BERND ROEDIGER: NOWNESS IN PUERTO RICO
BERND ROEDIGER: NOWNESS IN PUERTO RICO
BERND ROEDIGER: NOWNESS IN PUERTO RICO
Bernd Roediger reflects on his experiences at the WWT Puerto Rico event, blending personal storytelling with a playful, experimental writing style to capture the moments as he lived them.
BR: “I hadn’t the slightest idea where I was going or how I was getting there, but it always just fell into place.”
BR: “I hadn’t the slightest idea where I was going or how I was getting there, but it always just fell into place.”
SAN JUAN
BR: “So, Puerto Rico, this time I think I’ll dispense with the introductory fluff and begin my story in much the same way that I experienced it: only half coherently, with almost no structure or forethought as to a plan, I just showed up, vaguely aware of two people as I met them on my first day in San Juan.
At the airport I stumbled with my windsurf bags, wingfoil bags, surf bags and Nelson picked me up, I picked up on his vibe, stressed, excited and wild with enthusiasm, manic with a thousand conflicting concepts ready to implement but 100% dependent on the mutable conditions, which were less than positive.
Irene, his partner, flowing as always and presenting a casual energy, cruising in and out of her marketing lectures and classes while arm-wrestling local officials and processing the tired and poor windsurfers washing up on her shores. Components of trophies scattered on her kitchen table, wooden blocks needing stain, ceremonial masks of African origin, plaques for each place and division. Multiple phones ringing from various rooms in the house, a small mountain of government paperwork leering in magnetic stasis on the fridge, random assortments of promotional material varying wildly in their usefulness, this is the typical scene of an event organizer’s home the week before their contest is set to start. I slept in their son Benji’s bed the first night, outside San Juan streets were alive with sounds of both city ambience and waves crashing.
PICK UP TIME
The next day seemed to open me to the whole dynamic as it stood for the Puerto Rican wave comp, and from what I gathered from the night before, there was essentially no better place to be than with Nelson, helping him as he organized van rentals and pickups for riders/staff, he needed driver’s throughout the day in San Juan, and to me that sounded like I was assuming a role in exchange for free vehicle access. This is something I like to think of as “commandeering”, is it mine, not technically, but why couldn’t it be if no one else comes to claim it?
Marc Pare also arrived the night before and was recruited for gear transportation, this would become a partnership of sorts as he would be responsible for board bags, and I would be handling passengers. As the afternoon came, a group would be coming in: Antoine and his friends from Guadeloupe, and Federico Morisio. Now there was an Airbnb waiting for us in a place called Aguadilla, which was the town closest to Shacks from what I understood. It was perfect because most of the guys staying in those houses were coming in on the next flight, so all I had to do was play bus driver and get them, then jet off to surf. Upon arrival, Antoine insisted he get a rental too, which I thought was kind of frivolous and unnecessary as I had successfully commandeered a van. In any case I could see from my seat in the van, looking into the car rental shop, that something wasn’t working out, so I stayed and eventually I saw Antoine throw his hands up and walk out, back into the van, and on to Aguadilla with Fede, Antoine, his girlfriend Julia and our beloved cinematographer, Matteo.
MAUIZAPAS
The plan was to stop in a place called “Mauizapas” for a quick sail before heading to the house, it was a place that according to Nelson got a little more wind than Shacks usually. I was wired but ready to cruise highway speeds in a Ford Transit, I love that van as it’s so easy to drive, so comfortable and yet such a great hauler. However, driving in Puerto Rico quickly became a drag as we left the six-lane freeways of San Juan and enter more rural territory in our approach to Mauizapa. I woke Fede up with a bump on the head as I slammed into a pothole and set him into the ceiling. He woke up with a wince and looked out to see dirt roads, jungle, and asked “hey guys where are we going”, then, “is it safe?” No one answered. We were literally only a minute away from the pinned location Nelson gave us and, honestly we had no way to confirm or deny Fede’s valid question, it was a grassy field clearing in the middle of a mass of jungle foliage, classic Caribbean grove, there was a vague sense that the ocean was just through a pass in the trees, so we made for that and I parked the van nearest the path.
LOST
We all filed out and into the clearing, I was reminded then of Lost, all of us still in our flying clothes, headphones, neck pillows and suitcases littered about, standing in the midst of a jungle, peering into its shadowy depths looking for clues as to what might be waiting within. We pushed our way in. It really wasn’t long until we heard the shore break and wind filling into the canopy above, the thick jungle gave way to groves of palms waving in the breeze, we peered around a corner and found a perfect beach oasis, plus a little a-frame with about 18knots of wind. In the afternoon light, it was a spitting image of Sprecks back home, some submerged reefs here and there, forming a very distinct line of breakers foaming out the back, glass on the inside, rollers on the horizon, after all the travel, I wanted in badly.
So, we dove back into the leaves, this time navigating it like someone’s overgrown side-yard and got to pulling board bags out of the van. It wasn’t much of a sail but boy did I make the most of it, after having missed Japan, I think I was extra amped to get dialled-in to some technical bump-and-jump riding. At the time, it didn’t register that running here would mean fighting with the best for what little waves were on offer, instead I just flowed with the bros and caught what was coming to me, dropping little freestyle tricks mid-face, executing tight precise turns in the side-walls of windswept rollers that crumbled in over the shallow reefs. At times the waves seemed lined up and some poppy aerials were possible. Nelson brought up the rear in the convoy, coming out for a sail with us, I ended up borrowing his pre-rigged 4.6, this would extend the commandeering trend to windsurf gear, an arrangement that went well into the Finals Day of the contest and beyond. He was more than cool with it. I realized just how amped he was to sail, of course all the boys being here was a massive contributing factor to his stoke, but he really lived for windsurfing and was just as happy to get a session in to clear the stress from these critical pre-contest days. He kept asking “what do you think Bern, we can run here if we need to, it’s good enough?” And I would try to punch a lip with extra force to respond in the affirmative.
We stayed out for about an hour as the sun got low, I was ready to head out before dark so we could get checked in at this Aguadilla spot. We sailed back in over the exposed reef, this time I noticed all the urchins, yikes, we rinsed, derigged, changed and piled in, looking like surfers again and not castaway characters from a surrealist cliffhanger series. I’m glad I had the intuition to leave a bit early to accommodate the drive, but I was woefully unprepared for how defunct the traffic situation was when driving to Aguadilla from San Juan. Leaving at 6:30, it wasn’t until 8:30 that we rolled into town. And the whole time I felt like we were winding through a maze of food desserts, shoulder less lanes through what I’m sure were cute neighbourhoods that unfortunately felt uninviting in the night, followed by precarious and poorly lit hot-wheels tracks through the hilly jungle terrain, punctuated by brutally punishing potholes.
We were desperate for food and tried Google maps, then just looking out the window at random places with lights still on, finally we did the smart thing and thought about the locals we knew: namely our tour-friend Charlie Rovira who we knew to be the Shacks local. To our great relief, Charlie picked up his phone and told us he was eating at a great spot in Aguadilla with Takara and the rest of his crew, he pinged the location and we sped there with reckless abandon. There we shook hands with guys we’d later come to know as the core lords of the Puerto Rican surf scene, including Michael Gutierrez, former pro-skater/surfer and Caribbean Oakley rep. But at the time everyone was just a purple blob of conglomerate headlight trauma burned in my retinas, I introduced myself with a thousand-yard stare, thoroughly rattled and ready to be horizontal in an Airbnb somewhere. After food, we checked the Frenchie’s into their spot, then I finally -at about 11:30- joined the others in my Airbnb. They were kind enough to save me the twin bed, thanks guys.
TOUR GUIDE
I would learn over the next days that being the bus driver was a catch22. In many ways it was a lot of fun, zipping around Aguadilla learning the roads and routes to various breakfast spots, surf-checks, rental houses and necessary locations for running errands. It would become tedious when the crew wanted to hit Mauizapas, which was basically everyday, since Shacks was pure glass with no end in sight, Charlie told us we had just arrived when the wind blew out after a month-long spree of perfect conditions, “and its called Sarapas, not Mauizapa, that’s Nelson calling it that, not us”. So, each day I would get behind the wheel to run the gauntlet of slow country road yet bumper-to-bumper somehow intensely competitive but inept and dysfunctional-traffic w/ periodic-pothole-roads to get the gang to “MauiSapatos” as Marc Pare came to call it, a way of appeasing both the Aguadilla and San Juan camps, or infuriating both, I’m not sure. Still, we quickly learned that regardless of the name, this was a consisted fishing hole for bump and jump sailing, and we would be very grateful to have it as the holding period started and the prospect for sailing -even once- at Shacks looked dismally low.
COMPETITION TIME
Now, I’m sure if you’re reading this you followed the contest on social media and I can spare you the details of how each and every heat went down. My first heat of course went comically bad, but not entirely unexpected as I’ve proven to everyone that I’m just as capable of completely throwing for 17 minutes as I am pulling out Hail Mary’s in the last 30 seconds. What you didn’t see was the eyerolling and lamenting on the beach as Morgan and Antoine predicted the inevitable fallout of my nosediving into the Redemption Round, knowing that I’d then likely pull up hard to squeak out of Round 2 and break formation with all of the other seated riders, thoroughly disrupting the bracket and creating massive turbulence in the subsequent rounds, which is exactly what I did. You see, Morgan Noireaux, Antoine Martin and I represent the Triumvirate of IWT wave sailors and I, being the Mark Antony of the group, most often break this unspoken understanding that as gentlemen we can run our courses in parallel. It was a quiet ride home in the van after Day1 of competition…
Still, I couldn’t help but wear a ridiculous grin. Each morning the surf in Aguadilla got better and better. I hit up the only local I knew outside of windsurfing: Max Torres, and he showed me some of his home spots, turns out there are a lot and they are all quite good! I enjoyed the town and its whole Caribbean/Bali vibe. The wind was still not looking great, and we spent a few more afternoons lying in the sun at MauiZapatos postponing, cancelling, prolonging. But at this point I was also more acquainted with the local community of windsurfers in Puerto Rico, many of which came to the beach to support and interact with the event, we had many a tasty authentic meal at the behest of these fine dudes, and I was really enjoying the pace of the contest. Even the driving improved as we found out about a toll freeway, it greatly improved the drive time, and we only occasionally dimpled the ceiling with our domes.
LIGHT WIND
So far, I was in a losing position, but there was also now some hope on the forecast, and it looked as if we’d sail Shacks in the next days. I went out wing foiling one afternoon at Shacks, spending my time around the lower break with deeper water and softer waves. The waves were forecasted to come up, and it was giving Fiji and Upper Kanaha, I was very intrigued as I foiled around the reef and peered in from outside various sections, the sun plunged into turquoise rising seas and in my mind arose a eros for this down-the-line racetrack of a wave.
The next morning I had two agendas, (1) go to Michael Gutierrez’s house to borrow a particularly cool Campbell Brothers Alpha/Omega twin-fin shortboard, an item I immediately desired when Michael had taken a group of us to tour his board collection (which was an extensive throughline of performance surfing from Buttons to JJF) (2) meet Morgan at Shacks to paddle out and get thoroughly acquainted with the wave. I stopped by Michael’s place and found Takara sleeping amidst Slater’s 2010 quiver and a carbon Pyzel of John’s, slipping past him on tip-toe I found my prize and made for the door. It was only a few minutes down the road to get to Shacks and I could tell it was pumping.
SHACKS
Once there, I saw that Morgan was already out, the coolest and most collected dude on tour was playing the frothmeister, practically running over dry reef to have a taste of the corners roping off the west end of the reef. I will spare the details to avoid writing overly erotic surf fiction, and will actually compress two days in one. The first was an incredible “feeling out” of this new wave, a really worthwhile surf session in the morning transitioned into a lovely light wind (and I mean light) sail where I spent 40 minutes trying to get out the first time, then caught three waves in as many minutes, and on the fourth pulled a pretty hilariously underpowered goiter using the racetrack section of the reef I had espied from my foil the night before. When I came back in, I walked all over a family of sea urchins, just totally disrupting their lives and commandeering valuable spines from their collections, but Nelson told me that I had just landed the very first Goiter at shacks, which made the spiney-foot less annoying.
On day two, the surf really turned on. Again, my faithful “Tonto Noireaux” came with me to a slightly smaller Shacks, this time we sat right up the point where the locals drop in. There’s a ledge that breaks off of submerged (but not that submerged) reef -its an important spot for the wave as well as the plot of this ramble- and we watched two local uncles teeing off on the reef ledge as each and every set bent around it the same way. We cleaned up the unridden corners on the inside, happy to be getting a couple in a very chill crowd, but eventually the guys got tired and handed us the keys. Before leaving, this ol’ salt who looked very tuned-in to the spot casually paddled past and said “it’s about to drain out and get good” and I deeply under-appreciated how right he was. Within 30 minutes the wave had gone from a very good serviceable point break to a Tavy-Rights type wave and Morgan and I were essentially alone on the peak, cruising into only the choicest ledges that opened into wide growing high-performance faces of extreme rippabiity. I was in literal heaven, and mind you I was still riding the Campbell twin, I was once again commandeering: a little more than borrowing, a lot less than renting, definitely exercising some unwarranted possessiveness. But I couldn’t help it, this board was just so good, and so well suited to this high-performance draining reef-pointbreak that was too epic to leave unridden, despite our exhausted arms and burnt faces. We stayed out for three hours, becoming thoroughly fried despite the afternoon being a potential contest day, but we couldn’t possibly care when all that we wanted was right there, and yet I knew it was working at probably 40% of its true potential.
I don’t want to talk your ear off about every surf session, there’s really still a lot to cover here. I am looking at a photo from an entirely different session in a totally different place riding vastly different conditions compared with what we ended up competing in and I’m honestly at a loss for how to continue telling this story. There are kind of conflicting climaxes here, what I just described was a surfing climax for sure, but there comes the competition, and all that went down as the waves kept coming up, there’s the ledge I was alluding to earlier, then there’s the outer reef free-sail at Caballos and the Michael Gutierrez arc.
REFLECTIONS
You have to realize that I’m at Starbucks in Newark now and I didn’t take down any notes during the trip. The moments of pure stoke are not clear in my mind, so much as an overall sunset glow of slow-burning bliss that comes from realizing desires as they manifest in real time.
What I wish to convey is not so much how the contest played out, what my final felt like, or where I had my best windsurf wave -although I can say it was in San Juan surprisingly enough- no I just want to cherish a period of seamless coherence with a stream of pure experiences, synchronicities and connections that I can only describe as Nowness.
You see, I’m pretty seasoned at this point, enough to know that a place like Puerto Rico opens up like this only once. Fiji was like that, you know, that first year was just like stirring in a dream, it happened so fast and so bright yet so softly that I scarcely believe it was real. Each subsequent trip had unbelievable adventures, that second year was super challenging and I had all that crazy stuff happen with snapping my board in half, it was by no means bad, it was exhilarating, it was a progression. That first-time experience is like an Overture, it hints at the patterns that will be played out with each revisiting of the music, it gives all the beautiful potential in a single medley. This trip to Puerto Rico was like that, with so many various themes woven together, and as some faded out others came into sharp relief. This current moment that we’re on together, Morgan and I surfing Shacks, is the swelling into what I felt was some truly delightful high notes of wave sailing beauty. Though, there’s some controversy as to whether the windsurfing at Shacks was actually good or bad. Anyways, my butt is sore because Starbucks now seems to hate people sitting down comfortably. I think I’ll leave it at that and pick up again with the first day of competition at Shacks, when I fight my way back against self-sabotage in the Redemption Round and almost lose to even more self-sabotage.
CHAPTER 1
I hope you enjoyed chapter 1, it’s very unpolished, even for me. But I want to experiment with a style that could feel I’m just telling the story in person, stripping away some of the grand language I’ve tried to wield at other times. I love that stuff, don’t get me wrong. But I also like the idea of trying something that feels more approachable for the both of us, the reader and the writer. I’m very fortunate to have, despite my woefully infrequent publishing, actual readership, and you guys tell me what you think of my work, which is really fantastic. Just the other day a paddleboarder stopped me at Shacks and said he liked my Fiji story, and that’s definitely contributing to why I’m here writing right now. Mainly though, there’s this overwhelming feeling of deep appreciation that, as I said, I sometimes fall into with these trips, where I know its personally important to write about it, process and explore it through this specific medium.
Thanks guys, I’m gonna get up and walk around before writing more!”
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