09 October 2010

A Shadow of Yesterday (Kelly Ave)

Thankfully Darren hadn't made it to Davenport to meet up with us yesterday afternoon, but he was keen to do dawn patrol today, and I talked him into Kelly over Linda Mar (eww!) since it had been so much fun at the start of our surf safari. Arriving at the sunny beach half an hour past dawn, I was dismayed to see my car displaying the outside temperature as a nippy 48 degrees. But at least I had a dry wetsuit, falling back on my old Hotline.

The waves still looked decent, if a bit smaller, and again there was no one else out. We rode the friendly rip to the outside, and caught a handful of waves each as the current pushed us northward. The tide was incoming and started to shut it down after a while, causing backwashy mush or jacking closeouts. We paddled our way back to the south where we'd started out, pausing to try for any promising waves, and eating it good a few times. I came up with an inelegant maneuver for backing off of a closeout, which is to simply sit-scoot off the back end of the board into the water, and although it was sucessful I'm grateful Darren didn't have a camera to record it for posterity.
Near our entry point we ended up sharing a peak with the only other guys in the water, a crowd of two. The lulls seemed endless and while Darren caught a wave most of the way in, I ended up paddling myself close to the beach. I was tired on my third surf in just over 24 hours, and cold in my 4/3 Hotline, which seems more leaky than my new Rip Curl. Once out of the water, we saw that the scene had changed dramatically since our session began, with only one peak really working, and a light chop replacing glass.

Surfline: Clean conditions and a small NW/SW swell mix prevailed today. Most breaks were topping out around waist high, while breaks wide open to the swell mix were up to chest-shoulder high on the larger waves. Buoy 46012: (Wave) SWELL: 3.0 ft at 10.0 s WNW / WIND WAVE: 0.3 ft at 2.9 s NNW / WVHT: 3.3 ft / APD: 8.7 s / MWD: 296°

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