Dolphin Address 6 2003
28 juni 2003
The waves today are so high that I can look inside them just before they tumble to froth on the rocks. Especially Pollenawatch, and to a lesser degree the Dog Chunks clear up warped. White heads everywhere, but every so often my attention is drawn by a sharp foam trail when Dusty takes a surf. Here and there wave woven weed fields are floating.
I will wait to go in. In an hour I can sail off the pool rock with fin and wing stretched out before me. Now I would have to suffer blowwaves in the treacherously slippery BathTub and cripple my feet on the break-neck boulders.
Moreover, it's my birthday today and it's obvious: all the waves are dancing merrily towards me and many are carrying a clearly foaming party collar. With these and other light-hearted cares I dream the tide in.
After my meanwhile broadly copied 'flat-dive' and the necessary leg strokes to open water I fell to the mercy of the waves. Almost immediately a faint feeling of seasickness kicked in. Dusty was dizzying everywhere, but the waves seemed not to want to let me go. I had lost my grip on the water, the momentum that I could handle.
I was off my stroke, got half a snorkel of double salt water inside and hit mainly air with the mono. Felt rolled all over by the waves into a nausea. The visibility was miserable and swarming with the wrong kind of jellyfish.
After 15 minutes I excused myself to Dusty. It did not feel like my day, let alone my birthday. I limped into the bathtub where I was washed on the slope and saved my wrecktched body like a seal.
When finally I got my monofin off and gravity strayed me to my clothes, the first thing I saw sticking out, was what in spite of the thousands of dives that I've made, simply forgotten, what would have equalized me to the water, my 'missing link', my weight belt, bone-dry!
Jan Ploeg, Fanore Beach, 28 June 2003
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