Surfing in Buchupureo- Ale Soto

We met Nano, the surf instructor, at his newly built surf school. He spoke slow Spanish to make sure everyone understood. His frequent “cachai’s” followed by our head nods showed we understood most of what he was saying. When all the teachers arrived, we loaded into the vehicles and were off to the Cobquecura beach. When arriving at the beach, the doors opened and we all flooded out of the cars. Half the students kayaked while the other half of us took surfing lessons for this day. We walked over to Nano’s car and started sliding on the wetsuits. People were hopping around on one foot as the other was stuck in the leg of the wetsuit. After we were all dressed, we grabbed the surfboards and walked towards the ocean.

We laid down the boards and broke out into a warm up jog followed by some practice of pushing off the boards. After our blood was flowing, we made our way into the chilly water. We were instructed to hop on our boards and “remar”. Once we got a good distance from shore, Nano called us all over. We sat on our boards in a circle holding hands. This reminded me of the many surfing movies I’d seen. Nano gave a few words of wisdom and wished us all safety and health. We were now finally ready to begin. The next couple hours of the lesson were followed by some successful attempts at standing up on the boards and a few funny moments of falling off. Nano was swimming around the water guiding us to the perfect wave and moment to begin paddling to catch a wave.

Before we knew it, our time had run out. Everyone was trying to have their last moments in the ocean and trying to catch their last wave. We walked out of the water as a group laughing about our experiences in the water. We then shot a couple pictures with the surfboards throwing up the Shaka. We changed back into our dry clothes as our hair was dripping everywhere. In the car ride back to the town, we all shared funny moments and were all excited to go back to the beach the next day,