We travelled the coast south, from one Brazilian town to another. After the inspiring events at Ilha do Mel, not only she wanted to get into the water, I also wondered about a board to ride. Our minds shifted from ‘let’s see what we can get in this town’ to ‘let’s go to the beach to see the waves’. This is a huge step, a step in a surfer life, I thought.

From these days we never rested to hasten to the water front. Sometimes it was pure disappointment, a flat sea, a nothing, a fart of the sea birds. This is the Atlantic Ocean, I argued, how can this be? We wondered, and didn’t understand anything.

Frustration grew as we continued our journey and still never made it into the waves. Is this destiny? Are we looking at the wrong spots? Or just bad luck? No. We needed some patience, and when we reached the Urguayan border at Chuy, the sea was a beast. Big waves crashed one into an other, grumbling, cracking in a wild scene and strong winds. They grew in a second to 2 meter height, smashing all their volume right immediately and vertically into the struck sand.

The scene was so impressive that we forgot about surfing completely. We took a sheltered seat in the dunes and followed the spectacle. It was a secure place in a bizzare and somehow brutal show, and for us a surf would have been a suizide mission. Instead we left the place after an hour and headed back to the bus stop. On the way we discovered our favourite restaurant for the next days and ordered a typical plate of milanesa, for 2 bucs. That was just fair for the day and we returned despite the wild sea for several days to the beach.

Our journey continued, and the day would come when we both can hire our first surf boards for more than standing at the beach. We entered now Uruguay with big hopes.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 28th, 2006 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Surf & travel stories remembered. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.