Sometimes I forget to take the high road!

You have heard it before and you are going to hear it again in this post. Yesterday's session was stellar! What looked like not such great conditions resulted in the discovery of a good sized and perfect left offering up 100+ metre rides that I was only required to share with one other initially. That was until local shortboard charger Leif and his good woman Tanya, on their way further around the beach, noticed a wonderful 4 section ride that I got almost in to the beach. They back tracked to join us with Leif relating this background to their decision to me as he arrived in the line up. Now, that must be a first. Leif is a hard charger, the sort of guy that returns from a Bali surf trip with skin lacerations resulting from taking on one of the world's great waves, Desert Point in Lombok.


So a hierarchically challenged surf mat rider such as myself inspiring a top runger of his ilk feels pretty damn good!
Anyway, I was giving the 5GF another outing and I can say it went really well on these solid waves. The addition of the 5GF increases my quiver to 5 different mats with the Tracker Roundtail and Standard and Series I & III MT5s. I think there is definitely an advantage to having a number of mats in your quiver as a mat riding discovery previously learnt, but sometimes forgotten, was reinforced from riding a mat with different characteristics today. The waves had a bit of speed and even though I was on a mat and coping, there was little room for error as I was often tucked right in to the pocket. On that particularly long ride mentioned earlier in the post, I could see early on in the wave that I might get caught. Without really thinking about it, I squeezed the right front corner a little just to get the mat to move further up the face of the wave and there was an immediate increase in speed as I obviously moved in to a part of the wave where the push was most powerful. As I mention, I am aware of this but as a surf mat is so inherently efficient, one often remains too content to just let it have it's head without exploring beyond. To be fair on myself, though, it has been sometime since I have had the opportunity to ride a wave of such lengthy quality and I am hoping to be able to repeat the experience again today.