Yet another day of strong wind and big choppy all over the place waves.

Shot of the day goes to Alex Mussolini who is back in Maui after a few years.
He got out of the water visibly frustrated and said:"my timing is so bad!"
What you guys think?






Chronological order.
Next one shows what actually was my main issue. I chose to stay away from the mast high ones, because I would have been out of control at that high speed on the chop. Usually it's a good policy, since I can actually be more a agressive on a smaller head to logo high wave. But this day there was so much white water around. In this case, Lalo is on a big one and he just misses the soup.
I was hitting the soup all the times. And in the soup I had no grip whatsover.

Lalo

even King Robby had moment of out of controlness

but he had moments of sovereignty too

Sean O. showed up

there were some big ones

wish all my photos would come out so crisp and clear like this one. Oh yeah, wish I could hit the lip like Keith too

Mark. I did a bit of cropping on the camera itself on this one. I like that feature.

My sessions.

I knew exactly that it was going to be very hard for me to have fun in those conditions, but I chose to go out anyway... I'm not really sure why actually.
Sometimes I just feel like I need to deserve my lunch... and I bloody well did, considering I did my longest swim for the gear ever!
Here's how it went.

I lost the gear on a big one all the way outside. Immediately lost sight of the board, so I swam straight in towards the beach. So far, no big deal.... there was so much water moving in that that wasn't particularly hard.
When I got closer to the shore I was just upwind of the rocks and the people on the cliff were signaling that the board was downwind towards Lanes.
"Great" I thought, "it didn't go on the rocks!"
So I started swimming parallel to the rocks with my classic backstroke style.

I swim backstroke for two reasons:
1) it's a lot easier for me to breath hence it's less fatiguing
2) when I'm in the middle of the waves, it's easier to spot the sailors that are riding and yell at them in case they didn't see me. This saved my ass at least a couple of times.
But the backstroke does have a fairly big downside: you don't see where you're going! Usually no big deal, you just have to periodically check.

So anyway, as I was saying, I was swimming towards Lanes when all of a sudden.. thump! I banged into a rock.
"Oh shit, I'm swimming between the rocks!"
At that point I clearly abandoned the backstroke and tried to swim my way out and dive under the waves as hard as I could... a relatively easy task compared to swimming with your gear, but nonetheless the stronger swimming pace took a bit of a tall though.

Next I was swimming across the rip current of the channel between Hookipa and Lanes (I still couldn't see the board, but from the hill they were telling me it was downwind at Lanes).
That was another gnarly part.
I started the crossing close to the rocks, got pushed quite a bit out and ended it in the middle of the waves at Lanes. That meant having to dive under them and that took the last bit of breath I still had.

Once I was on the inside at Lanes, I finally spotted the board downwind. At that point I took it very easy (I had to... I was completely out of breath) and it took me forever to get to the board.
Needless to say, I sailed back to Hookipa and went in right away.
"Where's my f-ing lunch!!!"

From 5.30 to 6.30 when the wind finally died down a bit, I went out again down the coast and that was about 10,000 times more fun. Shoulda saved my energies...

Today more of the same.