The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘I felt like a real surfer – until disaster struck’
Mark Carroll’s ‘surf guru’ had him riding the crest of a wave, but not even he could prevent what happened next
It was all going smoothly until my arm popped out of its socket. Day three of a week-long learn-to-surf programme in Sri Lanka, and there I was, happily catching another wave. With a body of warm white water frothing away beneath my board, I nonchalantly prepared for a cruisy ride to the white-sand shore, and the ensuing plaudits of my Aussie instructor, Steve.
But then my shoulder gave way. Amid Steve’s shouts of encouragement, I’d brought my arms up into a press-up position – or “chicken wings” as he called it – ready to spring to my feet, when an ominous internal clunk signalled that my arm had slipped its sinewy moorings.
This was nothing to do with Steve’s excellent (not to mention patient) tuition, you understand, but the re-emergence of an old injury. Over the years, a combination of bike crashes and snowboarding slams has left me with “lazy” ligaments – prone to occasionally dropping the ball ( joint).
In truth it was more inconvenient than painful. Having wiped out and made my way to the surface, the trickiest part was shielding the offending limb from the oncoming waves while waiting for it to spring back into its socket – which it did. Eventually.
Until this point, it had all been going swimmingly. Arriving a few days earlier at the Anantara Peace Haven Tangalle, on the island’s south coast, I’d enrolled on a beginner programme at the resort’s in-house surf-school,
Tropicsurf, in a bid to master this trickiest of board sports.
With nearly two decades of snowboarding and wakeboarding under my belt, I’d always given surfing the swerve – put off by the prospect of bunking down in a surf shack with a bunch of random strangers.
But with top-notch Firewire boards and a 10-step programme that can take you from beginner level (“Kook”) all the way to “Kelly” (as in Slater, the 11-times world champion surfer), Anantara’s in-house “surf guru”, Steve, claimed he would have me up on a wave by lunchtime on our first day together. Good luck with that, I thought at the time.