By the 30th the swell had dropped enough that waves weren't breaking between mids & lefts channel. There was a couple of guys out at mids dodging the sets but having a bit of trouble. Gets hard in those conditions even without the 12-15 knt offshore. Your paddling for the nice shaped smaller ones, missing & turning around to face these bombs breaking out the back. Or you get a nice one right over to in front of mids 1 & get caught inside. Then havta paddle right round the left from mid 1 or duckdive a gazillion waves...but yeah, sure thins out the crowd
Headed down to the Bukit on the 1st July. With the benefit of hindsight we should have been down there the last few days. But I really wanted to catch AP rights going off & it would have been if the wind wasn't early every day. Although boats were an issue too.
I was headed to Bingin, but low tide wasn't running for 4 hours. So dropped into Balangan at the top of the 2m tide to find a sh1t load of people & a resort built at the top of the stairs. They knocked it up bloody quick coz it was just the side of the rocky limestone carpark 2 years earlier. Always easy to make this place look good, but 99% of the waves were shutting down pretty quick. Its sometimes ok on the high, but not that day.
So we bailed to Bingin...Had a swim with the missus & some lunch. It had been a couple of years since I'd been to Bingin also & its got a lot more buildings & people as well. Man the beach was covered in people laying on there towels sunbaking, it was bizzare. Various Euro accents chatting away. Way different vibe to just a couple of years ago where everyone was there for a surf. Most of these people didn't have boards with them, thank fark too coz there was already 30 people crammed into the narrow break, about 8 on softops causing chaos. Luckily 1/2 of them came in as the tide rapidly dropped & I headed out.
It was pretty small, fun & shallow...luckily I was headed home in a couple of days coz I got reef cuts on both hands, my hip, back & a small fin chop in the guts going over the falls & landing on the back of my board. I just wanted to get a couple of barrels before going home, so was happy to sacrifice a bit of skin




























