Surfing – Gubat Bay

With three kilometers of white-sand beach almost free of sharp coral grits, Gubat Bay in Sorsogon offers water sports thrills that go beyond the joys of swimming in a blue ocean.

The bay, 620 kilometers south of Manila and 63 km from Legazpi City’s airport in Albay, faces the San Juanico Strait on the southeastern edge of the Bicol Peninsula. It has been attracting fun-loving people since early this year when they introduced skim boarding and water surfing.

“It receives a lot of waves from the Pacific [Ocean] and even though this is the wrong season for waves, still you can ride on them,” Michael Kelleher, a Filipino-Irish swimmer and surfer, enthuses.

Kelleher, 23, who was in Gubat town for a two-week vacation this month, frequents the middle portion of the bay where the waves roll down unhampered to the shores. He lives and works as an engineer in Cork City in southern Ireland and was a champion in a national swimming competition when he was 18. He represented his country in the European swimming competition.

‘Not challenging’

Although he has surfed in Ireland, France, Morocco and Jamaica, Kelleher finds the Gubat Bay a safe place for surfing because the shores are “not challenging” (read: not dangerous because the area is not coral reef), which, he says, is “good for surf school.”

“You can teach people how to surf here and invite tourists to see it for themselves,” he says.



BJ Villaroya, 22, an agribusiness farm operator and one of the pioneers of surfing and skim boarding in the bay, reveals that the good waves come in the stormy months of October through December.

Villaroya cautions that the place is quite dangerous to the uninformed because it is where the sea currents converge, creating strong undercurrents. But, he says, one can learn how to handle the situation by observing the color of the water.

“The undercurrents are located where the water turns brownish with the swirling sand underneath. One must not counter the undercurrent once caught in it. You must go with it until you reach an area where it ends and then swim away from it,” he advises.

words by Juan Escandor Jr.
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 02:34:00 06/26/2008