Surfing Safari!

Last Saturday may have been one of my favorite days in Japan. I went on a surfing safari with an awesome group to roll with. Zuks and Mechen had been talking about surfing Chiba forever and in the course of various conversations, the group shaped up to include me, Ben and Bernard.

Zuks had borrowed Andrea’s ridiculously large Jeep Wrangler. We took the auto ferry to Chiba. The day was completely gorgeous, especially since 4 out of 5 of us had spent the previous day on the ship in duty status. We sat out on the top deck with the exception of a chu-hi break. Hey, start the morning off right!

We drove around Chiba for a few hours with a few snackie breaks. The main point was to get around the point of the peninsula to see the waves on the ocean side. We scoped out a few spots before deciding to stop at a really nice reef spot. It was a difficult spot to surf even for the experienced guys because the waves were breaking left and the current was pushing us right. I had an awesome time. BTW, I’ve never surfed prior to this. My paddling is pretty set, but I have to work on the whole pop thing. But I had fun trying and using the surfboard as a boogie board worked!

We were all kind of wiped when we started driving back, but all of a sudden we saw an AWESOME beach spot where we had actually looked at earlier in the day. We walked down to the beach and I decided that we were definitely going in. Mechen was with me and we convinced the other three, mainly with the “When are we ever going to be here again?” argument. Pulling on damp wetsuits in the fading light of day was slightly unpleasant but the surfing was so awesome that everyone was really happy we stopped.

We left around 1930 and headed back to the ferry with a growing sense of foreboding that maybe we really should have checked the ferry schedule for the last ferry of the day. After getting a little lost, we arrived at the terminal exactly 27 minutes after the last ferry had set sail. So, we went to dinner and ate just about everything in sight. Then we took the tunnel/bridge across the water to Yokohama. By the end of the night, I was definitely done with being in the car after multiple “scenic routes”. But there’s no way it could have been done without wheels and it was an amazing trip. I was just a little cranky after being in the middle seat all day-stupid short legs not needing legroom!