I can't sleep. It's like being 6 at Christmas, but my dreams are darker. I toss and turn under my heavy sleeping bag, placed over the hotel blankets that were too cold last night, but now are too hot. The bed sags and every sleeping position is a yoga maneuver.My neck hurts. My shoulder hurts. I want to club myself into slumber. I know I need sleep. The taxi is due at 5:45. For 40 sols the driver will take my new friend Jochen and I to a nearby break and wait for several hours to drive us back while we surf the swell that is supposed to be on its way while I am tossing and turning and dreaming of sharks and banditos and sea urchins and the phone rings and my breakfast is waiting and it seems like the cab is late. But, Jochen, the German surfer who is (damn it all) better than I am is at the door of the hotel. I let him in and we talk while I drink this strange Peruvian coffee and snarf my crumbly toast and we decide to walk to the town square and find our own taxi and we do and in a few minutes Juan is driving down the most deserted roads I have ever imagined and I realize I didn't even bother to check the waves in front of the hotel, but at least the wind is not howling from the wrong direction.

In the distance we see the waves. Are they big? Hard to tell. We pull up and don our wetsuits with the desperation of the truly needy. We adamantly do not watch to see if it's worth paddling out. We paddle out. The break we are surfing gets the waves bigger than Pacasmayo, but it is very exposed to the wind and it is best on low tide, so the early foray was necessary. We've arrived just after daybreak and the waves turn out to be fun for the first hour. Then they back off. Long lullsand closeouts become the order of the day. Of course, like the whole trip, the word potential keeps screaming in my brain as I pump in the mush and flail in the closeouts. AUGH! It's awful when sure things go wrong. More surfers show up together. One is from Lima and one from New York. Happily, the other people on shore are their non surfer wives. Like a jerk I drop in on the Peruvian, thinking he's a jerk New Yorker who hasn't talked to me because of his attitude problem. A few minutes later, feeling bad, I ask if he's from New York. "No, no, no," he says. Lima! I feel really bad now. He is cool, however. We all talk and surf. Jochen and I get out of the water shortly thereafter and Juan drives us back along the beach. In Pacasmayo we hit the market, buy pineapples, papaya, other unusual fruit, some bread and head to the hotel for a late breakfast.

Now, here at the Hotel Pakanamu in Pacasmayo, the wind, the waves, the beer, the pinapple juice, and the fact that I am not in the water, combine to tell the story. I am writing out of a desperate desire to be doing something productive when I should be surfing. If only... The frustration of "almost" tastes like the dust of cold embers in my mouth. The waves in front of the Pakatnamu are breaking in the sideshore wind with total abandon and completely diregard my fervant prayers that they be much bigger. Surfing these crappy waves would be like putting 6% hydrogen peroxide from Australia into my wounds: It might heal them, but I can't get past the pain. The pain of "almost." In the language of my experience Peru has come to mean endless potential almost realized. Almost. Almost. Manana. Jochen can feel that tomorrow it will really happen. He swears it. I desperately believe him.

Surfline's forecasts for South America are dismally out of date and I can't for the life of me remember (or find on Google, at these snail's pace Internet cafe's, God bless them) the URL of that surfing buoy weather website, But, from what I can piece together, it seems like tomorrow the swell starts building. Wed. it peaks out, and Thursday it starts to drop again. That means the day I am traveling back to Lima will probably be the best day of the last two weeks besides the day I surfed San Gallan. Thank God for the day at San Gallan!

Pacasmayo is a cute little town, however. I don't know why I like the Pakatnamu, but I do for some strange reason. I feel like Ernest Hemingway in this little seaside town. But, I am not dreaming of lions, walking on the beach. I am drinking Pilsen Callao and praying that whatever god rules the waves of Peru will lay some small mercy upon me.