So what’s the bright side? Photo: Philip Kammerer//Unsplash
Surfers glamorize scoring good waves in foreign places. There’s an endless stream of YouTube vlog content where surfers — professional and recreational alike — wake up at five in the morning, sip a coffee, and shuffle outside to reveal an exotic location. Before you know it, they’re getting barreled in the sun.
There’s a bit more guts behind the glory. Scoring on the road takes research, logistics, and of course a bit of luck. But the less seductive side of a road trip is less covered — getting skunked, or when there’s no waves.
Here’s a story of me and a few buddies when we got properly skunked on the road.
I was recently on a work trip in the Middle East. Our team was on a four-day assignment in a small coastal town near the Gulf of Oman. The plan was to work on the first day that we arrived, take two days off in between, and finish the job on the last day before we had to split.
We drank some beers on the first night and made plans for the off days. We settled on visiting the nearest Wadi — a beautiful oasis in the desert where you can jump off cliffs into the crystal clear water and swim up a lazy river towards the waterfall’s source. Then my buddy halted the conversation. He passed around his phone and showed us the Surfline report. There was a good chance of a storm hitting the region and producing decent-sized surf. We’d never seen waves in the region before, and didn’t get our hopes up, so we decided to play it by ear.
When we woke up in the morning and looked out the window of our hotel, it was on. Five-to-seven-foot walls poured into the beach. Our surfer brains turned on, and the froth began. The beach out front of the hotel was wind blown junk and walled out, but there was a protected cove about an hour down the coast that we found on Google Maps. We drove down to scope it out, and when we arrived, shapely chest-high rights peeled down the point. We mind-surfed them for a few minutes, running down the line and hitting the punchy end section. Good waves, check.
The problem was, we didn’t have boards. The area was not exactly a surf hub. We combed the internet for stores, and found a small shop in town that had pictures of boards on its website. We drove an hour back to the shop, ready to buy anything that could float. When we arrived, the shop was desolate, emptied out. The owner said they were going out of business, and were out of boards. When we asked the man if he knew anyone else in the area with boards, he just shrugged.
After another hour of internet searching turned up nothing, we were ready to give up. Then I remembered that I had a buddy who surfed out here a few years ago. When I hit him up, he sent me a contact for a guy named Jamal, and told me that he was the only guy in town with boards. I called Jamal up, and our luck began to turn. Jamal had three short boards, and was kind enough to let us borrow them. He got off work at five, and we planned to meet then. We had to wait to surf until the next day, but we had high hopes that the storm would clean up and shell out some fun waves.
When Jamal pulled the boards out of his garage, we got amped. There were three mint thrusters: a 6 ‘1″ …Lost, a 5’ 11″ CI Neck Beard, and a beautiful 6 ‘0″ made by an unknown shaper from New Zealand. Boards, check.
Jamal said that the point break we scoped was the place to go, and wished us the best of luck. He said we could surf all day, and drop the boards off at night. We drive home, feeling like a bunch of kids on Christmas Eve. We stopped by the harbor near the hotel and watched the waves come crashing in over the edge of the sea wall, spraying long wisps of water onto our faces in the cool spring night. At dawn, it would be on.
That morning, armed with a car full of boards and enough stoke to light a fire, we set off for the cove. We’d done everything right — spotted the swell, collected the boards, and showed up at the right spot — or so we thought. It was flat as a pancake. The swell had come and gone overnight. Still in denial, we manically drove up and down the coast for a few hours to see if some nook or cranny was still rideable. But surfing was not in the cards — we’d been skunked. Vibes and tempo were at an all time low.
We tucked our tails between our legs, and took the long silent drive back to town. When we dropped the boards back off at Jamal’s place, he could tell we were bummed. Then he reminded us what the surfing lifestyle is all about. We stayed for a barbecue, cracked open a few cold ones, and traded surf stories. It turns out that waves in the area are fickle, and you have to jump on a swell right when you see it. Jamal’s stories of getting skunked gave us some silver lining. We didn’t score, but we made a friend in a foreign place.
Sometimes you do everything right, but lady luck walks out on you.
