Blood sweat & tears...well ok not any tears yet, but gotta admit I'm getting a bit softer in my older years. Especially around the middle, sides, back & hands...just not hard enough to prevent damn reef cuts thats for sure, but I'll get onto that soon enough.
Tides were high this morning, going from 2m to 2.5m around 8am to 10am. So I wasn't in any hurry to race down to the Bukit, I really wanted to get barreled today. Wyan picked us up at 8:30 after brekky & we headed down to Balangan. It had been a couple of years since I'd been there & I was surprised to see a fairly big hotel built at the top of the stairs down to the beach. Paradise hotel if I remember right & I had actually looked at it on tripadviser coz we were thinking about staying down there for a few days. But I thought they'd buggered the map location coz there wasn't any construction last time we were there in 2013. It went up real quick & that place on Jalan Uluwatu hill that was just a concrete frame which had stopped being built due to breaking height restrictions. You can't help but not have noticed it, it was like that for over 10 years, probably 15. Well its suddenly completed also...building has not slowed in Bali, its everywhere. I could see a crane operating up behind Balangan as well.
But anyway, we just had a look at Balangan from the carpark hill. Obviously high tide, breaking fairly fat, really sectiony & about 100 people out. I sh1t you not, it was packed. Size looked to be at least double overhead. Didn't see one person get a decent ride, I mean not even 10m. I could see a section shutting down the least, bit over 1/2 way up the beach where you would have got the odd one if you went the middle size ones & just dodged the sets. Not what I was looking for though.
So I thought I might get a few at dreamland & walk along the beach to Bingin when the tide dropped. But despite some size at Balangan, dreamland was not even breaking, tide was just way too high. So it was the dreaded carpark hop, luckily though I wasn't in WA worried about the wind turning onshore. The tides were only going to get better.
Bingin has a lot more warungs also, there used to be a fair bit of space between them. Now it looks like the whole cliff face stretching over to Impossibles is covered. Of course Bingin was packed with about 25 people. Tide was too high for Bingin, Impossibles looked pretty good up at its first peak. I knew the tide wasn't far off from a sudden drop, so I went for a swim with the missus for 20 mins & then headed out.
Just as I headed out 4 local kids went in, all under 12 & absolutely ripping. They made the waves look huge too, was really cool to watch them. There was about 20 people now, mostly Euro's, a few with soft tops having a great deal of difficulty bottom turning as the tide dropped. Was surprisingly easy to get waves, the outgoing tide kept sucking most people out too far & as the tide dropped the sets went from just over head to head & a 1/2.
The change in pace happened quite suddenly. I had the third wave out of the first big set just making a bit of a late takeoff coz I had to race out & swing around for it. Bottom turned & it was just a big round sucky bowl. Got a quick not very deep barrel, then went for the big off the top, turned & ahhhhhg it looked shallow as fark. I kicked the board away & went down with the wave feet first aching my back & putting my hands down for a bit of a scraping on the reef.
After that I didn't go for off the tops, I just grabbed a rail & hoped to get barreled with varying degrees of success & fails. Resulting in scrapes to my hip, back & hands. It was getting really shallow, like knee deep on some of them & my feet were touching the reef if I drifted too deep (gotta love booties).
I was seriously considering going in when I cut my hand paddling, the Bingin reef is really nasty. Never surfed it so shallow before & I knee boarded a couple of waves coz I didn't have time to get too my feet & the only exit was through this tunnel to the left lol
I had too ride out straight on my last wave, there's a deeper channel in the reef about the middle of the peak that you could safely straighten out on. I did that till the whitewater subsided & headed back out to the left trying not to get in peoples way paddling out. Big mistake, I should have gone to the right or better still gone in...the wave I was too deep on was the first wave of a set & the guy on the third wave of the set had done the same thing. The ten of us remaining were farking it for ourselves by pushing each other too deep chasing waves.
He was coming at me & I had to paddle off more to the left to avoid being hit. Duckdiving a head & a 1/2 round wave in less than waist deep water at a funny angle. I actually made it under, but something weird happened as I was coming up my board got flipped round so that the fins were on my guts & then I got sucked back over backwards riding the fins with my gut. Bloody hurt! I checked my guts to make sure I hadn't sliced my guts open & decided I'd had enough.
Coming in I realized I had a few tears on the ass of my boardies, a small cut on my guts & all the previously mentioned other places. But so lucky they're all just minor scrapes. At the end of the day I'm stoked I'm going home in a couple of days with a few barrels under my belt. Coz there are a lot of things I love about Bali, but barrels are the main thing I'm chasing. Damn hard to find them at home...might have had to pay with a bit of blood & a lot of sweat climbing those Bingin stairs, but any tears would only be tears of joy.....if you read my shiz this far, cheers
MickPC
> 9 months ago, 25 Jun 2015
