d7: a gift for your soul

I get up to the sound of the roosters and realize my cell phones time is off. Ok, no problem, I just need to get ready and get to the beach: it’s still kinda dark. Looking forward to paddle out, I see what look like quite bad conditions: small waves at a shore break that close out most of the time. I think about it but the extremely brown color and floating things is not appealing at all and turn around… while I’m on my way back home I run into a girl with a surfboard and join her to check the surf again: I figured she’d know better than I, since I just got to this place last night and don’t know what to expect! She was meeting a friend a bit further up and the surf lookd better from that spot. The first girl wanted to jog rather than surf, but the other girl and I were ready to paddle out, so we all ended up stepping onto the sand for a session.

I was missing the little cord to which one attaches their leash, but luckly a local surfer had just gotten there and I asked him for help. Like McGiver, he grabbed a piece of rope lying around and cut the right size with a piece of glass that was also lying around… on the sand! I paddled out: it was an okay session, lots of close-outs and a break that’s too fast for me. Out there in the water I chatted with the surfer who helped me with the cord, Kervin, since we were by ourselves for 2/3 of our session… and I find out he’s one of the guys who runs my hostel.

Back home, I took a shower and two of the guys, Kervin and Byron (who would think they are Nicaraguan with these names??), offered some of their breakfast, since they had tons. I only accepted to try a couple of bites from their stuff, but I thought it was a nice gesture. Following up on that I went to a coffeeshop to use free wi-fi and had a watery orange juice and coffee, both of which were very expensive, US$1.5 each.

At 11 I joined the people at the hostel, which is really a surfcamp I guess, to go to Playa Madera. It usually takes 30′ by car to get there although it’s not far, because the roads are bad. Well, now, in the rainy season, “bad” is way short of an adjective to describe how the road was today… in fact, we had to switch from a van to a 4-wheel car because we couldn’t go on, and then we still had to unload the car twice to go through two bad sections. A few times we were all scared that we would flip over or so because the whole on the road were so bad the car was quite tilted (and we had all those board on top!). And it took us about one hour?

Playa Madera is awesome and the stressful trip was worth it (at least to do it every once in a while, not every day!). Pounding waves, stone cliffs and green cliff tops, a low tide that showed lots of yards of wet sand and very few people… because it’s so hard to get there! I had read and someone just told me as well (a local) that people here don’t want to use their cars to go to the beaches because they risk their cars so much! … and mechanicians ara expensive here.

The surf wasn’t exactly perfect… most waves closed out and it was scary to see! every now and then a wave opened fairly well, but I didn’t catch any of those, lol. I decided to leave my board behind at a couple of different sets because I was scared with those terrible closing waves. Otherwise I didn’t have much trouble paddling out using a channel. The really only rode two waves and not for very long because they closed out: the first one was the longest ride and I ended up flying over the top of the lip to avoid getting worked (my board didn’t follow me but that’s okay, my leash is not that old ; )   Most of the other waves I paddled for  I didn’t go for because they were clear close-outs… a couple though I did catch hoping they wouldn’t close out and ended up getting worked right after standing up.

It was good exercise and an amazing gift for my eyes and soul : )