For the trips that live in a van

Some surf trips are about one specific break and a hotel near it. Most aren’t. Most look more like: a van, a vague plan, a stretch of coast you’ve been meaning to drive, and a phone full of half-saved Google Maps pins.

Camper Mode is the layer Swellbook adds for that second kind of trip.

What changes when you turn it on

Most surf logs treat a spot as just the wave — the bottom, the direction, the wind it likes. That’s enough if you’re driving home after. It is not enough if you’re sleeping next to it.

Camper Mode keeps the wave info and adds a second card to every spot for the practical stuff:

• Camping — is sleeping in the carpark allowed, tolerated, or a tow-away?
• Parking — where, how far, and is it a tight cliff road?
• Fresh water — tap, fountain, or the next town over?
• Toilets and showers — public, paid, or “you should have planned ahead”?
• Distance to the line-up — minutes from the door of the van to the sand.

None of it is mandatory. Empty fields stay empty. But the parts you fill in survive the trip and stay attached to the spot the next time you scroll past it in February — which is the actual point.

Where it came from

The honest version: I spent two weeks in the Algarve last spring in Wallie, my old Fiat Ducato. Carrapateira, Arrifana, the cliff-top carparks where you can hear the swell from inside the van. The surf forecast was the easy part. The hard part was guessing which carpark was actually fine to sleep in, where the nearest tap was, and whether the climb down to the beach was something I wanted to do twice a day with a 6’2” under each arm.

By day four I was keeping notes in the same notebook as the session log. By day six the notebook was wet. By the time I drove Wallie back to Salzburg, the next version of Swellbook had Camper Mode in it.

How to use it on a trip

The flow that works for me:

1. Before leaving, drop pins for the spots you’re aiming at. Don’t fill anything in yet — you don’t know.
2. On the road, when you actually park somewhere and sleep there, that’s when the carpark notes go in. Sleeping there is the test.
3. After the session, log it like normal. The session attaches to the spot, the spot already has its camping notes from yesterday, and the next person on that trip — usually you, six months later — has the whole picture.

The map fills in differently when you do it this way. Not a list of waves you scored — a list of places you actually slept, with the wave attached.

A small bias the app has

Camper Mode doesn’t grade carparks. It doesn’t sort spots by how van-friendly they are. It doesn’t recommend trips. It just keeps your notes where you left them.

That’s deliberate. The good carparks aren’t the ones that score five stars on a map app — they’re the ones that worked for you, on the trip you took, with the van you had. The app’s job is to remember them. The recommending part is yours.

Off by default

Camper Mode lives in Settings → General, and it’s off out of the box. If your surf trips don’t look like that, leave the toggle off — the app stays the same as before. That’s why it’s a setting, not a feature. Camper Mode is for the people who plan their year around where they can wake up. Off if you don’t.

If your surf year happens out of a van — even just for two weeks of it — the part of the year Camper Mode is for is the best two weeks.

The app is on the App Store. Free, iOS 17+.