Praia do Rosa

In the morning I decided since I had a car I would travel the hour or so south along the coast to the town Garopaba I had read about in my guide book. Garopaba was supposedly "discovered" by hippies from Argentina in the 60's and has since turned into a popular surf and vacation spot.

The drive down was pleasant although I was perturbed by the fact that the steering wheel shook wildly whenever I got above 80Km/hour. When I pulled off of the BR101 and started heading toward Garopaba, I decided to first check out one of the many beaches signs were pointing to. So I traveled a long way down a dirt road finally ending up by the ocean at a place called Praia do Rosa. This was a very nice beach and there were tons of surfers out. For awhile I sat up on a cliff overlooking the southern end of the beach and watching the surfers.

The waves looked big and powerful. Now, there's always a lot of controversy among surfers when they try to describe the size of waves. Some people measure from the back of the wave, some people measure from the front (which gets you twice the height). I prefer measuring the front of the wave, since that's what you're looking at, from the trough to the crest. This gets you the highest possible height, but to me it is the more clear description. Another problem is that the waves always look smaller on shore until you paddle out into them. Judging against the height of the surfers I saw riding the waves, I'd say the sets rolling in were easily 10 feet high.  I sat up on the cliff watching these things for thirty minutes or so. They were breaking a long way out from the beach with a broad turbulent inside section in between.

I decided to walk back along the dirt road towards the small cluster of buildings that constitutes Rosa's town in order to get an idea of how far of a daily walk it would be if I lived there. It took maybe twenty minutes to reach the town along the hilly dirt road, passing mostly resort lodging and jungle along the way. The main building was the town's post office, general store, internet cafe and even had rooms for rent upstairs. While checking email, I sent one to my friend Michael Rei who was my mentor when I was first learning to surf 15 years ago on the outer banks of North Carolina. I haven't seen him since we made a surf trip to Panama together in 1999 as he lives in D.C. working as an Architectural Historian, but I was really wishing he were with me now as I considered paddling out alone into the surf at Rosa.

As I wrote in the email "i would be completely full of shit if i told you that i sat on a cliff watching those things roll in feeling anything more strongly than trepidation, but i am still considering staying here. i just sort of wish there was a better "beginners" area where i could spend a couple of weeks getting my strength up." I had come to Brazil with surfing as one of my primary goals, but this was brought on by the fact that I really hadn't surfed much at all since I moved to California. I just hate the cold water there, only managing to get out a couple of times a year; At 37 years old and having not surfed regularly in over ten years I was way out of shape and I knew it. Surfing uses muscles you just don't generally use for anything else, so it always takes me a week or so back in the water to get my strength up.

This was coupled with the fact that I hadn't paddled out into waves that big for over a decade. In fact, the last time I remember being in overhead waves was around 1990 when I went out in double overhead hurricane surf in Rodanthe, North Carolina. That day the waves were breaking far out, beyond the length of the nearby fishing pier. Only five or so people were out in the water, and we were spread far apart from each other. On the second wave I took off on, I wiped out and my leash snapped, sending the board on to shore with me attempting to swim as I got pounded by huge surf. I quickly grew tired, making no progress towards shore and having gone under water and struggled to the top several times. My strength started to ebb and I knew I couldn't last much longer. There was a moment in between waves when I looked at the beach and saw a man sitting on the beach fishing, the only person I could see. I waved to him feebly but then realized that there was really nothing he could do. I remember becoming serene then, understanding that I was about to die. It's not the sort of moment you forget and I'm not going to try to describe it further. I went under a couple of more times finding it more difficult to struggle to the surface each time. Then two other surfers called out to me. They had seen me and were making their way over. By the time they got there I was too weak to even pull myself on the surfboard one of them vacated for me. The three of us worked our way to shore, one of them having to go back to help the other after he pushed me to shore on his board. Once on the beach I laid there for a long time, in a state of psychological shock hardly able to think.

So that episode was flitting around in the back of my mind as I walked back towards Praia do Rosa. The waves weren't as big as the day I almost died, but back in 1990 my surfing strength was at its peak, at the moment it was at its nadir.

A man on the beach was renting surfboards for R$10 an hour. I took his only real board amongst the foam beginner's boards. I noticed that the leash was frayed where it was connected to the board, the string having less than half its original diameter at one point. Having learned my lesson on the importance of leashes, I had him put a new one on for me.

The beach was shaped like a capital C with sand along the vertical edge but rocks along the bottom and top. I decided to enter near the southern end where I had watched many surfers paddle out as the water was a little less rough there creating a 'channel' which made it easier to get to the outside. My intention was to go out only half way and only try to catch the inside surf. This would mean more paddling in rough seas than being outside, but it would keep me out of the larger waves. Besides I really just needed the paddling exercise to begin the process of getting my strength up.

As I paddled out, I found myself quickly getting pulled by the current towards the rocks at the bottom of the southern cliff, where the waves crashing sent plumes of water twenty feet into the air. This wasn't where I wanted to be and I tried paddling away from them, to the north. The current kept pulling me, and before I knew it I was sucked out further to sea, and around the corner to the south where there was no beach, only boulders where land met sea.

This all happened rather quickly, in a matter of four or five minutes. I spent the next twenty minutes struggling to stay away from the rocks and get outside of where the waves were breaking. The strength in my arms had long since started to wane so I had to take breaks to get my energy up again for another determined paddling effort. I momentarily considered trying to make a landing at an area I had spotted that appeared to be rock free and was about the length of a school bus but decided it was too risky as the waves were too big for me to be sure I could get there reliably through the shore break and plus there could be unseen rocks under the water.

It was a harrowing twenty minutes but eventually I made my way north, to where the lineup was . Once there I still found myself paddling a lot to keep position and avoid getting crushed by the waves that seemed as big as a house now that I was in them, but the situation was certainly less dire as there was a nice sandy beach about 200 yards from me on shore (although still with a madhouse of crashing water between me and it).

I tried paddling for a few waves, but chickened out at the last second each time. The damn things were huge, scary and moving fast and I just didn't have a lot left in me at this point. On the fourth or fifth one I didn't chicken out quick enough and was sucked over the falls and into the washing machine. I tumbled like a rag doll getting pulled along in a looping course underwater, losing all sense of up or down and was held under so long I started to panic momentarily and gulped water. In the end I reached down to my ankle and grasped my board leash, climbing it up to find the surface of the water where I took a quick gulp of air before getting hit by the next wave and starting all over again. I surfaced quicker this time and managed to clamber onto my surf board and point it towards shore before getting blasted by the next wave. I held on for dear life through the chaotic tumbling white water, still unable to breath until it calmed down enough for my head to be above water as I raced to the shore.

"Back in the day" I think I would have had a blast out in those waves, but in hindsight it was just a bad idea to try and tackle them on my first day back in the water. While struggling to get out of my predicament I kept telling myself "you're not going to die" and except for the few minutes that I was really near to the rocks, the chances of being wrong about that were pretty slim, but I felt more alive than normal driving away from Praia do Rosa.