Tenerife has become the winter go-to spot for slalom sailors, but let’s not forget Tenerife in winter can also offer huge Atlantic surf on more exposed parts of the island. Visiting Polish PWA racer Maciek Rutkowski took a break from training round the buoys to sample the big stuff.
This winter I headed out to Tenerife quite a bit later than normal. It had to do with a lot of reasons, but the main one was that in previous years I would peak in May and run out of gas by September. So after a slightly longer than usual winter break, which included an amazing month in Maui, I shoved my eight bags of race gear and myself on a Ryanair flight mid-February and headed to Tenerife. Since I had less time scheduled in the Canaries, I was 100% committed to racing and if I got a few days of wave sailing in Cabezo it would be a nice bonus. Signing with FMX Racing meant I was a “free agent” for wave boards, so I phoned up Puls Boards, a local shaper from Warsaw, to ask if he had any onshore boards around 59 cm and packed that along with only 2 wave sails – a 4.7 and 4.0, no point bringing anything bigger, I thought.
NO TRADES - NO SECRET
I arrived and the trades weren’t playing ball, which left us looking around the island for wind. Actually that’s not exactly true – I knew exactly where to go, but promised I wouldn’t tell even which coast it was on. Two days of foil testing into the trip we ran into a day which had not enough wind for slalom and too risky of a shorebreak to launch and come back in one piece with our super high-tech expensive foils. So we decided to drive up the coast to a place I had surfed multiple times and was pretty sure was the wave I saw German local ripper Jochen Stolz post pics of all winter on Facebook. And, as my friends hate to admit, as usual I was right (trying to keep a straight face while saying that). It was a bit funny seeing Jochen’s face when we arrived there, he was clearly not happy! But at the same time he kept posting pics on Facebook all winter, I guess that’s something to note - can’t have both the empty spot and the Facebook glory!
GETTING IN
This story is from the Issue 389 - September 2019 edition of Windsurf.
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This story is from the Issue 389 - September 2019 edition of Windsurf.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
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