After resting my inflamed upper back for about 6 days, I finally could start surfing again. I took it easy at first, restarting my sessions with my Hybrid Fish board to reduce the paddling and ease the wave catching.
It wasn’t as magnificent a start as my first session at T-Land, ie. I didn’t get super long rides with multiple turns, but there were multiple instances of surfing the wave where I experienced something new and remember saying to myself, ‘Woah’, a split second before wiping out.
One of the common recurring problems was that I found myself popping up but instantly falling off to the side of my board while trying to initiate the turn. I realise now the reason for this is that I did not compress my body sufficiently upon popping up and initiating the turn, causing myself to lose balance. But additionally, the turning radius while surfing my backhand is restricted by the lack of sensitivity of balancing on my heels, which once again, impressed upon me the necessity of grabbing the rail while taking off.
A lot of other times I was just caught behind the wave as I did not react fast enough to generate speed when I found myself slowing down. One time, as I saw myself being outstripped by the wave, I instinctively but wrongly tried to gain speed by pressing down on my front foot and leaning more body weight to the front. Needless to say, I watched in futile as the wave outstripped me. Upon popping out of the whitewash I questioned why I had even bothered trying that. This was clearly a case of having the wrong habits.
Something similar occurred on a larger and more aggressive wave, where the slightly overhead lip was throwing, and for the first time, I could actually see a clear race between myself and the lip of the wave. And the wave was large enough, that it actually overshadowed me, and I started to understand the meaning of ‘catching some shade’. I managed to put in one speed pump and saw myself catch ahead, and was about to do another to try and move past the falling lip and into the pocket, but in that split moment, I was too scared of the lip hitting me on my side while moving in and hesitated. And again, I literally saw the wave racing past me on the side.
However, most of the time, the wave would beat me almost me immediately upon take off when I had little time to start generating speed upon take-off. All these experiences, especially the fresh and interesting ones, served to habitually ingrain the speed generation manoeuvre upon instantaneous pop up in my mind.
These may seem like slightly disappointing waves, but I took heart from the fact that I was learning many new lessons from all these kook-ups. The ongoing repetition of falling off immediately upon initiating a turn was a bummer, but I did eventually learn from my mistakes.
In addition, there were some waves I caught, where I was just going down the line and the speed was just nice for me, but I didn’t feel like I was supposed to do manoeuvres. This felt very odd and counter-intuitive to me, because I had never just speed generated down the line before. And for that split moment I thought about this while riding the wave, I didn’t point down the face, and the wave pushed me off from the side. This was when I realised, a surfer has to follow what the wave offers, and can’t force manoeuvres if the wave doesn’t allow it even if he/she doesn’t like it.
As for the more undeniably positive experiences, there was one interesting wave where I could see the lip start to fall over further down the line and thought to myself, “hmm the lip is about to throw”, but before I could do anything, the lip hit me in the face from the side, from completely out of my peripheral vision. And for the first time, I realised, I could have been covered up or mini barrelled, if I had just tucked in. This is obviously once stepping stone closer to achieving my goal of getting barrelled, so I was undeniably pleased with this wave.
Additionally, there was one session where I felt so dialled in with the timing the waves. I didn’t get caught too late or too early on any of them. I don’t recall completing the line with any of the waves, but for the first time, I felt I was in sync with the waves, talking to myself while navigating the line-up and calling out to each passing wave in my mind, “Alright, I need to position here”, or, “Nope, this is too late”, or “Yes, I’ll go for this one”.
And finally, one of my sickest take-offs ever.
I was at the end of my session about to head it, so I decided to stick around a section of T-Land called the Mountain. This section produced slightly larger and heavier A-frames then the other sections and wiping out here meant getting caught in a really strong impact zone which tended to tire me out, so I generally avoided this section.
However, I saw a 6ft wave, slightly overhead, approaching, and decided to go for it. I took off right next to the breaking lip and for the first time ever, felt my Redz Hypto-replica board rattling beneath my feet as if it was an aerofoil about to lift-off from the wave face. I think this was due to the steepness of the face as well as the offshore wind blowing underneath my board.
I instinctively pressed down harder on my feet to stabilise it and made it out to the shoulder, felt the rattling reduce, and attempted to cut back to the pocket, when the rattling started again, and I wasn’t compressed enough to stabilise it and fell off.
A surf photographer in the water asked me whether I made the wave, and told me that he saw my rails and fins barely engaging the face. This was undoubtedly one of the most memorable take-offs I’ve ever had, and what’s more rewarding was that I was just 1 – 2 days before I was about to leave T-Land, and I thought to myself that it was such a shame I didn’t get a single photo of myself surfing throughout the entire time I was here.
Fortunately, this was one ecstatic surf photos for the memories for life. 😀
