The post starts with some photos from Uluwatu. Time stamps says July 3th.
Hopefully they were friends. And hopefully they still are.
Guy with the white helmet dominated the session getting barreled pretty much each wave he caught.
Beautifully shaped peak.
This kid was ripping the race track.
Lovely lady nose ride.
Best wave of the photo shoot, deserves a 3 shots sequences.
Too bad the guy in front of him was not a water photographer.
Barrel kinda squeezed on him at the end, he completely disappeared and came out clean.
This clip is either from the same day or the days before. I spent two nights on the Bukit in fact. Got some really good conditions. Check out the colors.
Couple of shots from the other clips. You might have seen this one already if you follow me on Facebook.
The bottom turn is the only angle where a wave can eventually look bigger in a gopro wide angle shot. The reason is that if you go kind of deep in the flat, that distance can be mistaken to be part of the wave too.
Someone thought this wave was DOH, but it wasn't. Instead it was only 2-3 feet overhead.
This other one looks definitely smaller, but it was still overhead.
But who cares about the size, look at the shape and the colors and the texture. In other words, look at the perfection. Yes, I did catch that one. Uncontested, as you can see.
After that I was supposed to fly to my favorite wave in the whole world (which I call UNS: UnNameable Spot) on Saturday the 4th and spend there a long amount of days.
I would have left my passport with a document agency so that they could take care of renewing the 30 days tourist visa when the expiration was approaching (like I did all the past years), but when I called them up, they told me that the rules changed and this year I needed to personally go to the immigration office at least one day to take photos and fingerprints.
Of course I found that out on the afternoon of the day before (Friday) and there was no way I could pull that off.
By paying the fair "expedite" fee, they managed to set an appointment for me on Monday, so after having spent a decent amount of money for moving the flights, I managed to leave on Tuesday the 7th, still in time to catch a 4-5 feet swell forecasted for Thursday the 9th.
The clip below is from the morning of that day when the swell was still well on its way up.
Unfortunately, right after that session, I got sick with the usual sore throat turning into cold with fever and muscle pain that catches me every single year in Indo.
Nothing tropical, no Dengue or stuff like that, no Bali belly either, just a damn simple cold that always gets me when the waves are good.
This time it only lasted a couple of days, just in time for the swell to hit (everybody was pretty stoked about the quality of the rides).
"Oh well, could be worse", I said to myself, "last year it lasted 5 days!".
After that we had a whole week of very marginal conditions. This is probably the surf spot in Indo that gets the least amount of energy and, even though I still surfed each single day, the waves were knee to thigh high and sometimes with a strong offshore wind.
Surfing waves that small, IMO, is far more difficult than surfing bigger ones, so I managed to have fun because of the challenge. Nonetheless, I still had the appetite for something bigger generated by that sweet one session with overhead waves.
The week after the small spell had a solid head high forecast, so I just hung on and did not complain much.
The head high waves arrived, and it was really fun until... I got bloody sick again!
Same exact thing. That never happens to me in Maui, so I'm blaming the combination of:
- change of food (the immune system might suffer from the change of nutrients)
- more chances to get in touch with germs (passing plates and stuff around at the surf camps).
Here's a couple of shots of the last days when I was still well.
Beautiful sunrise with longboarder taking off down the line.
Doesn't really render how perfect this wave is.
Towards the end of the head high week, I started feeling better, but the forecast for the next week was poor again, so I decided to come back to Bali, from where I'm posting this.
I still have almost a month to go, so plenty more action to come.
I'm actually thinking to go to Sumbawa (Lakey Peak area) on Thursday the 30th. I've never been there and I like to squeeze a new place in each Indo trip I take.
One way ticket is only 50 bucks (+15 for the board bag), it's so damn easy to travel in this country.
Here's how the surfline forecast looks like: fun.
As you probably guessed, other than that huge swell at the beginning, it has been a fairly average season for Indonesia so far. Nothing like last year.
Still, if it wasn't for those damn colds, I would have surfed every day, so no complains whatsoever.
So far I've also been able to escape the closures of the Bali airport due to the eruption of Mount Raung in Sumatra. Here's a picture of it taken on yesterday's plane back to Bali.
And, as soon as I'm finishing this, I just felt a mild earthquake that made the walls shake a bit. Wonder if the things are related... will find out later online I guess.
Fevers, eruptions, earthquakes, flat spells. Doesn't matter. A trip to Indo is a trip to Indo and I'm loving it.
PS. Here's a bunch of extra photos from the UNS.
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