In a Lame Duck Period

Last week, I got to see my parents, Reynnie and Scottie for the first time in almost five months. It's basically been the longest strecth of time I've ever gone through without my family. Strangely enough, I only got a pang of homesickness when I was with the family. Even more strangely, it was the first time I've missed two places. I was missing Pichilemu and Laguna too. Not on equal terms, for sure, but it was strange to have created a separate life for myself down in Chile. The intensity by which I missed Pichilemu was nowhere near as strong as for Laguna, but still it was unexpected.

I will say I had a great time last week in Fiji with my folks, Reynnie and Scottie. We got one great day of surf, a couple decent days and a few crap days. I guess that's about how surf trips go. You can rarely get every day good, I don't even expect it, I'm always just happy when I get one or two good days in total. I was definitely most worried about Scottie coming all the way over to Fiji and getting skunked, but luckily we got an all time day on Monday that was easily good enough to show Scottie the potential of the whole reef set up there. His first wave at glassy Pools was just a screamer and when he was paddling back out I've never seen him so excited. Now this is Scottie we are talking about, and he is perpetually excited, but his face seemed to say it all. I guess his words did to, he was pretty hyperbolic but in combination with his facial expressions it had a definite sincerity.

The rest of the week wasn't as good, it got smaller after monday, but we did get a bit of a farewell swell on friday and some decent waves at Pools again. It was definitely the most I have ever surfed Pools on a trip. But even though the surf wasn't as good the rest of the week, we all still had a great time, and the tension of getting good surf was lifted with Monday, so everyone was pretty relaxed the whole trip.

Except of course the Cohens, who seemed to forget that there were only fifteen people on the island and were hassling everyone for waves. This isn't to say that they are bad people, they are actually really nice. Dennis, especially is a laugh, but being on the island they forgot to leave their SoCal aggression behind. Dennis would paddle up to the top of the point after every wave and would definitely take a wave in every set. He consistently pressured people for waves and would paddle around them to catch a few waves. He even flat out burned me on a wave that was clearly mine. The worst part of all of this is that it gets Reynnie, Scottie, Me and some of the others into picking up some of our old habits of sitting way inside and consistently jockeying for position. We didn't go full bore though, we usually would try to take the in between set waves so the older crew would get plenty of waves and we never said anything to Dennis because we were getting plenty of waves, even if they weren't sets, but I did feel badly for the others who weren't expecting to have a hard time getting waves. I guess it was just frustrating to have people on the trip who just have no idea about surf etiquette.

Oh well.

But now I'm back in Australia, prepping for my lengthy journey ahead of me. I have a plane flight to Santiago on wednesday that will take me about 18 hours, that will get me in on the 18th. Then I fly to Lima on the 20th at 6 in the morning, meaning I probably won't go to sleep at all, only to be followed by a 9-11 hour bus ride to Pacasmayo. Once there I'll be camped out for the next 7 weeks or so. I had initially talked to my friends about going to Costa Rica with them but I haven't been able to find anything cheaper than 1000 dollars, so it looks like that's a no go. Not a big deal, maybe I'll just go back to Chile a bit earlier to hang out with Reynnie. That should be fun. I guess things are still up in the air but I'm not too optimistic about going to Costa Rica.

But to be back in South America is going to be great. I'm getting to the point with my spanish that I'm really comfortable, even if I don't speak quite as well as I want to, so I'm basically looking to clean up all my mistakes before I get home. The break in Australia was really nice but I'm ready to go back to the tierra baja.