Click for the tube rides, stay for the wipeouts. Our twice yearly advanced tube riding retreat is always one of the most entertaining of the year, full of guests who are ready to charge and push their levels which results in awesome rides and spectacular wipeouts. Check it out!
Come join us on our next one August 8-15!
At these retreats our goal will be to help you develop the skills needed to get your first tube ride. We’ll be getting up early and paddling out at sunrise, then coming in for breakfast, and paddling out again! If the tide and wind are good, we’ll surf four or five hours per day. This retreat is about surfing our brains out!
We hosted an advanced shortboard retreat in North Nicaragua with the goal of teaching our guests how to get tubed. You will see a couple of long boarders as well who wanted to come and join in the fun without the pressure of getting tubed. This is the highlight video of the week with everyone included!
There are waves for everyone in North Nicaragua and we scored an awesome swell and conditions all week. So much fun! Be sure to watch til the end to enjoy the hilarious wipeout reel!
Surf With Amigas has been sponsoring the Waves of Hope sea turtle conservation program since 2012. We just committed to another year doing our part to give back by supporting the program that buys baby sea turtle eggs from poachers turned conservationists to ensure there will be turtles in the lineup for years to come!
See below for the video we made way back in 2012 in our first year of the project. All the info is the same! If you’d like to participate in the release of baby turtles, join us for a retreat in Nicaragua.
At Surf With Amigas, we are always looking for constructive ways to engage with the communities where we host retreats. Whether it’s funding sea turtle conservation, donating school books to indigenous children, giving scholarships for higher education, or encouraging women to participate in sports by sponsoring a local ladies kickball team, we feel good about giving back wherever we are.
In this case, we have become friends with an amazingly inspiring woman named Hadas, who owns a vegetarian cafe and surf view cabanas as her day job, and offers art classes to kids and adults to feed her passion for art. She runs an open art studio called De Colores in Pavones, Costa Rica.
We are so happy to donate funds to support free art classes for local children to explore and express themselves through color, textures, and the allowance to get messy! Here are a few photos from a recent class.
By supporting us, you are supporting her, and thereby supporting them. Thank you!
You may have heard the saying “its not the destination its the journey”. It has always kind of annoyed me because the journey normally means long plane rides, delays, layovers, canceled flights etc., and I just want to get to the destination already and skip the “journey” part. But, it doesn’t have to be that way at all. It’s good to think of the journey as an adventure and wherever I end up, even if its not the place I had intended to go, as the destination.
My latest surf adventure was by boat with 3 girlfriends, a cooler full of beer, a comically large quiver of surfboards, and a desire for right hand point breaks. We left not so bright but very early (4am) and loaded up the boat with all of our boards. We brought long boards, mid length boards and short boards. The great thing about traveling with a boat full of women is that we are always prepared with stylish surf costumes, which explains the plethora of bikinis, leggings, rash guards, surf hats, and some surf sun glasses. Oh, and just in case, the snorkel mask and fins.
For those ladies who already know how to paddle into and ride down the line, we offer several advanced coaching sessions per year.
On these retreats the focus is breaking down higher level skills via classroom sessions and awesome surf sessions with our super talented coaches. This particular week featured guest instructor – 2x world longboard champ Jen Smith and super stylish longboard cruiser Macy Sivage.
Carrie edited this little video with the clips from each retreat and it’s awesome to watch the progression. We can’t wait to see where she takes it from here!
“When I came on my first Surf With Amigas trip in November of 2017, it was my first time on a surfboard in almost a decade! I grew up on the water and surfed a bit as a teenager and in my early twenties, and was so excited to reconnect with the ocean and with this amazing sport.
Fourteen months and a few more Surf With Amigas trips later, it’s so fun to look at the progress I’ve made thanks to the video footage! I’ve gone from barely being able to stand up to learning how to cross step at the advanced long boarding retreat.
The coaches at each retreat are spectacular, each bringing different strengths and teaching styles; they really make the retreats such fantastic learning experiences, both in the water and out. I feel like I have so many more tools now to continue improving my surfing at home, and I always eagerly await my next Surf With Amigas adventure.”
Two time World Longboard Champ Jen Smith joined us on two retreats in early 2019 as a guest instructor. She inspired all the ladies with her super stylish nose riding and also technical surf knowledge. Here’s the highlight video from the week.
A trio of girlfriends from San Diego joined us on our advanced shortboard retreat this year. One of them, Katarina – a badass mom of two who was charging into some bombs over shallow reef during the retreat – shared a quick summary of her experience.
It was awesome to go on a trip with your girlfriends and truly be able to surf at every opportunity. We got advice from every angle and I was able to progress further in one trip than all the rest of my surf travels combined. It was truly better than my expectations!
I have two kids and have to juggle my time in the water. Knowing I didn’t need to do the search for the right time, tide, location, my mind was free to just surf! I just needed to show up! How often do we get to do just that day in and day out?!
Continue reading “Advanced Shortboard Retreat Review by Katarina”
