WindsurfingUK issue 10 March 2019 | Page 55

55 How did you get into windsurfing? Before I was born, my dad and brothers were already windsurfing. I grew up watching them sailing, at a time when windsurfing was very popular. I remember messing around at the beach between hundreds of colourful windsurfing sails when my brothers were competing… The beaches were crowded and everything was painted with flashy colours, a very appealing scene for a kid! Sometimes my brothers took me on their boards and I started learning windsurfing when my brothers settled the first windsurfing Club in my beach, in the Bay of Cadiz, I was eight, so it was a perfect age to start. I was always around, so when a beginner couldn’t make their way back upwind, that was my time to sneak a board for a few minutes to sail back to the school area so they could start practicing again. They were the best five minutes of the afternoon! How did you discover waves? Even though I have windsurfed and competed since I was eight, I only started to try to surf a wave on a windsurf board at the age of 21. I had stopped competing in Olympic Class and I heard that Morocco was wavy during these months… I took the ferry with my sister and drove to Essaouira. At this time I really had no clue about how to surf a wave but little by little I started wave riding… getting many wipeouts, swimming so much, losing a sail and making my sister worried. I knew how to sail and being in the ocean didn’t scared me, but I was really not familiarized to wave riding. I tried to learn all at once, which wasn’t the best way, but it is how it happened! After a few weeks, I was riding some waves! Since discovering wave sailing I had the intuition that my life was going to be pointing in a different direction. At that point I was studying psychology but during that trip to Morocco, I stopped studying, I knew that was not me and that wasn’t my life. Now my life revolves around surfing. I started spending more time in places where I could windsurf waves. My van found her spot in Moulay and Fuerteventura a few months every year, then Portugal, France and the next step was travelling further afield and getting to surf some of the best spots in the world, like Maui or Tahiti… Since then I am living a little of a modern nomad life. uk WIND SURFING