The forecast was promising, almost 1.5m and a chance for clean conditions. Waves growing in the evening of the first day and then with another push in the morning of the next day. So a two day mission. I packed my van and drove south. Waves picked up around 3pm, the surf was so so…it was surfable which means you could actually surf and do turns, not just tiptoe along the wave, but it was kind of blown out. It was weird as it looked bigger from outside than it was once you were in the water. It’s usually the other way around.
Next morning it was clean, but smaller even thought it should have been bigger. Now, clean lines coming in from the south is not something to bitch about and there were some really nice walls going right, but still it was a bit of a letdown. Even the ship data showed live wave height between 1.8 and 2m, but waves on the spot were small. Cloudy morning turned into sunny afternoon and it was nice.
Last surf was two days later. Super strong bora wind was in the forecast, so strong that the traffic over the bridge was limited. Through the night you could hear the wind howling around the corners of houses and when I woke up in the morning, the sea was surprisingly calm. I mean, not calm, but not wavy as much as all the wind sounds would have you believe. The webcam for the spot looked okay, but not that special. So I hurried to the spot before it went flat. I ran to the beach to check the waves, they didn’t look that big but I did see a really steep wall going all the way from the platform to the beach. This almost never happens. Usually you have a steep takeoff and some wall, then the waves get mellow and maybe you can hope for some wall when you hit the shorebreak.
So I ran back to the car to suit up and get my board and I paddled out. Damn. That was a paddle. The period of these waves is so small that you are literally just making duckdives one after another. You have no time to paddle in between. Usually the waves are weak and you can just paddle into and over the whitewater and then do a couple of duckdives and you are out. But this time every wave was a washing machine. When I got to the lineup I was hot. Water was 12C and air maybe 4C and I was hot. Then the sets arrived. You could see the sets on the outside and again, this doesn’t happen often, the set on the outside came all the way in and it was a set to surf. Lots of time you see waves on the outside and then nothing. I let the first one go, the second one cleaned up nicely and I paddled. Damn, that was one of the sickest walls that I got here. Ever?! Got three more sets, did a couple of hacks before Andrej got in. I don’t remember when the waves had so much wall and power, like ever. One of the best sessions on this spot for me. It wasn’t super clean so from the outside it didn’t look that epic, it wasn’t blown out, but something in between. But the waves were S I C K!
NOA 17. & 18.1.2024, 20km spot 20.1.2024