Jaco

My feet are so stiff. And everywhere else it seems. Here’s why.

After a little lie in we took the dinghy ashore chaining it up to a sturdy tree as we were expecting to leave it for some time. We walked to the bus stop where we could take a ride to Jaco. We only had to wait 10 minutes for the next bus although I don’t know how often they really ran – perhaps hourly. The bus ride took nearly an hour to deposit us in Jaco.

For a seaside town, Jaco is rather differently laid out. Most of the shops and restaurants are on a street parallel to the beach one block out. There are very few signs of commerce along the beach with mainly the backs of hotels, walls and the odd corner restaurant facing the beach.

Our original idea was to surf rent boards for the day and just give it a go. After chatting to some folks on the beach we decided that taking an introductory lesson was the right way to go. In fact the first thing we learned was that right then was a bad time to go surfing as the tide was reaching its ebb and it would be better to wait until the lesson which was at 3pm.

We wandered around town for a while and settled on a restaurant serving an interesting variety of burgers which didn’t disappoint. After lunch we separated to wonder around some more before meeting up back on the beach half an hour before our lesson. Helen had decided not to try out surfing as she was worried about her healing knee so she looked after all our gear. Ella, John and I took our boards out a little early to learn the obvious – that without some instruction we had no idea what we were doing.

Our lesson started a little late which means on time for Central America. The lesson really came in two parts. The first was safety – how to keep yourself and others safe while surfing. The second was how and when to stand up. We had a number of practice sessions on surfboards laid on the sand before going out with separate instructors in groups of two or three.

The progression was worked out quite well as our next task was to stand up on the board while being pushed by the instructor at exactly the right time. At this stage we didn’t have to worry about paddling the board forward or timing our stand. I managed to get stood up on each occasion. The stance we had to make on the board was very similar to one of our old karate fighting stances so the positioning felt quite natural as did shifting weight forward and backward to control the speed. Likewise, the balancing and turning was similar to snowboarding.

After four goes of being pushed the next step was to paddle and stand up in accordance to the instructors called instructions. This was a little more difficult but the results were certainly fun. The surf was building and we were going gradually further out so the runs were getting longer and longer. The downside of this was there was more and more surf to wade back through to start again.

Just when I was feeling completely exhausted we were taken back to the beach for some additional verbal instruction / reinforcement accompanied with fresh fruit and water. We were soon back out again for another grueling half an hour before the whole lesson was up. That was all certainly enough for me. We had learned some valuable lessons – enough to be able to rent boards ourselves some day.

This morning I ache all over. Don’t know how Ella and John feel but I guess it will be much the same when they’re up and about.

Today we’ll be setting off for Bahia Ballena and the town of Tambor. I can hear the wind gen turning so maybe, just maybe, we’ll sail some of the way there.