Smoothie time

I am very thankful that my apartment is furnished with a working, albeit very cheap, blender, because it means I can make smoothies. My signature smoothie recipe is as follows:

• Three or four ice cubes
• A big, slightly overripe banana
• About a half-cup of pineapple
• A few spoonfuls of yogurt
• A splash or two of milk (optional)

I keep all these ingredients on hand at all times. Smoothie time follows the lunar calendar, but it is nevertheless somewhat unpredictable, and it's best to always be prepared.

Today I discovered that I mistakenly bought strawberry-flavored instead of plain yogurt last time I went to the store. I didn't even know they had strawberry-flavored yogurt. Turns out it is delicious in smoothies.

Oh, what a beautiful morning!

The stars aligned this morning to create a surfer's paradise at Playa Guiones - persistent offshore winds, high tide, warm, clear water, blue skies, and plenty of chest-to-head-high swell rolling through.

The result - tons of smooth, moderately-powerful, mellow, super peely waves. Sometimes the waves were so easy to catch it was like getting on a ski-lift. I had by far my longest rides to date.

The kicker is, after 9:30 AM there was hardly anybody in the water. By mid-morning on most days, the winds shift onshore, the waves start to get choppy, the surfing gets lousy, and the sun gets hot. Because of this, most of the surfers here habitually do early morning sessions and clear out by 10 AM. So when the conditions miraculously stay perfect, like they did today, anybody who sticks around has the waves all to himself. No hustling for position in the lineup, no deferring to better surfers, no drop-ins.

On a side note, I was sitting on my board, scanning the horizon for waves, when a sea turtle poked his head out of the water about 10 feet away from me. He must have decided he was at the wrong beach, because he didn't stick around to surf with us.

It was a good day.

How I spent my winter vacation

The irony of my current lifestyle is that I have a lot of free time, but very little free energy. As a result, my recreational activities are pretty undemanding. The lack of energy is mostly due to the all the surfing, of course - most days I spend a couple hours in the water in the morning and another couple in the afternoon (the exact times and durations of the sessions depend on the tide schedule and on how sleepy, sore, or lethargic I'm feeling). And don't forget the accumulated 40 minutes of walking with that 7'10" surfboard under my arm.

There's also the heat to consider. Between 11 AM and 3 PM, the sun is strong enough to send those of us from more northerly climes crawling to the sanctuary of a dark, air-conditioned bedroom. Especially following a foray into town for lunch or groceries - on foot, of course, so add another 20 minutes of commute time there.

Cooking anything also takes a long time. As in every rental apartment, the quality of the kitchen gear is abysmal, so chopping vegetables with the super-dull knife on the super-tiny cutting board takes forever, and the super-thin cooking pot distributes heat so poorly that everything has to be stirred constantly. And the super-crappy stove only has one full-size burner, so you have to cook things in stages and set them aside. And... you get the idea.

But when I'm not surfing, walking somewhere, eating, or cooking, I am totally free to use my tiny amount of remaining energy in any way I choose. I read books. I read the Internet. I usually Skype with Holly for a while around dinner time.

I don't have a TV (well, I do, but it only plays DVDs, and I don't have any) and my Internet connection is way too slow to stream video. So in lieu of watching TV, I've taken to listening to various old radio shows from the 1930s-1950s, many of which are available for free. When I was growing up outside of Washington, D.C., I used to listen to a bunch of these shows on WAMU every Sunday night on a program called The Big Broadcast, which apparently is still going after all these years. A lot of the shows are really corny, but also kind of fun, especially the advertisements. It's also fascinating to hear how WWII affects everyday life in the U.S. as it progresses. I can only imagine the uproar that would occur nowadays if the U.S. government imposed price controls and a ration coupon system on all food and consumer goods, and made public service announcements encouraging people to fight inflation by not buying new things. But hey, Kraft Dinner is only two ration points, ladies!

We're halfway there

Apologies for the dearth of posts lately. I was enjoying a few days hanging out with Holly, and the time just flies.

My sabbatical is past the halfway point now, and it seems like a good time to take stock of what I've accomplished and what I still hope to achieve.

For starters, I got the angst and anger about my old job out of my system. That actually took surprisingly little time, and the mental cleansing was so thorough that I almost wonder if I'm going to be able to coherently summarize what I did for the last few years when it comes time for me to write a resume or do an interview. Whatever. Good riddance, I say.

I haven't had any epiphanies. I haven't thought up the next great startup idea or the next major world religion. To tell the truth, I haven't done very much thinking at all on this trip, and it's been very refreshing.

I've read about 20 books so far, including a handful of excellent ones. Having the Kindle has totally changed the experience of reading on vacation. I won't bore you with book reports - at least until I run out of other ideas for posts.

I've got an insane farmer's tan, and the hair on the crown of my head has started to go blond. I think my tan has reached its fullest potential and stabilized. My hair will probably continue to lighten. I would like to add some lemon juice to the mix and see what would happen, but lemons do not exist in this country. There has been speculation in some quarters about whether lime juice would work. Your thoughts are welcome.

My surfing has improved a lot. I hear this from various people who've seen me in the water over the past weeks. When I arrived, I had a lot of difficulty catching waves. My paddling was weak. My wave reading was not very good. My popups were slow and inconsistent, and I used my toes. When I was riding a wave, I had a lot of body tension. I had not successfully done an angled takeoff, much less ridden a wave for more than a few seconds. Today, my paddling is pretty strong, and I'm able to chase down a decent number of waves. I don't have trouble catching waves (unless the waves are intrinsically hard to catch, as determined by whether everybody else is having trouble catching them). My angled takeoffs are solid, I usually pop up quickly, always without using my toes, and I can frequently claim a good high line on waves that don't close out right away. I've had a few rides that were pretty damn good. I still have a long way to go, and I'm honestly not very satisfied with my progress; then again I'm never satisfied with my progress, so I will defer to wiser minds and acknowledge that all things considered, I am doing all right.

Guest blogger: Holly

Here's what I have to say about February: it's much nicer here in Playa Guiones!  At the mid-point of John-Anthony's surf sabbatical, I am visiting and checking on his progress.  I'm pleased to say that his surfing skills, Spanish vocabulary, and tropical tan are all coming along nicely.

We've been busy checking out all the restaurants within walking distance, enjoying a few sunsets over the Pacific, reading each other The Hunger Games in the hammock, making banana-pineapple smoothies, getting bitten by mosquitoes at the pool, observing the monkeys and other passers-by, and, of course, playing in the surf.  I can't believe I have to leave tomorrow.

No hay agua

It's easy to forget how important water is - until there isn't any. Even in places in the U.S. that routinely experience drought, water conservation efforts rarely involve what in Guiones is apparently the standard response to a water shortage: turning off the municipal water supply.

This has happened a few times during my previous visits, but never for more than a couple hours at a time. But a couple days ago the water went off at mid-day and stayed off for about 24 hours - ruining my plans for a pasta dinner to say the least. Last night it went off for another 12 hour span. An email forwarded to me by the property manager this morning explains - well, explains is perhaps giving too much credit, touches upon is more accurate - the situation:

Subject: no water
Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:16:11 -0800 

everyone.....i am sorry but tonight thursday at 8pm we forced to shut off the water to the entire system and project.......the board of directors are doing our very best to over come this crisis but it is what it is as i explained today in my earlier e-mail......you have no idea how much time and energy we all putting into delivering water to your homes......the system will be turned on again at 6:30am tomorrow and many locations may experience low pressure until the air escapes........hopefully with shutting it down tonight everyone can experience 36 hours of water until we have to shut it down again......this will be happening for at least the next 14 days...also i still do not have my complete mailing list so please pass the word to your friends.......thanks rick walker

One can readily surmise the severity of the crisis from the quantity of ellipses involved.

I might note that 6:30 proved to be optimistic by about two and a half hours, but this difference can safely be attributed to "tico time" - a mysterious time zone some unspecified degrees longitude west of here, according to whose clock all Costa Rican deadlines and appointments are approximately kept.

At any rate I am stocking up on water. Pitchers and bowls and pots full of it are crammed in the fridge and on the stove. And toilet use has assumed a tactical dimension normally experienced only during long road trips through unfamiliar country.

Happy Valentine's Day

Three Valentine's Days ago, in Manuel Antonio, Holly and I got engaged. It's too bad we can't celebrate that anniversary together today, but I'm very excited to see her when she arrives on Thursday.

Just engaged

I love you, Holly!

Climb and drop update

I've been striving to get the hang of the climb and drop for a few weeks now. It's been slow going, mostly because the surf conditions haven't been very cooperative. What I need in order to practice it effectively is medium-sized, clean, peeling waves. But what we've mostly had in recent weeks is no waves, tiny waves, choppy waves, and closeouts (waves where the whole face breaks at the same time instead of peeling). It's been frustrating.

In the last week, however, I've had three or four sessions where the waves were doing what I wanted and I was able to successfully execute some crude approximations of the climb and drop. In one or two cases I was even able to use it to get around a section of the wave that was closing out (a section closes out when the crest of the wave actually topples over and crashes down into whitewater - once you're surfing in whitewater the only thing you can do is let it push you straight in to shore or jump off and end your ride). A competent surfer can often get past a section that is closing out by dropping down the face and going around the front of the section, then climbing back up the still-peeling face on the other side. I haven't quite got the last bit down, but I'm getting there.

But most exciting of all for me was the one ride I had this morning when I for the first time managed to gain noticeable speed using the climb and drop. Being able to add speed beyond that at which the wave is peeling opens up a new world of possibilities in surfing. And it turns out that the climb and drop allows you to do this without violating the first law of thermodynamics. Here's my best attempt at unraveling the physics: most of the energy of a breaking wave is in the upper part of the wave face. You tap into that energy when you're riding along high on the face. When you drop down the face you trade some potential energy for additional speed, but because you are now lower on the face, you get less energy from the wave and quickly slow down. The climb and drop lets you use muscle energy to quickly move the board up and down the face in a kind of a salsa-ish body motion, and in so doing you repeatedly gain speed during the drops and then reclaim the high-energy region of the wave face before you lose all of that new speed. At least that's how I understand it. However it works, it works!

The king and the pawns

Because my IP address is identifiable as being in Costa Rica, the ads that I see online tend to be a bit different than what I'm used to. But this one, which has been showing up all over the place for the last couple days, really got my attention:

This makes me sad in so many different ways.

Camouflage

Seen during my lunchtime constitutional.

Ctenosaur aka "black iguana"

Little lizard of unidentified type

Corona on your pancakes?

Just to be clear, all the rest of the beer is kept in refrigerated cases at the other end of the store. Only the Corona is kept in the syrup section, and I would dearly love to know why.

Surfing tip: paddle right

Disclaimer: This post contains no pithy observations or photos. It is intended to document and clarify my insights into surfing technique for my own benefit more than for yours.


As I've said before, paddling is hard. But if you're like me, or many of the beginner and intermediate surfers I see out in the water every day, you're probably making it a lot harder than it has to be. In my estimation, poor paddling is the single biggest obstacle to beginners catching waves, bar none. The good news for beginners - especially scrawny ones like me - is that more effective paddling doesn't necessarily require a huge increase in muscle strength.

Position

If you are too far forward or too far back on the board, you are doomed. Find the right spot before you start paddling, every time.

Chest and back

If you're a boy, your nipples should be off the board when you're paddling. If you're a girl... well, the point is, your chest should be tilted up and out, not lying on the board. Don't hyperextend your back to achieve this. Think of it more as a backwards rotation of your ribcage. It takes a while to figure out the exact position that's right for you, and in my experience, the mid-back muscles that will allow you to hold this pose need a few days to build up the requisite strength and stamina. But once you get the hang of this, paddling will magically get twice as easy.

Shoulders

Assume the paddling position as previously described, with your chest up. Now make sure your shoulders are pulled back, and just let your arms dangle. If you're doing this right, you should be able to relax your arms completely and let them hang from your shoulders. Which brings us to...

Arms

In the first half of your paddle stroke, you're pulling yourself through the water. In the second half, you're pushing yourself. People tend to overemphasize the pulling and ignore the pushing. Imagine trying to climb onto a ledge. Is it easier to pull yourself up from a full hanging position, or push yourself up once you've got your hands below your shoulders? Pushing is much easier, because the muscles you use to push (chest and biceps) are much stronger than the muscles you use to pull (shoulders and triceps). So what you want to do when you're paddling is really focus your energy output on the second half of the stroke, when you're pushing water behind you. You can make this even more effective by describing a slight S shape with your hand as you paddle, so that your hand passes underneath your board as you pull and then curves back out as you push.

Hands

It's counterintuitive, but paddling with your fingers together doesn't make you go any faster. What it does do is require the muscles in your forearms to be constantly engaged to hold that flipper hand shape, which consumes energy that you could be using elsewhere and adds unneeded tension to your body. Instead, you want your fingers gently curled and completely relaxed. Shake your hands out in front of you and when you stop, you'll have perfect paddle hands.

Speed

Alex once told me that I only had two paddle speeds - OFF and FULL. The truth is, you usually don't need to be paddling at FULL. But as a beginner, when you're trying so hard to catch waves or paddle back out through them, you can get in the habit of always paddling as if your life depended on it. Relax. Developing your wave reading skills will get you way more waves than busting your lungs for every bump on the horizon.

Power

There are definitely times when you do need to paddle really hard in order to catch the wave (or avoid having the wave catch you). The key in these situations is to make sure you're actually paddling hard and not just fast. Every paddle stroke should make a noticeable difference. It's easy to paddle so fast that your form goes out the window and you don't actually go anywhere.

It took me a couple of weeks before I felt like my paddling finally "clicked," but when it happened it led to a huge leap forward in my surfing ability. All of a sudden I was paddling for more waves and catching more of the ones I paddled for. And catching waves is the prerequisite for everything else.

Wonders of modern telecommunication

My only previous experience living abroad for longer than a few weeks was the 1996-97 academic year I spent living in Florence, Italy. My phone contact was limited to a weekly call to my parents, using my AT&T calling card, which undoubtedly cost them a small fortune. At school we had a handful of computers that shared a dial-up Internet connection, and we had a single email address for all 22 of us students to use. We encouraged our college friends in the U.S. to put the recipient's name in the subject line so that whoever logged on first each morning could move the incoming emails into the student's folders in Eudora. Nobody else back home had email, so I went to the post office and stood in line to buy aerograms. And the occasional postcard:

Actual postcard sent from Italy

Fifteen years later, I'm in middle-of-nowhere rural Costa Rica, but I can talk to Holly every day over Skype for free. I have unlimited calling to any phone in the U.S. for less than $3 a month. Granted, my Internet connection is dog slow (it's via 3G) so video chat is pretty jerky. But holy crap, I can video chat. And email anybody I know. And post pictures of stuff I see so that my friends can see it too.

It really is amazing how different the experience is when you can stay connected.

Gee, it seems kind of crowded out here

Big, beautiful waves greeted me this morning when I arrived at the beach. You couldn't ask for a nicer swell. The only catch - the ocean was positively teeming with ugly yellow-brown jellyfish, millions of them, ranging from a half inch to several inches long, drifting around me, washing over my surfboard, bumping into my legs, tangling in my fingers as I desperately tried to paddle away from the horror, the horror...

In truth the psychological revulsion was much worse than the occasional stings, which are mild and utterly harmless. The sensation is akin to having something tugging on your arm hairs, and is irritating but not painful. Still. Yuck.

Notwithstanding the challenge of paddling through these swarms of tentacled sea-vermin - and perhaps partly owing to the slightly diminished number of surfers out in the water - I snagged some rides that undoubtedly constitute the best of my career to date. I successfully executed climb and drop sequences on several really screaming waves and a couple of times managed to stay on through the thunderous closeouts that followed. A stranger paddling out through the whitewater complimented me on one of my rides - a personal first.

Things I wish I had a picture of, but don't

• A foot-and-a-half-long fish that I saw swimming nonchalantly in a nearly vertical head-high wave that I was paddling out to last week. It was like an aquarium tank with no glass. I was so surprised I stopped paddling and got nailed by the wave. The fish appeared to have no thoughts on the encounter whatsoever.
• A stingray jumping out of the water about twenty yards from where I was surfing. The maneuver was so graceless that it took a second before I realized what I'd seen. It looked more like a mortarboard being tossed in the air at a gradation ceremony than anything else.
• Pelicans dive-bombing for fish. They do a good imitation of a WWI fighter plane getting shot down, first stalling out mid-flight, then spiraling wildly down and finally crashing dramatically in the water.

Becalmed no more?

Lest you, gentle reader, imagine that I have abstained from long and boring descriptions of my surfing progress of late out of respect for your preference for colorful anecdotes and photographs, you will be dismayed to hear that in truth it is only the poor quality and quantity of waves these past two weeks that have stayed these nimble fingers.

That could change today.

There are signs that the waves are indeed getting a bigger and arriving somewhat more regularly than they have in a long time. After yesterday afternoon's session, when I caught a scant two waves in my first 45 minutes in the water and had dry hair for the first 20 minutes, this morning's session was a godsend, even if the waves were objectively still underwhelming relative to the historical norm.

I'm not the only one excited by this. The surfing population of Guiones has been increasingly on edge as the lull has dragged on, the days turning into weeks, and the forecast perpetually claiming that a new swell will arrive in another three or four days. Unfortunately, that population has undergone a huge boom since last season, which has made the competition for scarce waves even more intense. Having been featured recently in Outside magazine and the New York Times, it seems this off-the-map surf spot is no longer as far off the map as it used to be, even if the two and a half hour ride from the nearest airport is as bumpy as it ever was. The silver lining in this wave drought may be that some first-time visitors will document their disappointing experience here online, and thereby dim Guiones' star a little.

Hopefully the new trend continues and we get some consistent, good-size, peeling waves in the next few days, so that I can resume boring you with the minutiae of my achievements (or lack thereof) in the water.

Molasses revisited

A few days ago another road - a stretch roughly 50 yards long on the way to the beach - was inexplicably selected for the molasses treatment. This time I took some photos for proof. To bad I can't take a picture of the smell of all that sugar going off in the sun.

Surfing tip: hands on the rails

Disclaimer: This post contains no pithy observations or photos. It is intended to document and clarify my insights into surfing technique for my own benefit more than for yours.


The following is something I came up with that has dramatically improved my board-handling skills and the consistency of my popups over the last couple of weeks:

Step 1: Find the correct spot to grab the rails.

First lie in the correct place on the board (this assumes you have already figured out where that is), then put your hands on the rails so that the bottom edge of your hands lines up with the bottom of your rib cage. You should already be grabbing the board here when you pop up - if you aren't, you're doing it wrong!

Step 2: Whenever you aren't paddling, grab the rails.

Whether you're sitting up, lying down, doing a turtle roll, scooting back to spin the board around, scooting forward to sit up, popping up, whatever - grab the rails at the spot you found in step 1. Imagine that there are elastic bands connecting your hands to those spots on the rails. When your hands aren't busy, they should snap right back to that spot.

Step 3: Make it unconscious.

Practice consciously putting your hands in the right spot until it becomes an unconscious habit. When you're waiting for waves, paddle a couple strokes, then put your hands on the rails, sit up, scoot back, scoot forward, and lie back down without taking your hands off the rails. Do this over and over and over. Eventually you will find that when you are ready to pop up your hands will magically already be in the right place without you having to think about it.

The littlest scorpion

This is the second pequeño escorpión I've discovered on my bedroom wall. It's blurry-looking because I already smashed it.

Around town

Here are a few pictures of some of the places and things I've mentioned in my previous posts.

Entrance to the footpath to town

Guiones main street

The mini - home of Costa Rica's most expensive produce

The produce truck, here shown across the street from the mini

Boutique row on main street

On the road to the super

The super

Entrance to the beach

The beach at low tide