Around The World In 80 Waves

A quick word of congratulations to Cardiff City Football Club for winning the Championship.

Their promotion and Swansea being already in the Premier League means that 10% of next season’s top flight football will be Welsh.

With Swansea winning the League Cup and Wales winning the Six Nations rugby tournament it has been rather a good year to be a Welsh sports fan, and I will admit to being a tad disappointed not to have been around when it happened.

Only a tad though, I am doing ok. 🙂

As a reward for making it to Panama City I wanted to treat myself to a decent hotel upon arrival, and was particularly hoping for a room with a bath. I had no idea where to go, but saw the tower of the Hard Rock Hotel from right across town and eventually found it at street level after a couple of very questionable manoeuvres on the toll road to avoid the fees.

I was quickly back in my car however when they wanted over $200 a night for a room, but their bell boy was a cool kid who surfs and pointed me in the direction of cheaper hotels so I gave him a block of wax for his board.

Thankfully just for once my phone actually worked when I needed it to and using the Internet to scan the lonely planet forum, I saw a recommendation for the Hotel Milan. (http://www.hotelmilan.com.pa/en/) Google Maps worked too and I was able to get there relatively easily.

After checking in for a week I completely unloaded the car’s contents into my comfortable room to get an idea of how much stuff I have acquired on my travels, but can admit to going a tad Howard Hughes afterwards.

I was exhausted upon arrival in Panama City and needed a healthy fix of TV and air conditioning, as well as a good internet connection while I got the ball rolling on a number of administrative tasks.

I have been doing the odd thing that required leaving my room, but have mostly been enjoying the HBO cable TV channel to catch up on Game of Thrones and enjoy a host of movies which I have not seen before.

I periodically raid the hotel’s ice bucket to get a stash of my own for an improvised fridge to keep the cans I Cuba Libres that I bought ice cold. I will be moving to more salubrious accommodation after the weekend but until then will enjoy the facilities here as much as I can. I have even persuaded the restaurant to cook up one of my tins of baked beans for me, so that in addition to their usual fayre I could complete a full English breakfast. It was good! 

Wooo-hooo! I have made it to Panama City.

Some said it couldn’t be done. Many more suggested it shouldn’t be done.

However I have arrived at the end of the road, and since arriving here I have been enjoying not doing a great deal and recharging my batteries.

I have done a bit of sight seeing including going down to the dilapidated area of the former colonial capital, known as San Felipe.

There are some wonderful old buildings, but a significant number of them appear to be falling to pieces, partly because the area got a bit of a hammering during the US invasion in 1999.

From the Paseo Las Bovedas which runs alongs the shore there you can see all the ships lined up and waiting to enter the canal.

I am told the constuction work in the foreground is the start of a new yachting marina, which is part of a major investment plan for the area.

Driving along the shore towards the modern city centre you come to the Vasco Núñez de Balboa bronze statue. He is holding the Spanish flag in his left hand and a sword with his right as he overlooks Panama Bay.

Vasco crossed the Isthmus of Panama to the Pacific Ocean in 1513, becoming the first European to have seen the Pacific from the Eastern side.

However I have it on good authority that he is no relation to Rocky. 

No posts for a few days because I have simply been taking a day or two off to celebrate and rest having reached Panama City. I have also been rather glued to the events in Boston and Waco having cable TV for the first time in ages. This means I have some catching up to do…

I think the best place to start is with my run in with the law. Having left Santa Catalina and made my way back to the Pan American Highway you see above I decided to push on to Panama City and get started on selling the car, because it has been a nagging worry for a few weeks now. I was just driving down the road and unlike the usual me was not actually speeding. All of a sudden a motorcycle Policeman on the hard shoulder of the opposite side of the road saw my unusual car approaching and then ran straight towards the central reservation of the road holding one arm in the air as I passed. It wasn’t immediately apparent that he was a policeman because he was dressed completely in black or indeed that he was might have been trying to flag me down, so I didn’t stop actually thinking it might be one of the loons that routinely run across motorways down here.

As soon as I had passed however I saw him sprinting back the other way to the Police bike I had not seen previously, and was pretty certain it wouldn’t be long before I got my collar felt. Sure enough about two minutes later I am pulled over. I hadn’t been doing anything wrong in the first place so suspected that I was just being hailed because of the unusual car and California plates, with the strong suspicion it was just an attempt to get money out of me. Of course seconds later he is threatening me with all kinds of fines and tickets for speeding and failing to stop. I feigned ignorance on seeing him because it had been the most ridiculous dash across two lanes of motorway and he had barely got to the central reservation by the time I had passed him, and I point blank refused to accept that I was speeding because I wasn’t (I say again unusually) Having got this far without paying any bribes I refused to bite and stood my ground, despites repeated threats af massive fines and tickets. Sure enough he didnt have anything on me so eventually I was allowed to leave after about 10 minutes of not so subtle persuasion that a bribe might be the way forward. 

I pushed on all the more mindful of my speed and arrived on the outskirts of Panama City at rush hour, however genuinely seemed to be the only person travelling into town at this time, with everybody else going the other way home from work.

I crossed the Bridge of the Americas over the entrance to the Panama Canal and could immediately see the towering buildings of the city.

After all the jungles, deserts and rainforests I have seen since leaving the USA the city’s skyline is a surprisingly pretty sight. The traffic jams, not so much!

As usual I have sorted out a local phone for my time in Panama.

It is particularly important here so I can readily receive calls about selling the little green surf machine, but also because people will more willingly call a local number too.

I don’t know for sure but suspect I will have an aministrative nightmare ahead of me so a phone I can rely on is a must.

As ever if anybody wishes to get in touchuse this number until further notice +507-6244-2994.

After pushing the envelope to the very edge of my own comfort zone and probably some way past it at the triple overhead waves of the point, I was looking for something considerably less gnarly the following day, so chose the wide expanse of sand about a kilometer east along the bay.

It was just a short stroll from the hostel and I had been told it would work best at mid tide so went there after watching the nutters take on more madness at the point over high tide first thing in the morning.

I spotted a channel to paddle out into straightway and was out back in no time at all. However because I had left it late after watching the surfers the convections currents had already kicked in making the water surface really choppy.

There was still a 10 foot swell passing through so this made catching the waves rather unpredictable and quite difficult. On this one I am sort of taking the drop on I had to paddle so early to be sure of catching the wave that I passed a point of no return, to then have no choice but try and land the drop on the wave closing out behind me. 

Here is not a picture of me because I am still in the process of trying to make my way back to the surface of the water, which I should add is a good 20 seconds after I have spectacularly been swallowed by it!

The surfers amongst you may know the sensation of swimming hard towards the surface only to discover that you were in fact swimming down instead due to being so disorientated by your wipeout. This does mean that you can get a solid push off the bottom if the water is not moving too much, unlike my own situation where with each stroke you make upwards you make very little progress due to all the air in the water. 

However it eventually gets brighter in the water and you surface grab hold of your board and get on it just in time for the next one to hit you and throw you around like a rag doll.

As you can see here I am unaware that I am about to be eating sand again and probably just getting some air in my lungs.

Other times you do see them coming, but as you can see that is not necessarily a good thing either. No matter what I do from here I am getting hammered.

At least I caught something today, but so far I am just getting my backside kicked since arriving in Panama.

Maybe there will be something less extreme as I head towards the city?

Later in my stay at Surfers Paradise I discovered that there had been a photographer taking pictures from the cliffs during my scary session at the point, who got this shot of the line up.

I am the furthest left in this picture and like everybody else I am keeping one eye on the wave trying to decide whether to go for it, whether to get as far out of its way as possible, or just hoping that it doesn’t crash down before it gets to you, all the while wondering if the one behind is even bigger.

Try to factor into your thinking that this is the bathymetry that the wave is breaking over, barely over and not at all over at times.

Also that the above shot was taken from an elevated position, so it loses some of the scale of the wave.

Trust me when I say you lost nothing of the scale from sea level. I told you it was huge!

Without doubt the biggest and scariest waves I have been out in so far on this trip.

I have found this picture which says it all.

Enjoy!

I was up before dawn and into the water at first light to take advantage of the high tide and hopefully put enough water between me and the rocks beneath. I was wearing my booties again to ensure I had no issues getting out across any of the sharp surfaces beneath the water. The paddle out was surprisingly easy because you can paddle around the peeling section of the waves, but it was very long because the point is about 1km out to sea. After about fifteen or twenty minutes of paddling I was out into the set waves which were huge. By huge I really do mean HUGE!

A massive swell has arrived and here were only five guys out when I joined them in the line-up. Acutely aware of all the rocks that I had seen at low tide the day before, this was not a wave I wanted to get wrong. The faces on the waves were at least double overhead but seemed to be peeling beautifully to the right off the point which should favour my natural foot surfing. However as ever there was always a rogue set that would roll through from time to time. It would break much further out and if you were caught inside by the head high plus wall of white water of the first one, the rest of the set would also hit you and send you careering in towards the inside section and all the rocks that are showing proud of the water there. The result of this was everybody would hang slightly wide to the left of the peak and hope to catch one of the bigger set waves.

Like everybody else I did this and early on I very nearly bagged a beauty although as I got to my feet and realised I was pointing vertically down and the bottom was a very, very long way from the top I got caught by the lip and went straight over the falls. It wasn’t as bad as I had feared, but the whole time you are under the water you are wondering if you are just about to get clouted by the rocks that, unlike Pavones where they were akin to smooth cobblestones, are made of very sharp volcanic rock which is in lumps as big as cars and certainly will not take any prisoners!

Being honest I wasn’t enjoying myself as the sea kept exploding on rocks all around me and didn’t have the best time out there today. Although I had a few chances for waves early on in my session that I regret not taking, I actually blanked. I would keep thinking that a mountain of water was about to drop on top of me, and erring on the side of caution would keep scratching away towards the horizon to try and stay outside of the broken wave and white water, only to realise too late that I had probably been in a great spot to bag it. After I had been in the water for a couple of hours, with the tide dropping all the time, there were more and more areas of boiling water on the faces of waves where the rocks were clearly not very far below the surface. I quite like my face and my teeth the way they are and every time I would point the board down the face of the waves and see water boiling in front of me I would back off.

I hate nothing more than blanking and would usually stay out to at least catch something, but I was keen to get out before the water got so shallow that all the rocks would be in view almost guaranteeing a ding to the board or me, so got in front of one of the broken waves and belly boarded in having only got about a dozen jellyfish stings to show for my morning’s work.

However given that during the session I saw four snapped boards, one broken leash resulting in a very lovely board looking like somebody had test driven a sledgehammer on it, and one guy with a concussion in the water who had lost his board and after being rescued by his buddy was looking very pale as he clung on to the front of their board, I consider myself to have got off rather lightly. I could go back in the water here later today or tomorrow, but don’t think I will. I am not adverse to a bit of risk but I can hold my hands up and say that this break is a bit too gnarly for me.

Not the city in Australia but the Inn in Santa Catalina. It was dark when I arrived but this is what greeted me from the door of my room when I woke up this morning. There is an international crew staying here and like Pavones it seems that quite a few people are flying in based on the forecast (http://magicseaweed.com/Santa-Catalina-La-Punta-Surf-Report/448/ ). There were quite a few in the water this morning so I hope it is not too bad while I am here. I really don’t like crowds in the water. I just want to be out with a few friendly faces.

However I am not going in today because my reserves are always low after a border crossing and I have more pressing issues with doing stuff to help sell the car which the project manager in me knows I must get onto in order to sell the car as quickly as possible in Panama City. That of course assumes that I can get online and usual my computer, the wifi or both are playing up so you are probably reading this one as part of the latest batch of blog updates that I copy paste from my computer onto the web as soon as I get a connection. Apologies for that but there is not much I can do about it. Trust me I have tried!

Rather worryingly staying out today means I have now seen what is underneath these double overhead waves before going in, because all the rocks you see here were very visible at low tide. The tidal range is quite big and particularly so at the moment so there should be enough water underneath me for it not to be an issue when I am surfing. At least I hope so! It will certainly be a paddle out and back in where I will have to keep my wits about me.