After several weeks bouncing around surf locales in the Caribbean, John John Florence has charted his sailing journey back over in to the Pacific Ocean. In the latest installment of his vlogs documenting his competitive sabbatical on a sailboat, Florence, his wife, Lauryn, and his son, Darwin, sailed across the Panama Canal and caught a few waves on the other side of the country.
The waves he caught looked kind of fun, but nothing mind-blowing. That said, he found meaning in the human connections he made in the water.
“One of the coolest things for me in sailing to new places is getting to surf new waves and surf with new communities who are in the water every day just because they love it,” Florence wrote in the video.
This time of year, sailing north from the Panama Canal is risky business. It’s peak hurricane season, and El Niño-warmed waters have churned out three simultaneous hurricanes across the Pacific. So the logical move from Panama is to head south, which is precisely what Florence revealed in the latest vlog.
Vela, the boat he’s captaining, is setting sail for the Galapagos Islands – an archipelago with razor-sharp lava reef breaks and plenty of exposure to swells from both ends of the Pacific Ocean. Florence says it should take five to seven days to get there. Expect the next installment of his series to include exotic sea life and shallow barrels.
