfect, lined-up barrels that seem to go on for ever,” Penwarden says. “Being able to surf it is vital to the development not merely of local surfers but UK surfing as a whole.”

While Penwarden, SAS and a host of surfers will be paddling out at Kimmeridge to publicise their plight, England’s young surfing talent will be doing battle at the Rip Curl Grom Search, a contest held at Godrevy Beach, Cornwall.

There, beyond the breaking waves of the contest area, stands Godrevy lighthouse, the inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. Literary thoughts may not be in the minds of those at the Gathering, still less are they likely to occur to the young surfers at Godrevy, eager to make their mark.

But I like to think that Woolf would be forgiving. Anyone who can write, as she did in The Waves, that “The waves breaking spread their white fans far out over the shore, sent white shadows into the recesses of sonorous caves and then rolled back sighing over the shingle” would surely have been a surfer.