The day started pretty slowly - nice not to have to get up! But we are talking leisurely here - breakfast was probably 10ish. Went down to El Medano to check out the centre, surprisingly crowded apparently, since it was hard to find a parking spot. We walked through the town and along the front, checking out the people and places. It's a small town, friendly enough, a good mix of locals and holiday makers, with no headbangers apparent - most people have controlled their sun exposure for example!
One interesting feature is the community exercise equipment - lots of the beach areas and parks have various exercise kit, like wheels to twiddle for your arms, backward swings hinged to exercise your legs, and even bicycle pedals in front of seats for static bike exercise. People were actually using this which was cool too - the old guy on the spinny arm wheels thing definitely had no bingo wings, although the rest of him didn't look up to that standard, so maybe that was his favourite. We did reckon he'd done at least 30 minutes we knew of!
The OTC is downstairs through a double door, almost the last building going South/Southwest on the front. Almost hard to spot! Ben and Adam are pretty low-key - I filled out the form, but Adam seemed like he hadn't ever considered the content when I questioned some of the items. Surely he's had sad bastards like me before!
The wind was pretty light, and the guys agreed there was unlikely to be any action for a bit, so since Jen wanted to get a particular type of Italian shoe at the market in Christiano, we walked back to the car and drove off. We nearly went via Santa Cruz when Kirsty turned right intend of left on the highway junction, but people kind of noticed and we went off on a pretty deserted junction and turned around.
The market was pretty interesting, lots of tat but some good stuff too - notable items are the F1 clothing stall (all looks genuine!), the Fli Flot Italian comfy shoe stand (which didn't have any that I liked to replace flip-flops, but Jen did get some, usually £30/pair, she paid €25 for 2 pairs) and possibly the weird sheepskin slip-on stall. Yeah, kind of like warm snuggly granny boots but cut-down, slip-on. The stall owner was complaining about business - apparently it was really down in September.
Back to El Medano for lunch, at what is possibly a German-owned caff that Kirsty likes. The chili wraps are absolutely huge, so I'm kind of glad I didn't have one since that would have meant I'd have been too full to sail. The cheese, ham and egg baguette was pretty good, as was the fresh mango juice. Good to people-watch, sitting outside on the promenade, at least one pair of very dodgy Speedo-replacing board shorts, far too tight, one lady wearing a very tight dress with not much on underneath to judge by the general shapes and imprints, a little girl on a plastic push-along bike.
I walked back to the centre to discuss options, as the wind had come up a bit with some small white horses further out. Let's give it a go! Back to the car and the guys dropped me off on the car park that they would pick me up at around 6. Strange putting on a shortie, it was incredibly hot and humid downstairs in the OTC changing room, really sweating a lot.
Contrary to the suggestion of a 7.5, I went for a 7.0 and a Starboard Futura - good choice. This combo went ok, apart from not really liking chop and also being quite hard to get in the rear straps. This is probably because I'm not used to slalom-like straps, in the outside, all mine are centralised and a single back strap. I spent a couple of hours bashing around, which didn't get boring because of the need to work at planing, using the breeze and the slight swell to help.
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