The Rush of Bodysurfing in Rio: A Traveler's Guide
The Rush of Bodysurfing in Rio: A Traveler's Guide
THERE’S AN underground scene in Rio de Janeiro that starts early, like 5:30 a.m. Sometimes it begins the night before, when 50-odd bodysurfers who form a WhatsApp group are sharing pictures from the day—a baldheaded, wetsuit-clad wave-rider flying Superman-like across bottle-green water; a group shot of well over 100 exultant bodysurfers in sungas (like Speedos), swim fins flung skyward. The early-morning messages report surf conditions at various beaches: “Leme is firing.” “Diabo looking good!”
Until about a year ago I had no idea that the bodysurfing scene in Rio was so big. I discovered the rush of the waves there on my own. My late wife was Brazilian, and from 2002 to 2012 we made frequent trips to Zona Sul (Rio’s south zone). A lifelong surfer, I’d bring my board and a pair of fins, in case I wanted to mix it up. At the end of those monthlong visits I’d find that the board stayed in the bag while the fins were eternally dripping wet—I’d bodysurf two, sometimes three times a day.
“Everything starts and ends at the beach in Rio,” said Vava Ribeiro, an avid board and bodysurfer and a Rio native. “Also, by tradition we have the Candomblé goddess of the ocean, Yemanjá.” Anyone plagued by troublesome thoughts or deeds goes to the ocean to purge themselves of them. “That’s the spiritual part,” he said. “The other is that we go to parties at night, we drink, we dance, we wake up with hangovers and go straight to the ocean to wash it off. Bodysurfing is our Advil.”
Mr. Ribeiro and I were treading water side by side at a spot called Pepino. Grey clouds smeared the sky. Islands dotted the horizon. To our left, sloping to the sea, was a granite mound off which swells bounced and broke into waves. And therein lies the magic. Those same Land of the Lost-looking rocks that give Rio its most iconic landmarks—the seaside peaks of Sugarloaf, Corcovado and Two Brothers—also give us the sloshing bounce that creates the wedge-shape waves that bodysurfers favor.
A widow’s peak of a wave moved almost parallel to shore. Mr. Ribeiro turned around and swam over to it, his orange fins nearly kicking me in the face. I dunked under the pitching lip. Behind was a bigger, steeper one. I put my head down, stretched my left arm forward and flutter kicked. I less caught the wave than insinuated myself into it. It flung me along, the pulses and tremors going straight to my nervous system. The ride was short, as most bodysurfing rides are. The lip grabbed my right shoulder and ragdolled me under. My knee grazed the hard sand bottom. Then my hip. I popped up next to a smiling Mr. Ribeiro.
The next morning I met Francisca Libertad, aka Chica, at Padaria Rio Lisboa, a casual bakery/café in Leblon. Ms. Libertad told me that she is the sole woman in another bodysurf WhatsApp group called “Pontão.” “It’s like an anthropological study—about men, about humility. The group is a mixture of upper-middle-class people from Leblon and poor kids from the favela, and bodysurfing is where we meet.”
Body surfers at Diabo Beach in Rio de Janeiro.
Photo:
Marcio Pimenta for The Wall Street Journal
We ate pão na chapa (pan-fried toast soaked in butter) at a sidewalk table. Buff folks in workout clothes pranced past. Homeless, barefoot kids begged for change. Ms. Libertad showed me her WhatsApp feed. There were 152 messages from fellow fanatical bodysurfers. “It goes on like this all day,” she explained. “Once a month we have ‘encontro,’ where we all meet, and you get about 70 bodysurfers in the water at the same time, sometimes 10 getting the same wave. Surfers don’t like seeing each other, but we bodysurfers are exactly the opposite. We love seeing each other. We’re happy to share.”
Bodysurfing is first and foremost play. Anyone who’s ever waded into the sea and ridden the momentum of the waves is technically a bodysurfer. But the fun part is angling sideways, getting that blue-face thrill. The best place to find this in Rio is in the corners of the beaches at Leme, Diabo, Arpoador, Leblon, Pepino and Sao Conrado. Diabo is more advanced, with more rocks and currents to negotiate. Pepino is famous for filthy water.
Like freestyle dance, there are no real rights and wrongs. The biggest thing is catching the right wave. You want one that’s shaped like a wedge or a teepee—as opposed to a closeout, which looms shoreward as a long, straight wall—and you want to cut across it, parallel rather than perpendicular to shore. And you want to kick hard. Fins are not mandatory but definitely help (and they can be purchased at any surf shop). Bodysurfing champion Mark Cunningham’s tips go as follows: “Know how to swim, have a suit that’s going to stay on and kick like hell.”
FIN MEET Francisca Libertad with fellow bodysurfers at Diabo Beach.
Photo:
Marcio Pimenta for The Wall Street Journal
A couple of days later I met Rodrigo Bruno at Leme Beach. I’d heard a lot about Mr. Bruno—“legend,” “mayor of the Rio bodysurfing scene,” “human fish.” I found him in the water, one of two bodysurfers and about a half-dozen surfers. He caught a crystalline turquoise wave and did a corkscrew move that was the stuff of giddy dolphins.
Founder of the Facebook group “Surfe de Peito & Handsurf” (9,689 members), 53-year-old Mr. Bruno told me that bodysurfing was popular in Rio during World War II. “It was a cultural import from America. We called it jacaré. That means alligator. The bodysurfers looked like alligators.” When board surfing came to Brazil, in 1964, bodysurfers took it up, Mr. Bruno said. In the 1980s, bodysurfing resurged, only to be gutted again by boogieboarding. “Now it’s back again,” he said, “more popular than ever.”
Why? “Bodysurfing is the pure basics, just you and the wave,” said Mr. Bruno. “And it works well in Rio because it is very cheap. For a poor country, poor city, poor guys, the marriage fits together very well.”
I left Mr. Bruno to the surf and went for what had become my Rio morning ritual: a bowl of açaí blended with banana and granola and a cup of steaming coffee with hot milk. The açaí in Brazil is 500 times better than its U.S. counterpart. It’s stronger in flavor and vitality. You feel its jolt.
Post breakfast, bouncing along the swirling beachfront footpath in Copacabana, my phone pinged. “Put your fins on,” wrote Mr. Ribeiro. “Diabo is going to be pumping this afternoon!” I wrote back: “I’m in.”
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