I'm a little anxious but excited to experience a full blown typhoon which is sure to come. We just had two typhoon warnings in the past month. Luckily, neither of them made it to land. I've been told that it's pretty early this year for typhoons to start. This means that we're probably going to have more typhoons and rain than usual, this last one that just missed us was huge, bigger than Taiwan, and it was a category 4 out of 5.
I'm worried about all the wind and rain that we'll get. Landslides are a common problem because of the heavy rainfall. There are still many remnants of debris from previous typhoons. If you walk along the coastline in Taiwan, you'll see that most of the beaches are completely littered with mangled pieces of driftwood. They came from previous typhoons that wreaked havoc and washed everything into the sea. Another thing that we'll have to look forward to during a big typhoon is our commute into town on our little scooter. Since it's about a fifteen to twenty minute scooter ride into town, it's not going to be easy going to and from work when winds are blowing at around 100 miles an hour and there's so much rain it'll be almost impossible to see through my helmet's face "shield". My boss told me that I'll also have to be careful of the wind picking up a large random object, say a sign post, and chucking it at me to kill me. I'm definitely not looking forward to that at all. I imagine I'll be a little paranoid.
Of course an incoming typhoon isn't always a bad thing, especially for a surfer. Typhoons bring in some big swell, lots of beaches that look like lakes most of the time will suddenly spit out a perfectly gorgeous barreling wave or just some fun-sized swell.
It's too bad that the overly cautious Taiwanese government thinks this means danger. If a typhoon even gets too close to Taiwan, a typhoon warning is issued and consequently all of the beaches get closed down. This means no one is allowed in the water or you can get greeted with a ridiculous fine. It's really silly because they shut down all of the beaches, even if there are no waves.
They enforce this by sending the police and coast guards to patrol all the beaches, and the popular beaches for surf are guarded at all times.
This last typhoon that was making its way towards us produced some great swell. On Saturday, the wind switched offshore and Chris and I drooled from our rooftop watching the beautiful unsurfable swell. Every hour we walked down to the beach to see if they dropped the tape that was blocking off the beach. Finally, at around noon, we timed it perfectly, as we walked down to the beach, we saw the bright orange coast guard jumpsuits getting on their scooter as if about to leave. As we jogged over to them, they zoomed off giving us the "okay" sign. FINALLY!
I surfed so hard that I thought my arms were going to surrender and detach themselves from my body. I caught a few waves where I was in the perfect spot, I would paddle and suddenly the wave would get taller and taller and I would race down the face of the wave grabbing my rail for support, staring at a perfect wall that was lining up so vertically, so perfectly, solely for me. They had some size too, almost double overhead for me, (but remember, I'm 5'3"). Ohhhhhhh it was so SWEET! One of the waves that I caught felt so big that I actually made a few turns while I was dropping down the face before I even made my bottom turn. It was the first time surfing ever reminded me of snowboarding. I know some of you surfers out there are chuckling at my childish excitement, but that's how I felt, like a child at Disneyland. It's days like this I feel like I could devote the rest of my entire life to surfing. In fact, I do not at all think it's crazy when I hear of people giving up everything they have in search of waves, I get it.
 |
Check back later for the next typhoon swell, hopefully I'll remember to take pictures of at least the waves.
No comments:
Post a Comment