Surf!

Aloha! As promised I have been surfing this morning and it was fun. I tried to get up at a quarter past six this morning to meet Maarten at the Sydney Central bus stop at seven, but failed. This meant that we missed the bus and had to wait 15 mins for the next bus that took an agonizing long time to get us to Maroubra.

We arrived only just in time to sign the paper saying the surf school in not responsible in the case that we: would be bitten by sea creatures, would be poisoned by sea creatures, would be dragged into the sea by the rip currents, would brake bones or get hurt otherwise by being thrown on the beach by the surf, would get hurt by surfboards smashing into us, would get sick from pollution or any other nasty things. Then we had to write down who to contact in case we would get hurt and sign that we were a) able to swim at least 50 meters and b) were fit enough for at least 2 hours of surfing.


After all that was done Luke handed us our wetsuits. After we got changed we went to sit in a circle with the other 3 novice surfers. We did some introductions: who we were, where we were from, what we did, what our goals for the day were and what we could learn the other people. After that we needed to do some stretching and finally we were handed the boards. We dragged them to the sea where Luke explained the basics: get into the water, wait for the wave, paddle, stand.

We got into the water, which was nice, warm and blue. The surfing was not the grand success I had been hoping for, but still a lot of fun. Sadly I did not yet manage to stand up on the board. Every time I tried to get more than halfway up I fell off. I am gonna try again tomorrow.

Maroubra is a very nice beach. It's a long way from the city but there are also not that many people there. Especially at eight in the morning. I have told that trying to surf there is much better for my surf cred than going to Bondi, where we were last week. There were a lot of people out there doing some pretty nice surfing, while at Bondi I did not see anyone who was able to do more than just standing up and gliding for about 25 mtrs. Maroubra: surfers, Bondi: backpackers.

I have no pictures of my and the board as the camera was in the locker, but I did take some pictures afterwards, see them by clicking here.