Upon returning to Lombok and first setting my sights on a moderately big Don Dons, the first thing I thought to myself was: That’s it?
I was undoubtedly imbued with a renewed sense of confidence to take on these easier breaks after the more challenging breaks in West Sumbawa. They weren’t as powerful and the take-offs were way slower.
For the first time, I could confidently sit at the very front of the line-up to take the incoming sets right as they broke, and thought to myself, “So this is what it feels like being the king of the line-up”.
It was a bit difficult reading the slowness and thickness of Don Don’s after the faster and steeper breaks in Sumbawa, but after mis-reading a couple of waves and re-calibrating my expectations, my positioning improved a lot.
There was one particular wave that’s etched into my memory. I had just paddled back into the line-up from another wave (or wipe-out) and saw a wave coming right at me. My positioning was just right, but I was surrounded by 4-5 people and didn’t think I was in the order to get it. However, as it got closer, I realised no one was paddling for it and I was completely befuddled.
“Well, ok, if no one wants it, I’ll take it”, I thought to myself.
And it was glorious.
I bottomed turn after popping up, then performed a gentle cut-back back into the pocket, then repeated the two turns again, before the wave gave out. For the first time ever, I felt like I was actually manoeuvring comfortably on a wave, legitimately surfing at an intermediate level.
The rest of the week I continued to surf Don Don and Insides at Gerupuk, and observed that my pop-ups were almost 100% consistent. I had overcome my bad habit of not looking down the line while popping up 😀 At one of my Insides sessions, I even caught a wave within a 3 second window of consciously making the decision to turn around and catch it. This was definitely a first for me.
I observed a definite progress in my surfing and this left me with new challenges to overcome, namely beating white water sections upon popping up. I realised my first problem is not inverting the knee upon popping up, which causes me to lose speed. But other than that, I have to work on 3 possible options to beat a section: (i) For super fast waves, speed generate instantly upon popping up (ii) For mushy waves, following the white water onto the flats, generate speed out of it then bottom turn onto the face again (iii) Mid-way down the line, generate speed then floater on top of the white water section.
I felt like I was progressing because I was actually attempting to overcome a new problem (although inverting the back knee isn’t a new one :/), so this week was definitely one of the high-points in my surfing progress so far 😀
