Surfing is a pretty easy thing to do once you know how to do it. Usually to learn surfing you start out not standing up at all, just laying on the board and working on how to catch waves. Once you get better at that you start working on turning and maybe getting up on your knees occasionally. The final step is to actually stand up on a wave. The first time I ever caught a wave and actually stood up on it was in Jacksonville, Florida and it was really exciting, because I had never done anything like that before. The next opportunity I had to go surfing was in South Padre Island, and I definitely got better there. All of this leads up to now, we are in Puerto Rico, and there are surfing spots everywhere, although the conditions are quite a bit different than I am used to.
The first place we went surfing was Jobos beach, pronounced like hobos. It is so close that we walk to it. Technically as soon as we hit sand we are there, but the safe area with better surf waves is a bit further. The beach has a kind of funny shape, it is sort of enclosed by a crescent moon of rock. Because of the way it is shaped there is a strong current that functions sort of like a lazy river. Also, because of how the waves come at the beach most of them swivel around the point, so the closer to the point you are the smaller the wave is, and it was pretty difficult to find the right spot where we wouldn’t get swept away by a big wave, but we could also still catch them. Most of the people at Jobos were quite a bit better than me or dad, so for the most part we tried to stay away from them so we wouldn’t get in their way.
At the other beach we went to we did not have that problem. The beach was called Wilderness beach, and it was quite a bit bigger and better than Jobos, although getting out and in was much more treacherous because there was only about a five foot area of sand, everywhere else had sharp rocks that we did not want to step on. Despite this, I definitely prefer Wilderness over Jobos, for the simple reason that the waves are much better. While there I was also able to significantly improve my surfing ability, and I was able to get one of my better waves thanks to Mr. Paul, one of my dad’s friends, who was with us at the time. The main reason we didn’t have the problem of needing to stay out of peoples way was because the waves were so much more spread out, so we weren’t as clumped together. Another cool thing about Wilderness was the ruins on the drive down to it. There were two buildings, a historic lighthouse, and a place lovingly referred to as the sh#t house. We think that it used to be an outhouse and that is why it is called that, but we don’t know for sure. The funniest thing that has happened to me so far on this trip actually happened here. I was paddling back out from catching a wave, and I was getting smashed by a whole bunch of waves that were coming in. I managed to break through them, but then I noticed that sometime during that the front of my swim trunks broke open. Needless to say I quickly swam back in and covered myself with my poncho. We left the beach quite quickly after that happened. Two days later I have two more pairs of board shorts, although I haven’t gone surfing again since, but I definitely will. So look forward to my future updates, goodbye and see you later!
Wow! Such exciting surfing adventures!