2015 Indo trip n.2 Report 5. Three days in Uluwatu.

Tired of driving every day from Canggu, I just went for a three days stay in Uluwatu.

There's so many homestays that even in high season like now, it's never a problem to find a room. The cheapest one I found was $10 a night for a room with bed and bathroom (and absolutely nothing else!), like 300m from the entrance of the parking.

It's also fun to explore the many places for food. With the help of a knowledgeable accomplice, here's the list of the places where I found the best meals:
Breakfast: Pitaya bowl at Kelly's warung on Bingin beach
Lunch: mixed salad at the Cashew tree (there's one in Binging and one in Pecatu)
Dinner: bbq tuna steak at Jiwa Juice (owned and cheffed by a nice Spanish guy)
I should have taken photos of them, I know...

Absolutely avoid the fish bbq at the Padang Padang Breeze, unless you like heavy bbq sauces that make any fish taste the same to the point we couldn't tell which one was tuna, which one mahi mahi and which one snapper. I almost cried.
Instead, if it's a Saturday night and if you don't mind very loud Indonesian reggae, do go for the fish barbeque on the beach at Padang Padang.

Here's a few surf shots I took from the warungs on the cliff.

Occasionally, sets line up at Temples and it can be really fun.

Interesting setup for carrying a SUP board on a small bike. Not sure how it handles the side wind, the owner said it was ok.

One of the many beautiful sunsets I was lucky enough to enjoy in this long Indo trip.

Here's the dreadful gopro shot section, I have a feeling I lose half of readers when this starts.

 

My favorite of the bunch. The peak I surf can get pretty chunky.

Here's a video clip. You know you won't get away without one.



So this Saturday I leave for a one week trip to my favorite spot. I was very excited about a 5f 15s forecast, but now of course, the WW3 model has downgraded it. The reason is that the storm will have a slightly different and less favorable track.
The related swell will still be pretty big in Bali though. Too big for my tastes, so I'd rather be somewhere else anyway.
To the left below, the surfline Bali forecast calling for 10f 15s. To the right, my spot's one calling for 4.5f 15s, but surfline has been a bit generous with that spot.

The one good thing about a less than 5f forecast is that I might decide to only take the small board with me and make the trip a bit easier.
Below are the two wonderful Kazuma boards that are the core of my Indo quiver:
- 6.6x19.25x2.5 classic stepup (14" tail)
- 6.0x19.5x2.44 squirell fish (15" tail)
Despite its name, the squirell fish is not a proper fish at all. It has the same amount of tail rocker as the stepup, it likes a juicy wave and it's extremely turny. The main difference between the two boards are the length and the tail and nose widths. Yeah, tail shape too, but those are overrated IMO.
Much more drive and hold in the stepup (which I ride with Future EA), while the squirrel is much looser (also thanks to the smaller FCS K2.1).

Well, looks like I will have to put another gopro sticky mount...

 

2015 Indo trip n.2 Report 4. Uluwatu's surf contest + gopro shots + river mouth clip

Plans are made to be changed and I decided to skip the Sumbawa trip and save the money to go back to my favorite island later in the month.
I could have done both, but, as this post will show, it's not that in Bali I'm getting bored...

In fact, a lovely 5f 15s swell arrived and on July 31st I first surfed Airport left (fun, but crowded as usual) and then went to Uluwatu for a low tide session at my favorite peak.
Little I knew I would have arrived just in time for the semi finals of the qualifications for the Padang Padang contest that will happen sometimes in August (it's on when it's on).

So I leisurely ate my lunch at a well positioned warung and took a bunch of photos. So many barrels down at Race Track on a mid outgoing tide.

Same wave, different section.

A good bottom turn is key for a good top turn.

Here's the demonstration of that.

I called the size head and a half, but there were some occasional doubles. Dreamy wall.

Free surfer about to get pounded during the break before the final.

The four finalist performing the walk on the reef at ease with no shoes.

The right tide was calling for my peak, so I didn't watch the whole final. A local Uluwatu surfer won and earned the spot for the main contest. I met him on the mystical stairs and it was radiating stoke.

This is a section of the gopro shots of my session.

I'm gonna start with a sequence that illustrates how much of a kook I still am.
Despite the fact that I'm actually looking if there's someone deeper than me, I somehow failed seeing that guy.

I only saw him when I got on my feet, tried a last minute bail so that I wouldn't drop right on his head. Didn't quite succeed and you can see how close my board got to him. That's his feet. Fortunately, I didn't hit him.

After checking he was ok, I immediately apologized. He was pissed. "That was a fucking good wave!", he was yelling. And he was right.

Guilty face paddling back to the peak. I HATE doing shit like that. Next time I'm gonna turn my head a bit more to make sure no one is paddling for the wave I'm going. Never stop learning.

I'm not good at getting barreled the normal way, so I have to come up with alternative ways of doing it.

Seen my limited air drop skills, I think it was a good call not to go.

Finally I did pretty good on my last wave and this is the stoked yell of joy. It only takes one good wave to get to that place.

 

That was yesterday. 
This morning I timed the tide to perfection and hit my favorite river mouth at 7am. Nobody out. At least one hour before someone else showed up. That's how it looked from the parking lot.

An hour and a half later, the high tide was making it break way closer to the beach. Still some fun ones, but a lot more wobbly and a bit backwashy.

And this is a pretty good wave that walled up on the inside.

 

Let's end with a bit of peacefulness.

2015 Indo trip n.2 Report 3. More Uluwatu + UNS

Been offline for quite a few days, here's what happened in my trip in the meantime.

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.