7.27.19 Last Session in El Salvador

My surf boner slapped against my sternum, awakening me at the prescribed time, as we'd discussed the previous night.

I was in a funk given all the bullshiv I'm dealing with for the move, on top of a project I officially started on the fifteenth. I was also still a little sick, having picked up some bug from the two sessions on the big day of the 14th. I was suddenly not in the mood to surf.  I checked the forecast and opted not to go.  But my surf jimmies wouldn't stop rustling. 

I checked the forecast again and noticed the surf was supposed to get bigger.  The period was a lowly 13 seconds, which could mean some crossed-up chop from a somewhat nearby storm.  The 14 kph offshores were what broke the surf stalemate within me and I decided to head down for my last session as a Salvadoran resident.

I glanced at the point, less angry than times past.  That long wave I caught which allowed me to do so much had whitewashed many of the bad sessions and frustrating waves I'd caught there since having arrived.  Unfortunately, the swell currently in the water wasn't enough to overcome the rideability bar and it wasn't working right.

I walked down the dirt road, to the beach I'd spent a lot of time on as a youngster.  It didn't look like it was working right either.  There were scattered peaks that seemed gutless, though it might have been my 13-second swell period bias leaking.

I settled on a peak and caught my first wave within ten minutes.  It was a left that opened up somewhat.  I did a brutal carve on it.  I gouged it so hard and lay back into the water enough so that I wasn't able to get back up.  I was surprised at the amount of water I'd thrown but that's not really impressive because boating accidents also throw a lot of water.

It took forever to catch another unbroken wave, and in that time I was swept down towards El Majahual.  San Blas has a battery of rideable waves when there's swell, and there's a sizeable gap between the Tinoco house (two houses west of my ex-stepfather's rented house) and the next consistent peak.  I ended up in that netherworld and opted to belly board in.

I walked way east and paddled back out, then got swept down again, even more quickly.  I caught a questionable right, which had the slightest of corners available to me.  I didn't think; my legs swooped up and I did a mini-pump in a pretty critical part of the wave.  But despite upping my chances at glory, there was no payoff as the wave unceremoniously closed out.

A couple more swept-down-go-in-walk-east-paddle-outs and some pretty critical late drops on what turned out to be close-outs later and I got the wave of the day. 

I had to go easy on it, as the first wave had foamed out the surface.  I didn't get barreled, but the lip hit me in the head as I was in-line for it.  I got a lot of speed but unfortunately for whatever reason I didn't do a turn.  Not sure if I was going for a foamy floater or I had paralysis of analysis but it didn't happen.

It wasn't until the writing of this post I realized that my first session as a Salvadoran resident took place exactly a year before my last.  Will I come back to live in El Salvador?  Maybe when the girls are out of the house.

7.14.19 Bigger and Gnarlier Balsamar

I was on daddy duty and my wife had decreed that I'd have to wait to surf.

I saw some big slabs break, definitely overhead and not makeable by me, not even close on my board.

The tide kept dropping, and with it my hopes of glory.

In between sessions, I held my breath underwater for 47 Mississipis, which is equivalent to about a minute, I discovered.  I made it with no problem. 

Thanks to a near-drowning incident this month in 1997, I've had a mini to moderate panic attack whenever I am getting my ass kicked underwater.  I am usually able to mitigate this by counting, knowing I can hold my breath twice as long as the vast majority of beatings.

So after my 47-Mississippis experiment, I felt confident.  I was headed towards the depth of the low tide and these massive energy transporters were coming in ferociously.

I was granted reprieve and I paddled out.  It took me a solid twenty minutes of straight paddling/duckdiving/questioning my sanity before I was able to squirt out between behemoth sets. 

I saw waves out there that scared the hell out of me, possibly approaching triple-overhead and slamming so hard.  I was extremely lucky to make it under two gnarly ones.  These were so big they were black.  It was scary as all hell.

I got smacked by an insider wave and whisked about.  I was counting but I felt that familiar panic rising within.  I gathered my board and what was left of my dignity and got smashed around some more.

I was getting pushed back some and then a bigger set came.  I ditched my board and got absolutely throttled.  My panic took hold, but I tried my best to act logically and relax.  I was unsuccessful.

 There were so many waves that just smashed down into a close-out, and I was not even close at seeing some green face on these.

Eventually I caught a right and was able to do a turn.  I got hung up on the lip and jumped off.  I was expecting to get brutalized but got lucky and squirted back out. 

Eventually the wind made the surface of the water untenable, adding yet another element of difficulty and I decided to go in.  I caught a huge close-out and was early enough so as to BARELY make the drop.  When my fins engaged after most of the board was out of the water I looked up to thank the big guy upstairs.

When I urinated later, I was surprised to see some sand in a very special place, lurking under my foreskin.

Eventually

7.14.19 Massive Balsamar thanks to Friend-since-Kindergarten Guillermo!

We got a late start today as I was bringing the fam down to Balsamar, which we can only get into when invited.

The waves looked big, and they were over double-overhead on the sets.  I was without question undergunned on my 5'11", and I was curious to see how I would fare.

I was able to make it out without too much issue, not a single other surfer anywhere in sight, as has been the case every time I've been here.

I caught an overhead left, pumped, and then bailed out the back as I didn't want to be a part of the close-out.

I dodged sets for a while, then decided it wasn't worth my time or tragedy while out there.  I also didn't want to be a dick, as I'd said hello and quickly paddled out.  I caught a pretty good-sized closeout in.

7.9.19 Tragedy (but not for me) at El Recodo

I somehow talked myself into paddling out despite all of the reasons not to at the end of my previous entry.  The waves were well overhead but makeable when they didn't section off.  And there was no one out thar!

My surf boner was saying LET'S GO, but my mind, heart, and body were saying no

The river was mellow, considering the amount of water coming down.  I suppose its recent widening helped reduce the speed at the expense of its girth.  And boy do I know what THAT feels like (pitching).

The paddle-out was sketchy but not an issue.   I did take one on the head, probs a 4 on the Beatdown Scale©.

What a set-up, macking El Recodo, by myself, with distant thunder and several tufts of cumulonimbus formations maddogging me.

It was tricky finding a good paddle spot for one that wouldn't section off.  Easy, you might be thinking, just catch it after the section!  But those would fizzle into fatness and were just a drop.

After about a half-hour I caught one.  It was a doozy!  I got two cutbacks on it and three top turns, including one really good smack on which I thought for sure I was going to pearl.  I was AMPING, definitely the best wave I've caught in a year (this sesh marked a year since I'd surfed in Nica, by the way).

After about five minutes of straight paddling out and against the current I perched again.  I noticed a guy coming up the rocks down the beach from me.  I was bummed but thankfully he had no entourage.  He and I didn't exchange a word and he was out there with me for about a half-hour before he caught one I let go as I was just in too critical a spot for it.  He caught it and he...

...WENT IN!  I had to laugh.  Here I had made my peace with this guy and a couple of other dudes subtracting from my wave count and he went in with no sign of a posse

As I bobbed up and down with the wave action, I noticed there were a couple of guys from Pando's development up the beach, their body language looking weird.  I quickly guessed that a body had washed up.  When my mom was with my stepdad, they rented a beach house at the beachbreak up the way here and we would sometimes see a crowd gather at El Majahual, gawking at the latest drowning victim.  It was usually an inexperienced swimmer, a drunk, or an inexperienced drunk getting caught in a rip and surfacing the next day.

In between dodging sets and bemoaning my lackluster positioning, I spotted something on the rocks, mind you I was about 250 meters away as the crow flies.  There was something odd there, it was a white bulk which didn't seem to belong.  More of a crowd gathered.

Then I saw the police pick-up truck, which then left without taking what I thought was a body.  I made the decision to go in about another twenty minutes later as the wind was picking up to my disadvantage.  I wasn't about to fight the current AND the ferocious shorebreak so I opted for the El Cocal beachbreak, towards Punta Roca.  When I eventually caught a small wave to aid me in my journey, I looked towards my line-up spot and was shocked at how quickly I was moving as I faded off this relative piddler.

The go-in was rough.  There was no sand!  I caught a foothold on a rock while in waist deep water and did my damnedest to quickly twinkletoe in before the next shorebreak wave slammed my body along with my dreams of a perfect landfall against the rocks.  I made it and had a long walk back to the car.

I asked the guys at the development if it was a swimmer from El Majahual and they confirmed it.

7.9.19 HEAVY and Unpredictable Beachbreak

I didn't know where, or even if, to surf.

I knew the waves would be on the bigger side, and the high tide would still be pretty extreme.  The bigger wild card was the big downpour.  This would make for a lot of water being dumped by the rivers, not to mention organic matter such as twigs and branches.  This would make it hard to stay in one place.

But I'm on a time crunch due to our leaving ES in three weeks, and I can only surf four days per week.  So down I went.

It wasn't raining when I got in the ride at 419, but it started raining right around Zaragoza, a city just shy of the halfway mark.  It started pouring on me and I slowed way down.  It reminded me of August 14, 2003.  I'd been down for the summer and Chuleta and his then-girlfriend Tesoro set me up with one of her friends (I remember her name was Jessica).  We went to the mall as a group date and I shockingly was unable to close (We could have had a good thing, Jessica)!

I had to drive Chuleta and Tesoro down to the beach where they lived and there was a torrential downpour, definitely the worst through which I've ever driven.  I was in my mom's car and they were in the back.  There was a guy driving an SUV coming toward us and I had to do a low-speed swerve onto the mud shoulder.  The car went up, and two of the tires lost contact with the earth for a bit.  Tesoro shrieked.

After the excitement from that incident was over, I white-knuckled it down to the beach, barely able to see in front of me.  The windshield wipers' max speed was laughably slow in the face of such an onslaught.

We made it down and Isra, Chuleta's dad, tried to convince me to spend the night and let the storm pass.  I made the stupid decision, riskwise, to drive back up.  I made it back without incident, other than being freaked out by the driving conditions.

When I got to my mom's house, I got out of the car and felt like I was going to collapse from the mental exhaustion of being so concentrated for so long (2+ hours).

I was hoping the waves wouldn't be chocolatey brown but they were.  So much so that I could b a r e l y make out the outline of my hands as they rested on my knees while being perched.

I saw so many death pits.  The vast majority of these were unmakeable but some might have been, even by me.  It made me wonder...what if?  I'd recently watched the movie The Shallows starring Blake Lively.  It's about a shark who is terrorizing her.  I am proud to say that I wasn't too freaked out by the Mecca-for-sharks conditions.

I also saw something that may forever be etched upon my mind.  This massive and heavy left slab came down with a huge barrel and a gorgeous and frightening and SOOOOO thick serrated lip.  It reminded me of a barracuda's jaw line.

I started getting the heebie jeebies, HARD.  I had a couple of near misses with double-plus-overhead bombs.  While duckdiving under them, I got this weightless feeling that I was going over the falls.  I can't remember feeling that before and MAN is it unsettling.

I would paddle out whenever the bombs came and I wouldn't be able to catch them since they were mostly closing out and I was woefully undergunned.

So I made the decision to go in about halfway during a lull.

But then I was in a pickle. I could stay there and take the reduced power whitewash from the bombs.  But there were some mini-bombs that were coming and I had to fight the urge (almost unfailingly losing) to paddle out to beat these by making it under them in time.  This of course, would just further up the stakes, as their bigger brethren would surely be showing up not two minutes later.

I usually sing to myself when I am out there and during this session I was so flummoxed by the conditions I didn't get a chance to.  I took one in.

I walked up the beach, convinced this was the end of the session.

BBUUTT I somehow convinced myself to paddle back out.

As they say here in El Salvador, solo fui a traer, loosely translated, I only went to take (a beating).  I got absolutely slammed by a set.  My plans to stick around friendlier waters on the inside were once again scuttled as my surf-vival instinct took over.

I did not want to get stuck out there so I kept taking waves on the head without paddling out in between and went in.

I did the usual coaxing: "I'll check the point break, maybe I'll paddle out there" to get me walking back to the ride.  Knowing deep down that I probs wouldn't because:

1.  The river was swollen with organic and inorganic materials, not to mention rushing brown water.
2. This leads to a lot of swirling water, making it difficult to stay in one place/take-off spot.
3. Sharks love rivermouths after a rain.
4. There has been at least one documented shark attack there (way back in 1992, but still...).

7.7.19 ...It totally Redeems Itself!

I didn't know where I could surf to take advantage of the surge in swell.  It was the weekend, so Punta Roca was out.  I didn't want to deal with a similar bump in crowds at La Bocana.

It was a massive high tide, definitely the biggest I've seen since having moved to El Salvador.

There were some lines out there and I ran to my peak.  I surfed the entire session completely by myself.

I was having trouble getting anything going.  I saw some right death pits swirling and I decided to tempt fate and head over there.  I paddled and pulled back from close-outs for twenty minutes before I had a line on one.  It seemed like a baby wave, but there was a double-up situation happening and I had to throw myself over the ledge as it jacked up.  It broke hard and I did a set-up turn halfway up the face.  I got all kinds of speed and really laid into the big mama section, successfully smashing it as the behemoth blasted down around it.

That turn was cathartic.  I was bumming from having had a bad surfing experience despite being in south swell heaven and surfing by myself for so often. 

I went in on my belly and tried my luck at the lefts on tap.

Not too long after paddling out again, I caught a juicy left.  I thought it was going to section off and shut me out, but I managed to make it around.  I wound up into a bottom turn and aimed for the corner, where the wall met the whitewater. 

I laid back, my front hand feeling water with my ass joining in on the fun a short while later.  I managed to pull it much to my ecstacy.

The rest of the session was less memorable.  I think i went in four times total before paddling back out up the beach.  There was one set wave that closed out the entire beach, something I hadn't seen in a long time.  I managed to escape the session with less than my share of beatings.  I lucked into several air pockets on some real nasty ones.  I did have one that made my board shorts go almost all of the way off my ass though.

7.4.19 Just when I think the beachbreak couldn't be any more of a bummer...

This is a short one.

I paddled out and there was a fair amount of water moving around.  As usual there was the odd makeable slab but they shifted around and good luck being in the right spot.

I caught three waves in more than two hours, these slightly opened up but I don't think I even got one bottom turn in all morning.

I can't tell you how frustrated I was on the walk back to my car