Water Sports

Following the boogie board, yesterday I took out a surfboard. Just had to try! We only had a really short one in the garage, though. It was about a man's height. Usually, for a beginner you want to have a longboard, which is about twice the height of the rider. They enable you to ride small waves, and are way more stable. The board I had was extremely short, which means it probably wasn't suited to the waves in the first place, and especially for a beginner was way too wiggly. Just sitting on the damn thing waiting for waves was a task! I managed to kind of get on my knees, also once sort of walked along the board while already in the process of falling, but I couldn't really stand a wave. Usually, when I tried getting up, the wave had already rolled through under me. It was really exhausting. And once I was surprised by a wave. It looked reasonably big when approaching, so I went for it, but then it suddenly expanded. It lifted me one meter above my board, then through me over and in front of the board, then it was all tumbling chaos. I found my board on the beach, my wetsuit's zipper was opened all to the hip, and I had a cut on my leg. All in all, it was an amazing experience! :)
We also saw some dolphins along the way.

In the evening Julius gave me a short introduction to SCUBA gear. Breathing under water! Interesting feeling without the limitations of a snorkel. I never did it before, so he explained the breathing equipment, the controls for the air cushions used for modifying buoyancy and all that jazz. I was supposed to just sit down under water and try it out, but of course I went diving around the pool, balancing myself out and exploring. It's a quite delicate project, but not too hard. With even just variations in the depth of your breathing, you can precisely control how much you are sinking or rising, evening out your glide to a constant depth. Ready for today to go on a rogue diving trip!

Which is what we did. On a beach diving spot we went out there, first sinking down a bit and just checking out again how it feels to handle that equipment, and then off we went! It seems that Julius always has me try new stuff. When I visited him in Finland last year, I never had set foot on a sail boat before. He fetched me at the train station with the words: "Hey, I organized something. Tomorrow we go sailing in the National Baltic Offshore Championships." We did, and it was quite cool. Anyway, today we dove to a depth of about 20 meters, and it was a lot of fun! We saw fish in their hidings, Taylor found an octopus, I found a big crab hidden under seaweed, and when we left the waters there were stingrays in the shallow beach waters. The coolest guy out there, though, was a cormorant that several times dove alongside us, trying to grab some fish. We were at 20 meters depth, and suddenly we saw a bird!