When you were born the god gives you ten zeros. Most people use good number of them, and when you use up all ten of the zeros then the god gives you another one, just like those coffee clubs that gives you a free cup after if you collected 10 stamps.
As usual, the day started with Dog Haus calling my cell phone, and we decided to go further north, instead of our immediate local area surfing. So I wanted to check out further north breaks this morning as the south swells were basically ending and a moderate amount of NW swells were coming in today, and parts of our local area has been pretty dead today.
On the way up, he calls. "Hey, Mano, the waves are really solid here, are you sure you want to go here?" "Yeah, why not, where else can we go?" When I got there, it was not too bad, then suddenly there is at least an overhead size close out built up on the outside. "Ka-booom!" then "Are *you* sure?" "Hey, no problem, we can handle that, we just paddle out a bit to the outside." I was not scared, but I was cautious and so I put on my Gath helmet and headed down the stairs to the beach. The surface calms down and become nearly flat. This is the chance to get out, we were both paddling out fast into the outside hoping that close out set do not come in time. We did make the outside safely, then the sets started to happen. It was the start of the incoming tide phase so the waves were piping up a bit, so if I don't get into the shoulder right fast, I would be thrown. Dog Haus had caught already 3 waves from way further outside. In the meantime, I did not catch any as the waves I was paddling for passed by a few times. Finally another set come in and build up closer to my position. I took off into it, and it was too late, it started to crumble all around me, I was jostled up and down inside the white water like going down on a white water rafting trip. "Damn wave!" I am now half pissed off, and so I turn around and start to paddle back. By now, the entire beach looked like this huge white mess with one white wash after another. I was paddling hard to get out, ducking through one wave after another, but my paddling power isn't sufficient and looking back I was not making any progress. If you were standing and watching me do this basically I was not making any forward movement but staying in one location just ducking through the waves. It is such a waste of power. I got off the board, held on to the board and decided to wait out.
Then the ocean calms down again a bit. I look left and right as I paddle out and I saw a section of rippled water. I paddled towards it and now I am moving just so much faster back out. This makes so much difference with my next try ended up basically another immediate wipe out and the board hit right on my head. It would have hurt a bit more if I did not have a helmet on, so this was another happy moment that I could go back to the office and work the rest of the day as if nothing has happened to me or my board.
Finally things started to ease a bit and the inside breaks and now the waves were at my comfort zone. I caught several in the "inside" and that was fun.
Dog Haus was really surprised that I was handling the situation though. Though that's something our local beach breaks has taught me in all these "gone out but did not catch any" type days.
I was a good surfer today because I was having fun. To become a skilled surfer though, it still requires a lot of building up to do from paddling to riding, and I will be using up more than half of the zeros that I was given soon. Hopefully everything will hold up for me to do everything I wanted to do with surfing.
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