“Woah, I haven’t seen it this big in one and a half years…”
If your surf instructor says that, you know it’s going to be a big day.
A massive 10 ft SSW swell hit Gerupuk bay and Don Don took it in with a confident stride. A typically mushy and friendly A-frame now became this beautifully functioning yet scary and intimidating head high beast. (At least to me at my current pitiful level of surfing) Fortunately, it was still undoubtedly very safe due to its deep reef.
However, any wipeouts on the right hander (which I was surfing) were painfully laborious as its channel was pretty weak, and any paddle back to the line-up felt like a punishment of eternity with white water shoving to push you back. Despite that, I was still tried performing maneuvers on this wave, and I pulled off something I had never done before – re-entering the clean face of a wave with a subtle top turn with good compression.
However, other rides and photos from this day showed me that I’m initiating my top turns on the mid face of the wave, which isn’t wrong. But to progress to sharper turns and feel the full power of the wave, I should be doing sharper bottom turns to the top of the wave face, before initiating the a sharp bottom turn back down.
And that was just the morning session.
In the arvo, the swell was at its peak, and the sets were clearly overhead. I was too scared to even dare committing to my own wave, and relied on Ateng, my local surf guide to call me into the right ones. I wiped-out shamefully and wastefullyon some of them (caused by inconsistent body compression and poor inverted knee stance), but there’s a particular ride that I’ll remember.
Ateng guided me right into the sweet spot of the wave, just before it started to break and the first impact of the white water gave me the same sensation as rockets attached to the tail of my board. I had never felt acceleration on a surfboard to that degree. I rode it for awhile but fell off, maybe cause I was just so surprised by its power, then took a couple of sets on the head for good measure.
But the satisfaction of that few seconds of nature’s rush and energy, was worth the 10 hour long paddle back into the line-up.
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I was undeniably surfing waves exceeding my skill level this day, but I’ll think back to his day to give me the confidence to take on smaller waves and smaller days, for the simple and unelegant reason that I know I can take bigger beatings 😀
