Bucket List - Try to Surf
Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 5:26PM 
The Bucket List is a list of things I want to do/feel I should do before I die. I've done some of them already, and I'm telling one of those stories here. To see the whole list, click here.
I should actually change this to "Catch a wave on a surfboard," which is something I've never done. And something I'd LOVE to do.
I lived near the sea in South Africa. It was sunny. There were a lot of waves. Surfing was a big deal.
In university, you could always tell when the surf was up - at least half of the Bachelor of Commerce students were missing.
In High School, the big thing was to get on the bus and take the 30 minute trip down to the beach on Saturdays and hang out with the surfer boys.
My father, an avid fan of police procedurals on TV, firmly believed that I was going to be abducted by slave traffickers, raped by a pedophile or eaten by a shark and, when he tried to forbid me from going, it was one of the first times in my life that I really stood up to him.
So we'd hang out on the beach, giggling and checking out the tanned, muscular surfer boys (there is nothing quite as sexy as a surfer standing with his surfboard upright, his wet suit half off, dangling at his waist, watching the waves to see how the sets are breaking) and sometimes even talking to them. Mostly we hung out with boys from our school that we knew.
And, inevitably, we asked some of them to let us try out surfing.
You have to understand that, what an iPhone is to a man is what a surfboard is to a surfer. Actually, that's not even a good enough analogy, because iPhone users will let you play with their ubercool toys. A surfboard is more like a Ferrari to its owner. They're expensive for a kid and, if they have bought a new one, they carefully chose the color and pattern and size of fin and I don't even know what else.
So there's only one reason the boy would let my friend and I have a go at surfing... they wanted to laugh their asses off at us. And probably see our boobs when our swimsuits were wet.
So, of course, they didn't tell us anything about how to get out beyond the breakers. You're supposed to push the tip of the board under the wave, dive into it and paddle to come out the other side.
But my friend and I kept trying to paddle over the waves and spent half an hour being tossed back to the shore.
Eventually, we gave up.
It was humiliating.
The boys were guffawing up on the beach.
Little fuckers.
So yes, I've tried to surf, but I never succeeded.
So I'm adding "Catch a wave" to my Bucket List.
Right now.
Reader Comments (2)
There is actually no good analogy for how a young kid cares about his surfboard. Keep up the good posts!
Thank you, Mandla. And keep up the commenting!!!