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Friday, April 14, 2017

3.31 High Tide Playa Yankee with Even More People!,

I'd taken the previous day off to go visit Ometepe in Lake Nicaragua with my family.

By the time the surf looked doable, I could see some heads in the water from about half a kilometer away.  I thought I'd try to get close to my share since we were leaving soon and I'd only surfed three times the whole trip.

It's a close call from our rental whether to drive or walk.  It's about a third of a mile down, but it is down a steep and loose rock/dirt road, some of it just a car-and-a-half-width-wide on some blind turns.

This beach is known for people having their stuff stolen, and had my sandals gone missing, I would have cursed my decision to walk with every step up the hill.

The parking lot was full and I was told to do a hairpin U-turn, about 195 degree turn down and then immediately up broken-up rock.  It took me a few tries of rocking the 4WD Honda Element back and forth at the crux of the direction change to get it.

I hotfooted it down the very sharp and hot broken-up rock and made it to the sand before I'd realized I'd forgotten my ear plugs.  Back up, then down I went.  The main point wasn't breaking today either so around the rock bend I went again.

The beach scene was absolutely hopping.  There is a beach bar set up and quite a few twenty-somethings were partying.

The head count in the water was high, over twenty.

I got several waves stolen from me, including one on which I got back-paddled by a guy who'd not fifteen minutes earlier bitched out a local for burning him on a wave.  He must've misunderstood the idea behind pay it forward.

I eventually, after about forty minutes of doing the paddle/pull-back-because-etiquette-dictates-to-do-so/whirl around/paddle/duckdive/paddle circuit, I caught a couple and biffed both of them.  One was a too-far-out-on-the-shoulder-with-no-speed cutty attempt and the other was a classic EddieP backwards splay on a top turn.  I left the water super frustrated with the crowd and my performance, I gingerly stepped back to the Element, rocked back and forth several times to make it past the gnarly hairpin U-turn, and returned to our blacked-out rental (stay tuned for a full explanation).

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