Bára & Kuba On the Road

Castlepoint Surf Trip

Castlepoint Surf Trip

An exceptionally beautiful weekend. Sunny and warm. Since Christmas, Wellington summer has been really nice but mostly during the working week. As soon as the hard working days end, the sun comes down as well. Luckily not this time.

We’ve been already planning to go to surf to Castlepoint for a while, but a weather and a swell forecast were never good enough. Even this time the conditions weren’t perfect but we decided to try it.

After packing as much stuff as the others would need for a week we finally left Wellington. Just a quick shopping stop to buy some supplies and…ups…I’d forgotten my hat. So, once again back home but after that straight to our destination.

On the way there, we went through a few little sleepy towns where people were having their brunches at small cafes and enjoying the sunny day. The last hour of drive the road meandered within green hills, where the only living creatures were sheep. Again, I know. None of our trips can avoid them. But that’s because there are about 40 millions of them in New Zealand. You can easily avoid people, but not sheep.

Castlepoint is an amazing place. We’d already been there once with our friends in winter (New Zealand winter) when we had strolled up to the lighthouse and had climbed up to Castle Rock, named by Captain Cook. So this time we focused only on improving our surf skills. I like those types of beaches as that one at Castlepoint. It’s surrounded by land which reduces the strong rips and makes it easier to move in the water. Also the waves were exactly as high as I needed. I still spent most of the time surfing white water and from time to time I tried to catch a green wave but I’m not really successful at it. On the contrary, Jakub is already quite good at catching the green waves but on the other hand, he always spend ages just sitting and waiting for a proper wave ☺.

After having our dinner, Jakub wanted to go fishing. We don’t share this kind of hobby because I really don’t understand what’s entertaining about sitting and waiting for a fish. So I usually take a book with me and survive that time. However, there is one funny thing about his fishing sessions. He’s been fishing about five times so far and he always lost something. “You won’t believe what happened…” that’s how he always starts his explanation. Anyway, his score is 4 lost baits, one lost knife, one lost box and no caught fish so far. The lesson learnt – we still need to buy our dinner in supermarket.

As we didn’t have a chance to take some night pictures during our last Kapakapanui trip, we had much more luck this time, despite strong wind. The night sky was beautiful up there!

The next day, the waves were too small and we had to give up another surfing. Therefore, we decided to set out back to Wellington with an idea of having brunch somewhere on the road. On the way we stopped to buy some local food at street markets in towns which we passed by. We really like that kind of shopping because you can get amazing food of great quality and even cheaper than in Wellington.

The only disappointing thing was our intended brunch. We came to a café just before the midday and so it happened that our Big Deli Breakfast wasn’t really big because of the lack of mushrooms and sausage. However, the place was very nice as we were sitting in the café garden under the canopy, enjoying the sunshine coming through and our tasteful flat white and tea. It was definitely worth it!