I was finally able to experience surfing a sea kayak.

It was fun, and a good way to test my recoveries and balance — they need more work. On the bright side, I learned my right-side roll is solid: I did dozens of them, easily. I only failed the last two after 3h of practice, when I was exhausted. My go-to roll is the standard greenland, but modified to forward-finishing it with sculling.

Surf is also unforgiving with the wet exits. How fast do you recover when there may not be much time in between waves? I tried, but failed, the back deck scramble self-rescue, and successfully executed the assisted t-rescue with heel hook — both as a swimmer and as a rescuer, so that’s something.

After half a day in the water, I felt a lot more confident about my abilities. Despite having rough spots, it was a good kind of challenge: hard, but doable. In retrospect, I think it was a good idea to only try surfing after having developed a solid roll on one side. It increased the time I could focus on practicing the techniques required for surfing, instead of practicing rescues. And so by the end of the session I had caught a handful of good waves, and learned something from dozens of others.

We forgot to take good pictures/videos, but at least there’s proof: