Tekendra Parmar is a writer, editor, and kook surfer living in Brooklyn.

This is a story about me not being great with numbers, more than it is about surfing. What people usually do when they’re going out, to make sure that they’re comfortable in the water, is look at an app called Surfline. They look at what the weather conditions are going to be and how big are the waves. For me, the limit is usually about three to four feet. I haven’t been surfing that long. My sweet spot is two to three feet. Three to four feet is getting there. Five feet and more, that’s where I’m a little nervous. Because I’m not terribly tall, five-foot-ten, as the waves get steeper and bigger things get a little scarier for me.

Last November, I was out in El Salvador, because Bukele has been telling the world about how great El Salvadorian surf is. They’ve really built out various surfing towns. One of them is called El Tunco, which means “The Pig.” They have viewing stations with binoculars to see people surfing in the distance, because the main break is pretty far out there. The first day, I’m on a longboard and I don’t fully know where to get into the water or where the break is going to be. I get in at a very inopportune place, a 30 minute paddle out from where the waves are actually breaking. So I paddle out and catch waves at El Tunco. It was really fun, but I was worn out.

It was Thanksgiving. I was with my friend who I’ve been friends with since college. We used to do Thanksgiving together in New York. His sister works in the fashion industry, so on my first Thanksgiving with him, this supermodel Jeisa Chiminazzo cooked us Thanksgiving dinner. This was a lot more low key. It was just him and a couple of his local friends. We were breaking bread and drinking wine ‘til the late hours of the night. I didn’t want that to get in the way of a day of good surf, so the next day, Black Friday, I got into the water delirious from Thanksgiving dinner. I’m super hungover. My body is super tired, my back is completely sore, my core can barely stand up, but I’m gonna surf again. 

I look at this spot called El Zonte, which, if you are familiar with tech bros, you know is Bitcoin Beach. It’s the first place where El Salvador was experimenting with using Bitcoin as a transactionable currency. I check the Surfline for El Zonte and it says three to four. What I don’t realize, to my detriment, is that when you travel from a country that uses the imperial system to a country that uses the metric system, Surfline, without informing you, makes the conversion. So when I’m looking at three to four, I’m thinking three to four feet, which seems great. That’s my sweet spot, it’s all good. Four meters is 13 feet. So I go out to the beach. I’m trying to find a place to rent a board. I’m asking people if they take Bitcoin. They don’t. It was a completely cash economy around there. Sometimes you could pay with card, but I could not rent a surfboard with Bitcoin, even if I had Bitcoin.

Eventually, I find this guy that runs a hostel who lets me rent a board. He’s like, “I’ll also take you out.” I usually surf on an eight foot hard top — the difference is a soft top board is much more floaty, it has more volume to it, so when you’re a beginner you don’t have to use as much of your core muscles, because it’s almost like a boat. An eight foot hard top is good for my size and my experience level. But today I’m like, “Hey, man, I’ve had a really rough day of surf yesterday and I’m super hungover. Can I just take a soft top out in,” what I think is, “three to four feet of waves?” Which would be pushing it a little bit on a soft top, but not really. He’s like, “Yeah, take this board and let’s go out.” He’s on a fucking short board, which is probably the right board to be on in that environment. 

As I’m looking at the waves before I go into the water, I’m like, “This is totally manageable.” But this is a skewed perspective. You’re on a little cliff overlooking waves. They look much smaller from where you are than when you get in. Immediately, as I get into the water, I realize the mistake I’ve made. I’m like, “Oh, fucking shit.” He’s taking me through a rip current, so we’re gonna get pushed out into the water really quickly. It’s do or die now. I’m swimming through these mountains of waves. The good thing about a wave is there’s a peak and then there’s a slope. So if you find yourself in the slope of the wave and you’re paddling hard enough, you’re going up and you’re going down quite gently. But when you get to that frothy powercenter, you’re shit out of luck.

We've been paddling for maybe 20 minutes, trying to get to where all the other surfers are. The waves are getting bigger and bigger, and we’re getting closer and closer to the peak. At one point, I’m tiring out. My instructor-slash-surf-guide has disappeared. He’s decided, “You’re on your own, buddy, I’m gonna surf a couple waves.” Super irresponsible, but what are you gonna expect of a dude I found who runs a hostel. I don’t think he had any intentions of being my guide more than being like, “I’m gonna rent a board and show you the way out. Then you do your thing.”

I find myself in the epicenter of the wave, the peak, trying to get out. I see this huge fucking thing — we can assume that it’s a 13 foot wave. It crashes right above my head and sucks me down into the water. I immediately am disoriented. I raise up my hand to try and see how far the surface of the water is. If I put my index finger up, the tip is breaching the surface. That’s how much I have to swim. Luckily, my board is still attached to me and it’s floating up. I try and swim back up, but just as I breach the surface again, another fucking wave crashes over me. I’m pulled back down. It felt like it was 30 seconds. I’m really straining my oxygen levels at this point and I’m kind of freaking out.

I open my eyes underwater and I freak out a little more, because on the other side of me — I swear to God, I’m not making this up — I see a fin. It’s circling and wants to come near. I try and swim back up and a third wave crashes right on top of me. I’m like, “Holy fucking shit. I can’t let this happen again.” I swim to the surface as fast as I can and get on my board, which is flipped over. At this point, I’m really glad I have a soft top and not a hard top. Because it has more volume, it acts like a boat, so if I can point myself towards the shore and swim just a little bit to where the wave is crashing, I can use the energy of the wave and jet back. So I’m holding on for dear life and boogie boarding through these crashing waves. At least two of them flip me and I have to flip back. I ride the engine of the wave into these rocks, cut a slice of the board, and a slice through my heel.

I learned my limits in the hardest possible way. Now, the fear of God has been instilled in me. I don’t say this lightly. A couple years before my dad died, he went to visit a shaman and the shaman decided to predict how his daughter and his son would die. He tells my dad, “Your daughter should be aware of fire, because she’ll perish a burning death. Your son should beware of large bodies of water, because his death will be drowning.” I used to joke, every time I would get into a body of water, whether it was a jacuzzi or a pool, the Game of Thrones thing, “What do we say to death? Not today.” But that day, I came so fucking close to death that I was like, holy shit, I actually might end up dying by drowning. So I’ve been a lot more careful going out into waves. The other day, I didn’t go out because it said six feet. If things are above my head, I’m not going into the water.

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