double-over-head

Tomorrow is the BIG day… 6 ft at 16 seconds = double over-head barrels in Nusa Lembongan

“Lacerations” on a big swell

I’m currently sitting on the balcony of my hotel listening to waves detonating on the reefs of Nusa Lembongan.  It sounds like a combination of thunder and explosives, one after another, with no silence in between.  I tried to look out into the darkness to see the size, but the half-moon has not yet risen.  The roars of the ocean and the surf reports are our only indication to what we surf tomorrow.  The biggest swell of my Bali trip has arrived in the dark of tonight, and its building for tomorrow.

My first Bali reef bounce

Jay and I are both a bit nervous, and its obvious.  When we hear a bigger set hit the reef, we exchange semi-nervous looks and say things like “We shouldn’t have partied that hard last night.”  or “What are our safety precautions?”  We are both sitting in silence going through all the worst and best scenarios in our heads.  Long hold-downs, reef bounces, and stand-up-barrels are all possible, and they are not mutually exclusive or inclusive.  Anything is possible tomorrow.

Nusa Lembongan and neighboring Nusa Ceningan offers 4 main reef breaks, each with the potential for epic waves.  We’ve been told by a local friend to not surf Ceningan on anything larger than a 5 foot swell because the clean-out sets will be double (that means 15-20 foot rouge waves to wash you onto the shallow reef and into the punji-stick-like seaweed farms on the inside.  Thus, Cenigan is out of the question.

We will decide tomorrow between Playgrounds, Lacerations, or Shipwrecks, three quality reef set-ups out in front of the beach near our hotel.  We will balance wave quality, crowd, and risk to select the wave with the highest potential reward.

Thunder and explosions on the horizon remind us that this is real, and this is why we came here.  Time now is for sleep, tomorrow is for barrels.

-Alex