Around The World In 80 Waves

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 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.

After giving up on the island surf camp I only had $8 in my wallet, but did have more than half a tank of fuel. I had no means of communicating with anybody and figured I had about an hour or two of daylight left, although I couldn’t be sure on that because the time zone had changed once more as I crossed into this latest country. I did have a map because I am still that much of a boy scout and figured I could probably figure things out, despite the government’s lack of spending on road signs in Panama.

I pushed on and cannot tell you how delighted I was to find a cash point in a town called Sona, which I will be backtracking though later this week. Dollars are used in Panama so I got a stash out because I didn’t know if I would be able to get anymore in Santa Catalina (you can’t by the way) and I would have to pay for a hotel, food, etc whilst there. Having been caught out by this in Pavones I didn’t want the same issues.

From Sona it was actually quite easy to find Santa Catalina.

I also must compliment Panama on the road surfaces I have experienced so far.

They are better than most in Britain! Two lanes of smooth blacktop.

As an aside here I will recommend ‘Two Lane Blacktop’ which is a cult car movie which starred Dennis Wilson.

Dennis was The Beach Boys’ drummer who was the only one of them who could actually surf.

I rolled into town just after the sun had set and found a café on the shore of the town’s sheltered bay to cool down with a few cold beers as well as a fish supper. I didn’t stay there long though because it was already dark and I wanted to get a place to stay. That task proved more difficult than I was expecting simply because nobody was at home or answering the door. It turned out well though because I have found a great place overlooking the best break in the area, and have secured a private room for three days.

After my fun session in the morning I said my goodbyes and jumped in the car and then bumped my way along the supposedly good road out of Pavones. It was better, but was far from great, with most of it an uphill climb on barely flattened rocks. However it eventually got me to actual tarmac and I could stop gritting my teeth over every bump and relax a bit.

From there it was very quick to the Panamanian border although I had the usual stresses in the heat upon arrival. People running in front of the car, chasing me down the road so they could try and ambush me to offer their help, change my money, etc. all of which would be done for a fee. Sooner or later they always get the message but it is an additional stress and gets my back up straight away, when I already don’t have clue where to go, what paperwork is necessary, how much money the crossing will cost, to who I need to speak to, etc. My lack of Spanish doesn’t do me any favours either! Two hours of suffering in the heat with an additional frustration getting across this border, because they all disappeared for an hour to go to lunch, but I am in Panama and hopefully won’t be doing anything like that again on this trip.

I was hoping to stay at the Morro Negrito Surf Camp (www.morronegrito.travel ) which is a bit like Tracey Island, but for surfers. I had contacted them before I left Costa Rica enquiring about a room and what I might do with my car whilst I was on the island and got this response: ‘We have availability and a safe place to keep your car. Please drive to this location: http://goo.gl/maps/4w3fz .‘ Now that seems pretty helpful but if you follow the link it just produces a line on a satellite image, which helps a bit, but is far from a great navigational aid and given they were expecting nearly £100 a night to stay there I thought at the time it was a bit shoddy service. Of course as soon as I cross the border into Panama my mobile phone stops working altogether and I can’t even see the line on the satellite picture or ring him to try and get nearer.

Panama is like the 51^st state of the USA so I was able to pull into a KFC and use their free wi-fi which got me as far as again seeing the line on my mobile phone (my laptop is really throwing its dolly out of the pram about connecting to anything now!) I tried to leave that image on my screen, but once off the main road and in the middle of nowhere halfway along a mountain road, I inadvertently pressed the back-up button and it was gone forever.

I will admit there was a wee bit of ranting in the car at this stage, but afterwards I had a look at the map and decided to push on to Santa Catalina where I was going to head for next anyway.

Time to push on once more, and this time I am heading into the last country of my Central American oddysey.

I have been pushing to get to Panama to allow myself some time to offload the car, send various things back home or onwards for collection later in my travels.

Originally I was going to put the car on a boat from here to Colombia, but due to time constraints there would be far too much driving involved across the north west of South America with nowhere near enough time for surfing along the way.

You cannot get past the Darien Gap you can see on the right of this picture because there are no roads linking North and South America, and FARC guerillas, drug operations and all kinds of other serious threats to my health lurk along whatever tracks there are in the region. Driving through simply isn’t an option.

However there are still some great surf spots between the border with Costa Rica and the capital Panama City and I may even have the chance to surf on the Caribbean side while I wait to offload the car because the land is so narrow at this point and can easily be navigated in the car. They get ocean liners through the middle of the country so the bug shouldn’t be a problem!

I will let you know how bad getting into this final county was.

I have sorted out a new phone number for the next few weeks.

If you need to call or text me please use +502-5249-5779 until further notice.