Surfing

The dearth of recent essential mass messages can be explained in on word: Surfing. The last couple weeks have brought consistent waves and one epic swell (more on that later), and we have pared our lives down to the bare essentials: eat, sleep, surf. No time for superfluous activities like blogging, reading, conversation, laundry... Actually it hasn´t been quite that bad, and we have even squeezed in a couple of public musical performances (one at a local bar and one at an organic farmstand), Spanish lessons, new friendships, and the preparation of fine cuisine (primarily involving our new favorite fruit, the maracuya).

However, surfing has been the overriding focus ever since good waves showed up just in time for the big Canoa surf comp (maybe you saw it in the news? The Canoa Pro Classic) several weeks ago. The locals boys struggled against the rippers from Montanitas and Atacames, but one squeezed onto the podium in third to salvage the town´s pride.

Rose, I am proud to announce, has been killing it in the waves lately, making huge strides - surfing til her ribs ache, popping a few Advil, and paddling back out for another session. Her recent highlights include a clean, green, hundred-yard long left at Mompiche that brought all us spectators on the beach to our feet, clapping and hooting.

Our Mompiche trip from last week (Mompiche is Ecuador´s finest wave, an incredible lefthand pointbreak) was pretty incredible. We tagged along on a spur of the moment trip some friends were making, and lucked into some truly amazing waves during one of the best (and biggest!) swells to hit Mompiche in a couple of years. Although Mompiche lies less than 150 km north of Canoa, it takes about 6 hours in various buses and pickup trucks (a bit more if you end up walking the last 8 km like we had to due to the dearth of passing cars to flag down...). However, we were rewarded by amazing waves reeling off a rocky point break, every bit as gorgeous as those glossy Indonesia spreads in the surf mags. The big set waves on our first afternoon were solid double-overhead, with glassy calm conditions - truly amazing! The rides were so long it would take 20 minutes to paddle back out to catch another. The wave starts breaking over a reef directly in front of some nasty rocks, and the first section is fast and hollow, but then slows down and rolls more slowly and relentlessly over a nice sandy bottom all the way into the bay - something for everyone! The other highlight from Mompiche was an earthquake (two actually but I slept through the second) - a solid 30 seconds of strong shaking that sent coke bottles shattering across the floor, put a big crack in the roof of the restaraunt we were in, and knocked down a few walls next door. It left us a bit jittery, but the locals were unfazed and no tsunami followed.

Lest our readership start thinking that our life down here in Ecuador has been nothing but fun and games let me compile a short list of the various ailments we have suffered in the last two weeks: bruised ribs, countless sandfly bites, a wasp sting, a stingray sting, a smallpox-like armpit rash (fungal infection?), plus a pair of feet covered in scrapes, scars, and bruises from rock encounters (I didn´t quite master the elegant leap off the rocks which shortcuts the long swim out in Mompiche...).

And in other news, the freckles on my back have finally melded into one uniform, pre-cancerous blotch, and my hair has grown so long that everyone I meet tries to sell me pot. And Rose´s fiddle playing has become so sweet that she has been inundated by requests for lessons, in spite of the fact that she has the only violin in all of Manabi...

Hope this message finds everyone in fine spirits and health heading into the holidays,

Ty