To borrow a couple of football puns, it would be fair to say that surfing is a “funny old game” and “a game of two halves”. Today’s surf expedition illustrated this nicely. After yesterdays surf , Chris and I decided to give The Witterings another try today. We had studied the forecasts and all the usual pre-surf preparations, and seeing that conditions looked better today than yesterday, we headed down to the break.
When we got there we were really disappointed, blown out and tiny. Completely unsurfable. We hung around for ages, waiting with crossed fingers for it to pick up, but after around 3 hours of waiting we decided to call it quits and write off the day. Grumpily we went home, but we were philosophical about it, surfing is fickle at best – especially on this particular west Sussex break.
Trying to salvage something out of the last of the swell, a dawnie tomorrow morning was planned. Resigned to the fact that I wasn’t surfing today, I settled on my sofa, turned on the telly and looked at Magicseaweed.com to plan the morning session. One glance at the webcam changed this completely.
Bracklesham was firing!
I fired off a quick text to Chris to let him know that Brack was Going Off, grabbed my boards and wetsuit and leapt in the car. 25 minutes later I was in the car park in front of the break and pulling on a slightly damp wetsuit.
I went out at first with my NMD board. It’s a 42″ board with a crescent tail and I thought it would do the trick, but I wasn’t having much joy with it so I went back to my car and grabbed my Rob Barber Core board. this is a 41.5″ board with a bat tail and better for my body shape, weight and height (see this guide for bodyboard sizes) also the bat tail works better in bigger conditions.
The board took off like a rocket when I caught a wave, and I had some lovely, lovely rides. As the conditions were big, I was really glad I knew how to Duck Dive or I would have never have got out back and past the breaking waves.
Knackering, frustrating sometimes but always fun. My advice? get out in the water whenever possible.
