JD's Journal : Somewhere in South America
Getting to the lineup

:: Time to wake up. I'm in my tent, wearing sweatpants, teeshirt, fleece and a sleeping bag. It's still pretty dark - as I crawl out of the tent, I can see the dawn just beginning to show over the hills. We need a fire. Grab the wood, dump some gas on it, get it going (yeah, I know - I should rub two sticks together, but time is short). Boil the water, make the coffee, get the binoculars out and watch the break - it's about a half mile from where we're camped, across a big stretch of beach. It's breaking left as always around here, swell is a few feet, there's no wind yet..

The lads wake up slowly. Since this is a boy's surf trip, breakfast conversation sounds like this: "looks bigger than yesterday" "yeah" "could be fun" "yeah, could be" "maybe the wind'll hold off" "maybe".. None of us resemble Oscar Wilde at this time of the morning.

More coffee and a powerbar, and we're ready to go. We crawl into damp, cold wetsuits, grab the boards, walk across the sand as the sun comes up. It's still chilly, and everything gets covered in a gritty layer of sand as we walk.

The "best" way to the lineup goes like this: walk into the water up to your chest. Paddle about 20 feet to the bottom of a massive rock outcrop. Getting the timing right, stand on a ledge about two feet under water, which is covered with kelp - too early and there's too much water and you fall off - too late, and the next wave will hit you and you will fall off. So you spend a few minutes falling off. Finally, grab a hand-hold, pull yourself up, and creep up a sharp rock ledge. Then over the top of the ledge, walk down a narrow path to a flat rock that overlooks the jump-off rock (you are doing all of this one-handed of course, since you're holding the board in the other hand). Time the sets. Wait for what seems like a lull. Clamber down to the jumpoff rock, wait for a wave or two to go by, jump in, and voila! A few strokes and you're in the lineup. Or you're looking at taking a set on the head, being washed into the rocks and doing it all again.

Simple. After two or three days of this, I have scrapes on both hands, both shins, and bruise on my ass when I completely misstimed a set and ended up hanging on to the jumpoff rock kelp while a set tried its best to scrape me into the water. ("You need to work on your rock technique" said Mark, mildly, having watched the whole disaster from 30 feet away in the lineup).

So, feeling cold and creaky, we do all the above and end up in the lineup. Sets are frequent, about chest to head-high, a fast takeoff, little hollow section, then a long wall - up and down, up and down all the way to the beach. Then you walk about a quarter mile against the wind back to the big slab, and do it all again - when somebody takes a good wave, you know you're not going to see them again for 20 minutes.
Early morning left
Three hours of this - three of us in the water - concentrating, paddling constantly against the current, and it's time for lunch. By now the offshores are howling into our faces as we stagger back to the camp. Get the fire going again, toast some bread and eat monster canned-fish sandwiches. Coffee, coffee, water, juice, more sandwich, the sun is up, we crash on the grass.

Late afternoon. Another session? Sure. This time we climb the ridge behind the camp, and down a steep sandy hill to a cove where chest-high lefts are tooling in. Two of us out for two hours, the sky goes yellow, then orange, then it starts to get cold and we paddle in, haul ourselves up the ridge and down the other side.

Mark has meanwhile scored a tuna from the local fisherman and gutted it. We open a bottle of red wine (at least I do), grill the tuna, make spaghetti to go with it, and eat, bundled up in every piece of clothing we brought with us. We tell a few stories, go quiet, head back to the tents.

Then we do it again the next day. Every day for a week.

 



my email is: jdj@pacificwaverider.com

an archive of these columns is here