23 May 2014

Weakness and Strengths

I got sick yesterday, perhaps from dirty water, but who knows. I'm on antibiotics and still feeling weak, but that didn't stop me from surfing. Of course.

Although the cam and report suggested an easy session, I picked the wrong time to paddle out and had to plow through an incoming set when I had hoped to conserve limited energy. I rode a few waves, saving the best for last, before I tuckered out.

As I left the water, I passed a young teenage girl with a bodyboard standing only knee-deep, and suggested she move away from the trench near the pier, down the beach to where the sand sloped more gradually and the waves were more amenable to her purpose. "Oh, OK," she said, "I don't really know what I'm doing." I offered to give her some tips and she accepted eagerly. Kayla told me she was visiting from Arizona, and that her father (who wasn't around) had just bought her the bodyboard.

Bodyboarding on whitewater seems so intuitively easy to me that it was both hard to explain and perplexing that anyone wouldn't get it right off the bat, but I tried to pass on what I knew. Kayla still struggled for a bit, moving only a couple of feet on a wave I bodysurfed to the shallows. Then she caught a couple to the sand herself - yeah! - and I left her to practice on her own, hoping I'd made her vacation a little more fun and perhaps provided inspiration.

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