Surfing connects

I guess everyone will agree with me that surfing connects people, in one way or another. Every day guiding I meet new people and every person has their own cool stories. You who know me might think bye now; ”But dude when you surf the only thing I hear you say is ‘heyhey when your in my inside, or maybe a wissle when there’s something spectacular happening. But fur sure not much talking?” True. Usually when I’m surfing I’m really in the zone and I seem to have a problem to focus 100% and talk at the same time. So I kind of don’t do that.
But there is still an average drive of 45 km from our house to the beach and some downtime where I do try to be social!

A few days ago I met an Irish guy, nothing to crazy, just a guy with long-ish hear, like we all have nowadays. He was actually a pretty special dude. He had a very nice story to tell us from the backseat;
He had been to this typical Irish exposition with two of his friends just before he went for a short getaway to Portugal. And at the expo there was a spiritual type of guy that handed every visitor a card with a word from the ‘old Irish language’ that is about to be forgotten. Every visitor got his own card with that one single word. From that moment it was up to the visitor to do with the word what he pleased to do with it, but the essential was to keep it alive. Now the word that the spiritual dude gave my new Irish friend was ‘SMEACHAIRE’ – vibrant soul, enjoyer of life and basically someone who shares good vibes. And my Irish friend on his term told me and my friend that we are like that as well! So I am a ‘smeachaire’- sounds sweet right!?

(Irish friend on the left and on my right my Argentinian bro Lucas who saved my ass by driving me while the Van is at the mechanic again, or still, or whatever.)

The next morning we basically agreed on doing this little adventure one more time but now with real waves (and no go-pro). But before the adventure was about to begin Lucas had a little gift for me that he wanted to show in the hostel he works:

The session that followed goes in the books as one of the best I had this whole summer, but I was stoked as a (*Dutch)child who just got his first bicycle, before that happened.