Montara, 7 March 2008

It's interesting that my surf buddy M just wrote about "The Confidence Thing" as the other side of the coin from fear, and that a Western Australia surfer also thanked me for having the guts to write about fear. Because today was all about facing the fear.

It was supposed to be a small day, so I loaded my longboard and expected to be hunting for knee-knockers. Montara, I thought, would have the most enthusiastic ripples, and as I drove past the near-flat Jetty I still wasn't expecting much. As it turned out, Montara was probably the best place to be this morning if you were a shortboarder, with curling, punchy waves going near head-high on the sets. There were no other longboards in sight; it was another bout of brought-the-wrong-board-itis, and I was sorely wishing I had Nemo the fish or even my Xanadu Rocky shortboard. In retrospect, I should have driven on and searched for something more suitable, perhaps even at Ocean Beach, which was reportedly offering up weak summerlike waves. But I had forgotten that Montara always looks smaller from the cliff, and when I reached the sand, fully suited up with the Blue Behemouth, it seemed to late to turn back.

Summer conditions were absent and I searched for an accessible entry point through the powerful shorepound. The ocean quickly rebuffed my first attempt, spitting me back on the sand, so I walked a bit farther down the beach and made it out on a lull. There, looking at the backsides of waves beyond my comfort level on a big board, I had to face my fear of the consequences of failing attempts to catch them, a fear that seems to grow whenever I'm in a period, as now, when I haven't ridden even one damn wave in long time. It took a while to work up courage to try, including paddling off the crowded peak onto an empty one that looked a little mushier. I had no sooner attempted to back off a closeout that took Big Blue for a ride and me with it, dragged by my leash, that I got caught inside and had a mercifully brief hold-down. Then the rest of the set waves crashed in, one after the other, and I could only push my board away and dive down, tumbled like a bit of flotsam in the surf. Washed near the beach, I still had to make it out through the shorepound, getting rolled to the edge of a trough where I could finally touch bottom, then grabbing my board and running out of the water before the next breaker crashed down, finally safe on dry sand, panting.

At least I cleaned the cobwebs off of my longboard.

Standing on water.

Today's pix were taken with my new GoPro Digital Hero 5 wrist camera. I'll review it later.