Around The World In 80 Waves

Amarapala my friendly tuk-tuk driver turned up to collect me this morning at 5am as arranged. Sadly I had completely overslept and had to be woken up and dragged out of bed.

It didn’t take me long to grab my gear and we were soon on our way south along the coast road, pausing only to have a look at a cow which had been mown down by a bus and to enjoy this sunrise at Galle. 

The aim was to go as far as possible first thing and then work our way back up to Hikkaduwa. We stopped at Mirissa but the swell has really dropped and what little waves there were there were right on top of rocks and I already have enough scars from this trip so didn’t go in.

Instead we watched a monkey vs blackbird battle at the top of the middle tree you see in this picture. The monkey was obviously trying to steal some eggs and the birds were not happy about it, dive bombing him until he fell from the top of the tree. You can see that I had no line of sight to the base of the coconut palm so do not know how well or how badly it landed, but can tell you that it fell a very long way.

We pushed on with our wave safari and Amarapala asked around until we found this reef break in Madiya.

You can see how rocky it is on the shore and the reef continued all the way out to the breaking waves, so I donned my booties to make life easy and paddled out to join the handful already in the line up.

It was quite shallow and this caused the waves to jack up nicely as they hit the reef, but I was on my game this morning and bagged lefts and rights off the peak including this beauty.

I had a great session seeing so many turtles in the water and slaloming along the clean waves. No complaints at all in fact apart from the outrageous drop in on my wave by a German guy, who afterwards said he had seen me but decided to go anyway, then nearly landed on me when he took off. I can’t publish my response to this moronic statement because I know a few children read this blog, but I can tell you the second word of many was “off” and as a consequence of my tirade he stayed very far away from me until getting out a short while later.

I wasn’t sorry to see him go but wasn’t too far behind him, and was delighted to find that Amarapala had bought me some curried rolls for breakfast when I returned to the tuk-tuk.