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Wednesday, July 10, 2019

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...).


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