Surfing is so much fun. I can totally see how people can turn into hardcore surf freaks. If I lived near an ocean, I probably would too. Anyway, we signed up at the Hans Hedemann surf school conveniently located next door to where we were staying. They'd gotten kudos in Let's Go (which is my guidebook of choice) and offered group lessons (we figured it would be nice to go out with other people who didn't know what they were doing) so it seemed like a no-brainer. After getting a bit of a tutorial on the basics, we grabbed our boards and headed across the street to hit the waves. When we got there, we started paddling out. We would be doing a lot of this over the course of the next few hours. In fact, the paddling part was pretty exhausting.
The surfing process goes like this: you paddle out to where the waves are, turn yourself around, and then as the wave gets close, you paddle like mad to try to match the speed of the wave, then you push yourself up (in a kind of fluid jump-type motion), hope you're balanced, and away you go. The dude with the hat was there to help you mostly with the timing of it all. He'd watch for a decent enough wave, then tell you when to start paddling, and then to jump up. When you feel like you're not going to go any further, you turn around and start paddling out again. I think I did pretty well for myself. A few times I wiped out pretty early on, but I had some pretty long runs, too. Looking at the pictures, I notice that I didn't tend to get as upright as the experienced guys in surfing movies (like The Endless Summer), but hey, it was my first time. I was mostly just trying not to fall off. Like this.
I was asked later about whether surf music went through my head while surfing. Honestly, no. Nothing went through my head, except this little voice shouting at me to Stay Balanced.
And, with that, I suppose we will conclude this edition of Travelbloggin'. I guarantee that there will less than a year's wait until the next one.
Gnarlacious, dudes!
No comments:
Post a Comment