It's 7:00am on a rainy tuesday down here.  The day is starting a little slow with the rain, but that's just fine with us, we had a long day yesterday.  We just took the dog for a walk on the beach with umbrellas and now are just sort of waiting to see who wants to surf. The surf is big again. Not so big that it's unsurfable out front, but there are more user-friendly places to go today. Yesterday was even bigger though and two of the local pro kids paddled out front and put on a show. We weren't there to witness it, we went surf venturing up the coast, but we came back to hear that those two got barrels that looked like big Puerto.  Cest La Vi. We got to try out a spot we had never surfed and check two others that we had wanted to see what they were doing.  One of those spots was dangerously perfect....but a little too big and shacking for our shortboards. We watched tube after tube spinning down the reef. But a step up board would have been needed to get yourself in early enough to survive the drop. We recently got to see a secret spot down here do it's thing a few weeks ago. Getting there is no picnic. It involves driving on a beach that is only navigable at low tide,  paddling across a river that has crocodiles, walking a 1/2 mile up the beach and surfing in the outflow of an even bigger river where 16ft crocodiles have been spotted hanging out on the sand where you have to paddle out.  The wave itself is sick though. The left comes in and tubes from start to finish with the potential for 20 second tubes... No exposure says the main locals here, so I won't be able to show you any video clips of it. The takeoff is not user friendly... It throws the entire time. Almost everyone tows it, due to safety reasons of less time in the water = less chance of being eaten by crocodile, and makes for the easy takeoff. But it is paddleable. I got some footage of Andy and Cory Lopez paddling in and doing quite well. THey were calling the wave better than skeletan bay. After that only two weeks passed before Kelly came down to give the wave a go. We couldn't film those days because the tide made it impassable to drive, you had to launch a ski from a long way away to get there. But I did get an opportunity to film him at Terraza and get some good clips of him.  We finished our first surf movie called Pura Alma and his clips are in there. We also made a trailer for the movie on youtube with his best wave in it. here's the trailer:

 The movie itself was a long long process to make.  an uncountable number of hours editing and filming and then when we finally made the movie, the file we were working with became corrupted somehow and we had to remake the whole thing.  We then got it done again only to realize that the HD clips would not be seen HD in the version of Imovie we made the video in so we had to go back, find every clip again out of our 50 high stack of dvds containing the footage and put them into the new version of Imovie. It was a long process, but the movie is done. At the moment it is only availabe at surf shops down here, but we will work on getting it available elsewhere soon.  We are going to do a few murals down here this month which is pretty cool. I'll post the photos once we complete them. Other than the hours and hours of filming and editing, we've gotten to surf some great waves along the way.  I had to do a fair bit of healing too. I fell into a ravine at night while walking the sidewalk. The sidewalk had collapsed to the point where only one person could cross that section and my brother in law and I were walking side by side. my side ended in an 8ft ravine full of jagged concrete and rusty rebar. Amazingly, for how gnarley the injuries could have been from a face first fall into that thing I only ended up with two deep cuts. One in the elbow on in the back. I didn't surf for five weeks to heal them and the elbow is still a bit painfull at times. ( I think it cut into the muscle or something it's a strange pain because the wound itself has scared over). The time out of the water was necessary though to finish the film for the deadline of the New York Surf Film festival. So its one of those good luck bad luck who knows stories.

that's all for now, it's 7:46am, the rain just stopped, the tide's hit its midpoint. It might be time to surf... 

Hasta Luego,

Gary