Apologies for the somewhat morbid beginning, but of all the methods of shuffling off the mortal coil, drowning is the one I fear most. There’s something about being caught under water that inevitably scares the daylights out of me. Since one Mr Murphy revels in just such situations, perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself deep inside the ocean, under a wave of fairly gigantic proportions. I could feel the blood pounding in my forehead as I struggled furiously to come to the surface. My eyes were stinging from the salt water, my lungs were at bursting point and I could feel water starting to enter my nose. I was in a blind panic, to put it mildly, and the fact that I had a surfboard attached via a cord to my ankle wasn’t helping matters any. The overall sensation was that of being thrown inside a giant washing machine in Turbo Spin mode, and the more I struggled, the more air I burned up.
Just then, in the midst of all the panic and chaos, I suddenly realised I was being stupid. Sure, the water was deep, but not that deep; I could see the ocean floor a couple of feet beneath me. Also, although the wave that had knocked me flat and churned me underwater had been huge, it had spent itself and was now not much more than a large swell making its way to shore. I stopped fighting the water and allowed myself to float to the surface, treading water and gratefully sucking in lungfulls of air. Man, this surfing business wasn’t as easy at it looked.
Nevertheless, I was in Arugam Bay, on Sri Lanka’s eastern coast and among the world’s top ten surfing sites. I hadn’t come all the way here just to give up after being battered by one wave, so I gathered up my (rented) board and headed back to shore in order to try again. Before coming here, I had done a ‘surfing for idiots’ Google search and had carefully memorised some of the how-to lessons I had found. Naturally, as is usually the case with such foolishness, the chasm between rote learning and practical application had turned out to be considerable. Still, the absolute basics were valid, so I began to go over them mentally as I walked into the water.
‘You saarf faarst time?’ I turned around to find that the query had come from a spectacularly fit Japanese girl in a bikini the size of a postage stamp. Board in hand, she looked like she had been surfing for years. ‘Is it that obvious?’ I asked. She giggled in the way only Japanese girls do. ‘I see you fall. Also, you holding saarfboard wrong way.’ I produced one of those sheepish ‘heh heh’ grins and quickly turned my board around. ‘I show you? Is not so difficult.’ ‘That’d be great’ I said, although frankly I would blindly have said yes even if she had suggested I walk barefoot over hot coals, such was the power of her attire.
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