Friday, March 21: More Tres Palmas

Okey and dokey, It’s another day in paradise.

Up at 7:15, cuppa, and walk out on the front side of the house, give Harley a scratch behind the ear, and stand up on the little wall and give it a look.

Still waves, but it’s starting to look ‘normal’ again. It’s not cycloptic anymore.

I think.

Rob comes out and we discuss what’s going on down in the distant ocean below us.

Swell almost looks like it’s not as north as it was before, which is weird, at least to me.

Whether that’s true or not remains to be seen when I head down there and give things a proper look. The kludge-job I did on my fin seems to have set up overnight, so maybe I’ll get to ride that board today. We’ll see.

Maria's grinder

Ok, in the car with the cameras, and off we go.

First stop, Maria’s.

Still pretty damn big. Too big to deal with, in fact. But I spy a couple of intrepid guys headed for the outside, even as nasty oversize boomers break disorganizedly across the reef.

This should be interesting.

I take out the camera and start getting shots.

Tres in the distance from Maria's

Eye of the storm

Off in the distance, at Tres, you can see a boat parked and black dots in the water.

So ok, it’s bigger than I though it was.

In front of me, the two paddlers luck in to a combination of impossibly long lull and fortuitously placed rip current, and promptly find themselves sitting all the way outside.

Pistons, grinding right along

You'd never imagine what the waves		were really like, to judge from this

The peak at Pistons is grotesquely too large, and despite the fact that it occasionally throws insanely hollow grinding peelers both left and right, it’s just not to be trusted. For every wave that breaks makeably, ten or more drop sections, close out, or are promptly followed by impossible walls of whitewater that would bounce you almost all the way back to the beach.

Perfection		left

So I depart without waiting around to see what befalls the two lonesome figures sitting all by themselves in the Lineup at Maria’s.

Tres is still rocking and rolling, and the scene is still on.

People all over the place.

Drive right past it and go have a look at Little Malibu, yet again.

This is getting to be repetitious.

Board rescue from the rip

And, once again, the wave is a jumble of double-ups, debris, and danger.

But this time there’s a few boogie boarders down at the bitter end of things, getting short chunked-out rides into the deep water. Doesn’t look very satisfying in the slightest.

Outside, toward the balneario, I spot a guy paddling back in, loose surfboard in tow.

Somebody at Tres lost their board and it headed downcoast and would have kept right on heading downcoast all the way to fucking Venezuela or the South Pole, or maybe even farther, had someone not taken the trouble to go and get it.

I walk over to the other side, and eyeball Tres, steaming off in the far distance.

Yeah, it’s still breaking, and the longer I look at it, the larger it seems to be.

Ye gods, will this swell never go down?

Distant thunder

I haven’t caught anything except that teency Little Malibu session on the first day, and a game-ending cleanup wave on the head, the day after.

Not much of a surf trip, and yet I’m strangely unconcerned with it all.

I think I came down here more to learn something about myself than to catch waves, and last Wednesday, I learned plenty. So it’s ok. Excellent, even.

I wanted to see Tres Palmas thunder, and by golly that’s what I’ve gotten.

So I’m happy as a little clam.

I guess it’s sort of like going somewhere to watch a total eclipse of the sun. There’s a whole subculture of people who spend great gobs of money and fly to batshit-weird corners of the globe, just to stand directly in the shadow of the moon for mere minutes, and nobody gets to ride anything while that’s happening. I did it myself back in July of ’91, in San Jose del Cabo, Mexico, so I have an idea of where those guys are coming from. And I’m coming from a very similar place, headed down here to get a look at things when the ocean really gets up and GOES.

This wave doesn't look very big, does it?

Meanwhile, Tres continues to fume, and I start shooting from way down here, looking right into the mouth of things up that way.

Stand-up paddlers have entered the fray, and are getting waves right along with everyone else.

As I shoot, here comes a guy in a black rashguard, trotting down the beach. I inquire, and it turns out that he’s the owner of the board that’s being ferried back from oblivion out past the boats parked in the deep spot.

Mission accomplished

How nice.

He trots on down the beach and I keep shooting.

After a while, him and his buddy who took the time and trouble to rescue the board both come walking back up the beach, surfboards happily nestled under their arms, headed toward Tres.

Very nice. A story with a happy ending. Gotta like that.

I finally wrap things up, and head on back. But on the way, I decide to head down to Steps Beach, and get another nice close look at things on a sizeable day, and this time, photograph it too.

Drive down the car-choked road, and miraculously find a spot almost at the very end.

Steps Beach high-water muck-pit

Let's go swimming!

Between the end of the road and the beach, the ocean has come up over the dune and created a stinking miasma of sludge, cowshit, coconuts, and god knows what else, that blocks the way to the sea's coastal edge.

I prudently take the side path to the north, and go around all that.

Outside, it’s banging right along, still triple overhead. Once in a while, even larger.

Unridden aqua perfection

Watching

Nice and clean, brushed up by an offshore breeze that’s not too strong.

The swell hasn’t gone back around more west as I had earlier surmised from the perspective of Tiki Rob’s front yard, and is still just as north as hell, even more so perhaps.

But the wave has a bit of a wall to it, and some of the rides look sweet.

The soups, however, are pushing like demons down the coast. Waves will break and roll for a while, and while that’s happening, the soup will gather itself together, expand, and then start attempting to outrun the whole wave, going north to south. The result is waves with shoulders that wind up just smothered in these large powerful soups that have so much push and speed that they’re getting farther out on the shoulder of the wave down at the bottom than they are up at the top. This is causing no end of trouble for the people riding, who think they’re safely out on the fat of the shoulder but then suddenly get swallowed from below and behind by those alarmingly powerful soups.

The big one that got away

I suppose it has to be seen to be properly appreciated.

Meanwhile....drifting into the scene from somewhere over by dogmans....

I take a load of short-lens vicinity shots, and then decide to head back up to the road where the elevation gives a much better view of things.

Find a parking spot and back in business.

The water is nice and clear, the wind is offshore, and the waves are still here with size.

Late entry		Shallow and late on the duckdive, not good

This is what it's all about

Nicely done drop, under pressure

A couple of sets are quite large, but I’m giving up on trying to call the size. Yes, it IS smaller than yesterday, but no, it’s not small by anybody’s definition of the word. Have a look at the pictures and then you tell me, how ‘bout?

The tow-in guys are absent, and it’s all paddlers and stand-up paddlers.

I watch an SUP guy grab one of the big ones and then just completely get snowballed by the soup down at the bottom where he should have been fine and dandy.

Those damn soups are a bitch, I’ve decided.

An hour or two of this, whatta ya say we head on back?

Full sequence from above		Two up, one down		Full sequence from above

At 2pm, Rob heads off to the Punta Mar bakery, to do some signage over the entrance door, and I have the place to myself. Just me and the dogs.

SUP on a nice one

Full sequence from above		SUP swallowed by the soup

Unridden bomb perfection		One last unridden bomb

I've been wanting to write, and now’s my chance. Set the chair up in the back yard, but it starts to rain, so I move it under the back porch awning, and for the next couple of hours it’s writer heaven as the soothing rain falls, and there’s no one around to interrupt my thoughts as I make the second pass through the Wednesday story, fleshing out the scaffolding I’d hastily dashed off that night.

Things flow, and I couldn’t possibly be happier.

I’m making the most of it, still sitting here, still writing, and still drinking deeply of it.

Ahhhhh.