Surf Wax Japan

"The sea is foaming like a bottle of beer.
The wave is coming but I ain't got no fear.
I'm waxing down so that I'll go real fast.
I'm waxing down because it's really a blast.
I'm going surfing cuz I don't like your face.
I'm bailing out because I hate the race
Of rats that run, round and round, in a maze.
I'm going surfing, I'm going surfing."
- Surf Wax America by Weezer

Nothing like having your buddies come from 8,000 miles away to remind a guy to take a vacation every once in a while. I've posted pictures of basically the first half of Adam and Tom's trip to Japan. Everything you'll see in the Gallery, dated 05/27/2008, covers May 10 through 15. During that period, we visited Kamakura, Hakone, and Yokohama; and had a great time at each stop along the way. However, I decided to focus this post on my favorite day of their trip... the surfing trip to Chiba.

Adam's Group Portrait

I don't want to downplay any of those other places, but they are familiar spots for many of our regular blog readers. But the Chiba trip is brand new. And it was a perfect chance to test out the capabilities of our family's new (used) Honda Stepwagon, the perfect surf wagon. Chiba is the Prefecture directly east of Tokyo. It's gigantic. Closer to Tokyo, in the northwestern part of Chiba, are Narita Airport and Tokyo Disneyland. But Chiba extends south on a peninsula much like the State of Florida in the USA. And along the southeast shore of Chiba is rumored to be some good surf.

On the road from Yokosuka, the southeast shore of Chiba is a long journey. It'd likely take four hours or more to get there on the streets, because Tokyo Bay is in the way and you'd basically have to drive all the way around the bay and across the Chiba peninsula to get there. Fortunately, the wise people in Kurihama (on Miura peninsula, south of Yokosuka Base) set up a ferry port that can commute people and vehicles over to Chiba in about 45 minutes.

So at around 10:00am, Adam, Tom, and I packed up our gear, rented boards from the base Outdoor Rec water sports equipment rental place (I wish I knew a better name to call it), and hit the road to Kurihama. It was surprisingly easy to get a round trip ticket to Chiba and back. Between my bad Japanese language and the ticket agent's reasonably low level English skills, we sign languaged our information back and forth. Within 10 minutes, we were boarding the ferry to Chiba.

I used Google Maps ahead of time to give me an idea of what to do when we got to the Chiba side of the bay. Once off the ferry, we headed south, then east, across the central part of the peninsula. Man, that central area was awesome. It looked straight out of "The Last Samurai", with ancient looking Japanese style farm buildings and terraced rice fields. One of these days, I need to head that way on my own for a photo shooting expedition.

When we got to the east coast, we headed north to a spot known as "Malibu", because it's supposed to be pretty big and have a good break. The spot didn't disappoint. Actually, a tropical cyclone had passed the coast the day before, so quite a few of the breaks were shoulder high to overhead. One problem... none of us had paddled out in quite a while... and one of us was a virgin surfer. No way we were going to send Tom out in that for his first round of surfing, especially with only one working eyeball.

We also figured out at that point that we forgot to load up on surf wax. Wax gives the feet some surface grip on the board; without it we'd be hosed out there. So we asked a local about the whereabouts of the nearest surf shop. He said, "Three minutes north". So we went north. Twenty minutes later, we found exactly zero surf shops. But we did find ourselves in a knee to waist high surf spot with rolling, glassy conditions. Much better for our mostly unwaxed boards.

So we hit it...

Surfer at Our Gaijin Friendly Spot (not us)

And what can I say, other than it was the time of our lives. Great conditions, great weather, a view of a torii gate in the water several hundred yards out... the perfect surfing trip.

Another Surfer (once again not us)

We spent a few hours on the water, then called it a day. Wanted to make sure that we got some scenic pictures on the way out... and didn't want to risk missing the last ferry back to Kurihama.

Adam and Tom Relaxing with the Honda Stepwagon
(aka: The Redheaded Stepwagon)

As I mentioned at the top of the post, all of our pictures of the Chiba trip (and the preceding 4 days) are in the Gallery dated 05/27/2008.