For the first time, the competition, which combines the 3 disciplines of surf, kitesurf and windsurf, included Stand-up-Paddleboarding (commonly known as SUP).

This competition is hard at the best of times and Luciano put in months of tough training to achieve his goal of being untouchable in this competition. Congratulations to him; he richly deserves the title.

You can see Luciano in action here

The guy pictured below (Luciano Gonzalez) can teach you at Swell surf camp

My abs and shoulders are sore after so long out of the water but it’s worth the discomfort

Coco…..

Ken being attacked by the dogs

me, Luciano, Kelvin, Ken, Will

Our very own Luciano Gonzalez, resident sports manager at Swell surf camp Cabarete, is favorite to carry away the trophy as he has done on two other occasions.   You can watch the video of Luciano kiting huge waves recently on http://www.vimeo.com/9539480

For kiteboarding/kitesurfing , Cabarete really is the place to learn; you can gather information on kite boarding holidays from this website, about Cabarete kite surf holidays

You can check it on this link http://www.vimeo.com/9539480

It features Luciano Gonzalez, one of the most talented water sportsmen of the Dominican Republic and a lovely person too.  Luciano will be competing at the Master of the Ocean event taking place in Cabarete, beginning the 23rd February.

I rarely enjoy a morning as much as I did this Sunday AM.

Drew and I left for Encuentro at 6am – I was so sleepy. It was worth it however. After 3 or 4 years of encouraging him to surf (after all, we have the perfect spot on our doorstep) he was never ‘hooked’.

That all changed recently and he cannot get enough of the water. No weekend lie-ins now, if he’s excited about going, it’s worth the effort of taking him and taking pictures.  Encuentro is a beautiful place to sit in the early mornings.  I wonder which other surf spots in the world are so well shaded by the trees?

As the construction of Swell gets towards the finish line, we are at the hotel several times each day.

We have been doing the garden this week – planting a huge variety of the kind of wonderful tropical plants and flowers that help to make this country as beautiful as it is. The draw back is that it is back-breaking work and we are falling into bed each evening, beaten by working hard in very high temperatures. In an hour and a half from now, we will be back again to work in the cooler evenings to finish.

I will post some pictures of our progress in the next days.

We open on December 1st and quite a few of the rooms are already booked out for December, January and February; quite amazing given that people have not seen what the camp really looks like on our website as we are not ready to take the final photos.

I did kite for 2 hours this week – that was wonderful. September has been as dry as a bone and windy too – not usual for this time of year.

How good looking is the pool cleaning guy?

Today we will go back to the Hospital to remove the gauze and stuff that it inside his nose still, despite his best efforts to sneeze it all out!

The surf camp doors are on now and today, the container arrives in Cabarete containing all the bathroom fittings, kitchen, furniture, etc. Everything looking very good indeed. Some sample colors have been painted on the wall so that we can choose the overall color scheme.