Esperance
9-Feb-2011
Last week was fairly quiet - no big trip up or down the coast. It was windy in Perth, we had a couple of days with strong seabreeze and I was training freestyle on the river.
On Saturday morning I went down there early to make the most out of the strong south easterly that was blowing. E-SE winds usually die pretty quickly here but that day it lasted for a few hours. I was pretty stacked on 4.2, no crowd on the water and had a really good time.
When I got out of the water I had 3 missed calls from Si. I called back to see what was going on and was told about the new last minute plan: drive down to Esperance and catch the swell / wind which were about to hit the south coast. I de-rigged in about 32 seconds, jumped in the car and rushed back home, transferred my gear from car to van, threw a wettie in there and off we went. It's a bit of a drive but when you know what's waiting at the end of it you don't think too much. Looking at the forecast I was actually thinking it'd be too big for me to go out. The wave has some proper power to it down there and it doesn't need much swell to start throwing fat lips... Thinking about it at over mast high kind of made me anxious. But I love it so much down there I couldn't not go, I had to go and at least check it out.
It ended up being a lot smaller than expected with waves around logo high in the sets - which is easy plenty for me, especially down there. We sailed Observatory all day. Clean, offshore, sick. The next day the waves had dropped to about head high but there were still heaps of them. Observatory was really good in the morning, head high and clean. Then we moved to Fourth in the afternoon. The wind picked up like crazy - I could hardly hold onto my 3.7 - some good sets were rolling in and once again it was awesome fun.
I'm back in Perth now, had a really good freestyle again yesterday, and it looks like it's on later today too. And tomorrow... who knows!? There's always somewhere on this coast where it's going off, a place that's calling... It's just too hard to turn it down.
