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Puerto Rico

They called it the “East Coast Hawaii” and even our wave-sailing hero of these days, Dave Kalama, had been quoted calling it as good if not even better than the windsurfing paradise in the Pacific.

Our researches revealed that a trench with about 8,000 meters of depth starts in the North Atlantic and ends right in front of the north coast of Puerto Rico. That looked like a no speed limits highway for North Atlantic winter swells and sounded promising. We also found out that the island was situated far enough south to stay in the winter trade wind hemisphere. That meant fairly regular and fairly strong side-shore winds for the Puerto Rican north shore. This sounded very good. Solid waves plus starboard side-shore winds was exactly what we were looking for.

So our expectations for our two months stay in February and March on the island were very high.

Saturday, Feb. 9th. We landed at San Juan airport at 9:30 in the evening. It took us a while to check out with our bulky luggage. During that time consuming process we had made contact to some local girls who offered us to spend the night in the garden of their mother´s house in Arrecibo. We were really happy about that offer as we had not pre booked any accommodation. But when we finally had received all of our luggage it was very late and all car rentals were already closed. We were stuck at the airport and spent an uncomfortable night sleeping on our boardbags on the street in front of the entrance hall.

Sunday, Feb. 10th. I got up at six and organised something for breakfast. Then we rented a Mitsubishi space wagon, (over-) loaded it and drove to Arrecibo. We found the house of the girls but nobody was there, so we went to the beach where we had a first windsurfing session in light winds. Afterwards we drove back to town, had some food in a bar and tried to phone the mother of the girls but couldn´t reach anybody. So we gave up this option and rented a shack at the beach. Christian drove back to San Juan to return the rental car.

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