This morning it was pretty calm and flat, and we headed off to the harbour in Tarifa to do some forward stroke drills. Magnus switched off with his wife, so now it was Karen’s turn to paddle with us this morning. We did the same drills we’d done on the first full day (God, what day is it today, Thursday? I don’t want to think about the rapidly approaching weekend and week end.), although hopefully we did them a little better. Then we went out of the harbour for a bit of a sightseeing trip along the outside of the harbour wall and a nice view of the city rising up the hill.
As has been the pattern for most of the week, the afternoon was breezier and we headed off to Punta Paloma. As has also been the pattern, Kassie joined us. However this time instead of going from the point directly to the hotel, this time we went a little further out to sea, and headed towards the football stadium on the edge of town, making the downwind section closer to 10km rather than the 6km or so the “direct to the hotel” trip was. Frank was in the V10 Double with Boyan, leaving three V8s, two red stripe and one black one. I was half expecting to be demoted to the black stripe one for my cock-up yesterday, but instead Boyan had us draw straws and I ended up in the black stripe one anyway. Hmmm.
On the paddle out the point, we again encountered Ben, the English paddler in the V10 Sport who we’d met yesterday (and again in the excellent “Eco Center” restaurant later). He said “There’s no surf, I just went around the point to look at the Roman village”, which kind of intrigued me. But Boyan knows the conditions like the back of his hand, and he told us to paddle “towards the tip of Africa over there for 5 minutes”. I know I see that it’s Africa I see across the Strait every day, I just get a little frisson hearing it in a context like that.
When we first turned downwind, the waves weren’t much, but they got slowly better and better. By the time of our third little “get together to make sure everybody is having fun and staying safe” on the water, they were getting amazingly good. Most of the time both Karen and Kassie were well ahead of me – I think I was wasting time and energy trying and failing to catch the biggest waves, and they were both doing a better job of seeing and catching the little ones. But on the other hand, when you catch a big one it’s a real thrill. So I’m not going to apologize for that, but I am going to try to get better at spotting the little ones that can give you a push in between hunting for the big ones. I did catch a couple of nice ones that linked to other nice ones where I went from a big one to a small one to another big one all without slowing down or even having to paddle hard. That felt good.
When we approached the shore, I told myself to not be an idiot this time, go last, and watch and learn. So Boyan and Frank went in on the double, and then Boyan stood and signalled where we were to go in. Kassie was in, and Karen was heading in, and I was paddling parallel to the shore to try to line up to go in at that same spot when a big wave broke over me and dumped me in the water. Fortunately it was shallow enough that I could stand up and grab the boat, so it looked almost like I planned it that way. I guess today’s lesson is “do your line up outside of the breaker line”.