======== Newsgroups: alt.surfing Subject: Don't shoot me! I am just surfing... From: Gennaro Monteleone Date: Fri, 04 Oct 1996 13:58:06 -0700 Hi all, this is what happened yesterday morning. At 7 am I meet with a buddy at a 'new' spot. I already surfed there and lately I am going almost exclusively there since its much less crowded. It is about 1Km away from a river mouth and all the times we have surfed there we could notice apparently BIG left breakers close to the river mouth, even when the place was rather small. So this time we decide to give it a try get all our stuff and walk along the beach to get there. We do find a nice hollow shoulder to head high left and go for it. Unfortunately the wave was a bit too fast and we have a very hard time trying it also because we keep finding ourselves out of position when the larger sets come, due to the very strong current (I guess from the river). So after quite a bit of struggling and very little surfing we decide to go find another break. It was almost 9 and we were just out of the water gathering all our stuff when we see someone running in our direction from far away on the beach. As he gets closer we see it is a military appoaching: "How did you get here?" "We were in the water since a quarter past 7" "Oh god, I didnt see you! you have to go away now since they will soon start SHOOTING exercises in this area" The guy was really upset and worried probably because he was the one in charge of keeping people out of the area. We followed him to his place and he called someone with a radio telling we were going away. We had to go back trough another (longer) way and when we finally got back we passed right trhu maybe 150 soldiers in war equipment getting ready for their shooting exercises: "hello... " Well that's it. It seems they will be doing this sort of things every Wed and Thu for some time. After that we drove to another place that was new for me and wasn't bad at all and I could try my new 6'8" board... (I have a 7'2" hybrid shape) not bad at all but I got one of the worst pounding of my short surfing career when I sinked with the forward part of the board right after standing up and the wave exploded on my face and made me hit the (sandy) bottom (no real problem except I felt a bit funny for a few minutes and kept losing water out of my nose for a few hours). Ciao, Gennaro.