This morning the wind was pretty light, and I figured we wouldn’t get any surf paddling. Instead, we (Frank and I – Magnus was spending the day with his family and Kassie is on Spanish time so she wasn’t up yet) learnt about how to launch and retrieve in the surf. Boyan, who seems to know every location and every wind condition in this area took us to the end of the beach near town where the waves were coming in and breaking harder than they are back at the hotel. There’s also no rocks around, which is probably a plus for the longevity of his boats considering how we treated them.
Over and over, we practiced controlling the boat by the foot strap, lifting the front end over breaking waves and keeping the paddle away from the boat, spotting the lull between breakers, swinging the paddle down into launch position and getting in the boat and launching out through the waves. I was definitely getting faster and faster at that part of it. Going out through the waves, I frequently got a mouthful or even worse, an eyeful of salt water. Not much you can do about that except hope your eye stops stinging quickly and you can see again.
Coming back in was tricker. When you turned around outside of the surf zone, it was really hard to tell which waves were going to give you a ride, which ones would see you on the backside of a breaker, and which ones would come up behind you, turn your boat the opposite of the way you’d been planning, and leave you with the boat between you and the breaker, running you down and then getting away from you as you ran after it through the surf. Boyan was smart to give me a black stripe V8 instead of the red one, or we’d probably be picking up pieces along the shoreline. Somewhere along the way I managed to lose the water bottle Frank had loaned me, in spite of putting an extra knot in the bungee to hold it in tighter.
But mostly it worked out, where either I got the right spot (behind the breaker instead of in front of it, or in a lull with no breakers at all) and just hopped out and grabbed the foot strap in one fluid motion, or I deliberately came in on a breaker and managed to drag a brace and a foot to get turned in the direction I was expecting and hopped out between the wave and the boat so I grabbed the boat by the footstrap and stood firmly as the wave broke over me and the wave turned the boat harmlessly nose into the sea. The ones where I managed to do the right thing in the breakers were the most satisfying. The ones where I ate sand and lost control of the boat, not so much.
For the afternoon session, Kassie joined us and we headed off to Punta Poloma again. In the parking lot we were surprised to see a car with a V-rack with an Epic V10 Sport. There was a strong on-shore breeze, and Boyan suggested we might just surf out and back in whatever waves, or we might find that the current and tide would make a better situation out beyond the point. Boyan buddied with Frank and I was buddied with Kassie. He trusted Kassie and I with the red stripe V8s this time – a decision I almost made him regret later. We paddled out beyond the point with the guy in the V10 Sport (his name is Ben and he’s from the UK) and after a quick consult, we decided to make an easy paddle towards the hotel, catching whatever waves we could, and then when we got to the hotel there was the promise of more waves and we could paddle in and out on them a bit. Ben stayed at the Punta surfing in towards shore.
This time I decided to try and keep closer to Kassie to benefit from her experience – she hasn’t been paddling for very long, but she’s had a wealth of experiences I can only dream of. Just like yesterday, she kept closer into shore than Boyan and Frank, and we rode the small waves, sometimes catching them by paddling up over the top of them, getting a bit of energy, and trying to use that to paddle over the top of the next one. Not too different from paddling on Lake Ontario, actually. She gave me a few pointers about using my body angle to catch waves and other things.
About a kilometer from the hotel, we circled back to see Frank and Boyan, who were well out to sea and behind us, so we had to go pounding into the waves. But once out there we saw why they’d stayed out – the waves were higher, but much more confused and complicated. You had to really concentrate on what’s right in front of you – I forget the exact phrase Kassie used, but I think it was something about “the pie slice” or words to that effect. (One thing that’s been a constant factor in these paddles is that there is a very strong wind, and so if you don’t stop paddling and face each other you might miss easily half of what the other person says. That has been a factor a few times already, and will be a major factor later in this posting.) (Ohhh,foreshadowing – who says I don’t blog like a writer?) You had to watch the front of your boat and maybe 20 or 30 degrees either side, out to about a boat length, and that’s about it. You attempt to catch the ones that are going in that direction, and ignore the ones that are coming in from the side and dumping water on you. Every now and then I’d look up and think to myself “oh, Kassie’s behind me, how did that happen”, and the next time I’d look up and think “oh, now she’s ahead, how did that happen?” Sometimes I could even spare a look and a thought for Frank and Boyan. But mostly I was watching that slice ahead of me and catching waves. Fun stuff.
After we arrived at the hotel, we did a few passes in and out of the beach. Kassie kept heading back kind of at a strong angle to the beach back towards where we’d come from, Frank was heading off downwind towards Tarifa, and I was trying to go straight out into what seemed like the major waves. Boyan was just sitting by the beach watching us all. Eventually Kassie and I decided that Boyan looked bored of waiting for us, so we decided to head in. I said I’d follow her in because I wanted to learn from her caution. But then she said “You’re not going to like this” followed by words that were whipped away by the wind, and she veered back up the beach again. And suddenly my resolve to watch and learn went out the window – it appeared I had a clear expanse of beach ahead of me and she was well clear, so I didn’t see any reason not to just head in on my own. Big mistake.
On the way in, it seemed nice and flat and I wasn’t getting much of a push, but then suddenly when I got too close to the beach to be surfing I suddenly got picked up by a huge wave. It was really tall and steep, probably the biggest one I’ve ever been on. It would have been awesome if I’d been 500 meters off shore. But as it was the water in front of it was looking dangerously shallow. I threw out a brace and I put a leg over the side of the boat to try to brake off the wave, to no avail. The nose of the boat was diving deep underwater and I was terrified it was going to dig into the bottom and flip the boat (and me) right over – I’ve seen the videos of that happening, and if you’re lucky all it does is break the boat into pieces. So I jumped out on the sea side, trying to hold the boat with my leg. It didn’t work – the boat went spinning up to the high water line (fortunately undamaged), while I was pounded into pudding by the wave breaking on top of me. It turned out that Kassie had spotted that breaking surf and was heading up the beach to a place where it wasn’t breaking so hard, and if I’d stuck to my original plan I might have learned something.