During the cold and snow of this past winter Faron suggested a surf trip to the Hawaiian island of Kauai.

It took 3 seconds for me to respond “Yes”, we booked our flights and that’s how I made it through the long stretch of dark evenings and frosty roads.

Faron’s choice of Kauai was informed by his sister who lived there for a period and learned how to surf from a man name Ambrose. Ambrose has a shop on the East side of the island where he builds, paints, and rents/sells boards. He’s also a pretty wicked artist as you will see below.

We rented two boards from him that we got to pick from the surfboard tree:

While we were choosing, some other guy dropped by to check out a board that Ambrose was working on for him. The artwork was incredible:

I was pretty jealous and thought, “if it means being able to eventually ride something that looks like that, heck I’m gonna be standing up by the end of this week!” (I would also browse skis at MEC to motivate myself to learn.)

The swell was fortunately on the smaller, beginner side. It was also so so nice to be out there without a wetsuit and to look into the water and be able to see the coral-covered bottom.

But the coral could also be a bit of a hazard – a number of times I wasn’t careful getting off my board and my feet got pretty scraped up. I’m still not able to stand but my paddling and catching waves and general relationship with waves are all getting better. It was a little sad leaving Hawaii not fully “able to surf” yet but it will come.