what a fantastic Sunday! (part 1)

This island is magic.



I've lived here for almost 8 years now and I'm still impressed (almost shocked, actually) by its beauty and by the all it has to offer to the ocean lovers (and not).

As I wrote in the previous post, Sunday morning I didn't wake up early enough to go dawn patrol on the south shore. So I went to check Hookipa and found that even though already windy, there were head high peaks to be surfed and one guy out. Evidently the out of season south swell was big enough to be known by everyone (or everyone in Maui reads my blog...), so I guessed that everyone was on the south shore.
Michelle called for a report and we decided to paddle out, just to say:"hey, we surfed The Point with only another guy out". Actually she ended up having some good fun catching the very first waves on her brand new 6.0.
I cut my session short to save my energies for windsurfing and managed to take a pic of her. Good style, shoulders right above the board and no one else in sight!


That's the other guy. Not a bad wave to be caught without any competition at all!


At 11am I hit the water with 72l and 4.5 together with a couple of other early sailors. The first hour was super fun: I caught tons of waves before the usual crowd showed up and the wind got even stronger and gustier. I quit at 12.30 and ate my lunch with the appetite of a hungry wolf.
Two different people happened to take photos of me, but I'll publish those tomorrow.

While I received an afternoon invitation to a free Ukulele festival at the MACC, I followed the call for more ocean action and drove Makena side. As usual, the kids were challenging the impressive shore break. Some of them, very, very close to the rocks on the east end of the beach.




I love this shot. Pure fun and joy to play with your buddies. So cool! Click on it to appreciate better.








And now the surfing. These are some of the best surfing shots I've ever taken. The light was beautiful and the stiff offshore wind created a huge white spray that stood out in contrast with the black lava rocks in the background. The water color was unreal. But that's too many words, I'll let the photos speak...















Well, the photos make it look epic, but it was super crowded and the SSW direction often didn't allow to make the whole wave. So there was a massive number of people dropping in along the way and sometimes that created some hairy situations. The following clip shows a small set.


Occasionally the wave opened up better and if you were lucky no one would drop in. That's the case of the photo on the very top. That's Michelle again, "everyone's best surfing buddy" as Juan once defined her.
Here's a little cronicle that wave. It was the last one of a big set, so the face was a bit frotty, but most people had already gone for (or got washed by) the previous waves. She did a big drop, a sweet bottom turn, the awesome top turn that I caught in the picture, then she trimmed the board halfway on the face of wave, got completely barreled on the final section and even came out of it.
A perfect 10 from the italian judge. Very good job sistah!
"best first day on a board ever!", she commented in a Skype chat we just had... I believe that!

Around 5pm I decided to go to Little Beach. Met a couple of friends, surfed the left over there, drank a beer, watched a great sunset, admired the fire dancers and the stars.

As I said: fantastic.