Thursday 5 February
Making a bad call was the title of my last blog. But this time the call we made was a dandy! It's wasn't easy sitting in Los Angeles at Reg's place with my girlfriend Kate and looking at a computer trying to make a call on whether or not to head halfway around the world chasing surf while having to send her home at the same time.
But the Pacific was looking shithouse and the Atlantic was just lining up swells and my new job for Billabong is to make sure that I'm getting waves so....I'm really sorry baby, it's been a great month together travelling the coast of California but I have to go.
Luckily she is the best girlfriend ever and as always was totally supportive, so I dropped her off at the airport to fly 30 hours home and I went to the next terminal and jumped on a flight with Greg to Europe. This was exciting for me because I've never surfed the North Atlantic before and one of my passions in life is to surf new spots.
We arrived at the airport at 6am and had planned to meet our new friends Mickey,
Fergal, Tom and Pete for a surf first thing in the morning. Luckily everything
went smoothly and we found ourselves surfing 12-15ft slabs just a few hours
after getting off the plane.
This was a baptism of fire and started a week long crusade to find and surf some
of the heaviest slabs in the world in an area that is as beautiful and friendly
as any other I have been to before.
The boys looked after us like gold and the only downer of the trip was Tom dislocating his shoulder during a particularly heavy wipeout, but as we all know that's the price you sometimes pay in our line of work.
You know how sometimes you just feel a natural belonging when you go to a new place? This area was defiantly one of those, the countryside, the people and the waves all felt very familiar and homely. I guess it could be that both South Africa and this country have had a tumultuous past and have both had an amazing recovery in the past 10-15 years and that we have the same mindset. Or it could be that like South Africans they have a natural aversion to negative thinking that makes every situation fun to be involved with even if it is a bad one. Or it could just be that the weather is so similar to the Cape of storms that if you are not upbeat and positive you would slip into a nightmare of a time.
But If I am allowed one complaint it would have to be the cold....Europe in Jan/Feb is not warm and on more than one occasion we had to scrape ice off our car and break chunks off the Jet Ski before we could go surfing in the morning. And if you have ever surfed in below zero conditions you will know what it's like to drag yourself out of bed before dawn and pull on a still wet wetsuit to paddle out at a surf spot that has snow on the hill overlooking it, hell on earth that requires some expert wetsuit management...ha ha
But besides that it was an amazing trip and we scoured the coastline from north to south and found the most incredible slabs in amongst the wind and weather. To say it was a successful mission is an understatement and I'm pretty sure the fruits of our call will be seen in the pages of magazines around the world.
Oh and I almost forgot, the boys can drink to, like true Saffas!! We had a bit of a competition on our last night in town and I lost, or did I win, I can't really remember but it was howler.
Thanks guys it was a special.
And now it's back to the USA to sit out the last month of the Eddie waiting period, so stay tuned because it's now down to the wire.
See ya
Twig
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