Jumbled (HMB Jetty)

The swell had picked up again by this morning, and I met J-Bird, Jacob and Darren at the Jetty for a long session. As we surfed, a thick fog slowly parted to bright sunny skies.

The waves were jumbled, doubled- and even tripled-up at times. I rode a couple of fun long lefts and caught a batch of meh waves that quickly closed out or dumped me in a crash. One beautiful head-high left was lost (damn!) when my left hand slipped off on the pop-up; I was gloveless and somehow the wax had disappeared just from that side of my board, perhaps melted in the recent heat. Maybe I'll try sticking a little piece of wax in my keypocket from now on, just in case. Or make sure I'm thoroughly covered before I paddle out, duh.

Cold, tired and hungry, we caravaned to It's Italia for a tasty but slow-serviced lunch. Funny how food always tastes better when you're lightly salted from the ocean.

Surfline: New WNW (280-300) swell builds through the day as small SW swell continues to mix in. Dense coastal fog is making it impossible to get a good look at the surf this morning. Expect better breaks to see generally chest-shoulder-head high surf, as top exposures pull in some occasional larger sets. Winds are steady out of the NW making for mostly jumbled surf. Look for a 6.5'+ high tide to swamp things out by late this morning, peaking just before 1pm. Buoy 46012: (Wave) SWELL: 7.2 ft at 12.9 s WNW / WIND WAVE: 3.3 ft at 5.6 s NW / WVHT: 7.9 ft / APD: 7.7 s / MWD: 289°

My First Custom Surfboard: Enhanced Mini-Magic

My surfing has greatly improved since I got Magic a year ago, but I still have a dream to eventually be a shortboarder, and 8'3" is starting to feel too long at times. I tried my 5'8" Xanadu Rocky hybrid shortboard again recently, and it's a big step down from the longboard. I need a transition board, something in between, to help me get smaller more gradually without sacrificing wave count.

So this afternoon I spent an hour with Santa Cruz shaper Ward Coffey, who was recommended with rave reviews by several friends. Although Magic was shaped by Bob Pearson at Arrow Surf Shop, it's an exact clone of Luke's wife's surfboard, so he didn't need to put any thought into designing it. My new board will be truly custom, shaped with my size, skills and goals in mind.

Ward asked me to bring in all three of my surfboards, and then spent a good amount of time quizzing me on where and how I surf, and where I want to go from here. With the 5'4", 5'8" and 8'3" laid out side-by-side in front of his shop, it was clear that there is a hole in my quiver. On a sad note, he said the crack near Magic's stringer needs to be repaired soon, as the wood could start to suck up water and expand. He told me that if the board wasn't epoxy, the same hit would have caused much more extensive damage. Not that I need any convincing to stick with epoxy for the new board; I like the durability, but I also like that it's lighter and feels more lively under my feet.

I explained that I'm looking for perhaps a shorter version of Magic, with 7'0" as a starting length just because it's about halfway down to my 5'8". Other than that, the board design was in his hands. Ward grabbed a blank and drew an outline of his concept using a number of wood templates, his French curves. Ward agreed that 7'0" is a good length since I swim laps for a mile several times a week and have good paddling strength and endurance. Magic's dimensions will be scaled down, shorter and a little narrower, with similar rocker. The new board will also have a squash tail for more confident turn control over the fins. Instead of Magic's traditional bottom, he's adding a more high-performance type of concave, but nothing as radical as on my 5'8" Rocky. He'll put on Pro Teck Future fins, same as Magic's, so I don't have to order them separately. He was more flexible about color than Pearson since he saw I take good care of my boards, but still wanted to keep it light since epoxy is more heat sensitive. We went inside and he unfurled a thick stack of color samples. The blue I picked is aptly named "By the Ocean."

Ward says the board will be ready in about 4 weeks, in time for my birthday (it's a present to myself). There's a rule that you should double the shaper's estimate, but I'm going to be hopeful that I'll be riding my blue enhanced mini-Magic on my special day.

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°

Blowin' in the Wind (Davenport)

After lunch in Half Moon Bay, Dwayne, J-Bird and I parted ways with Dwayne's friend Rush and his East Bay buddy and began to meander down the coast on Highway 1. We knew we had time to kill before the high tide stopped killing the waves, so we stopped off to see the latest coastside tourist attraction, a dead 80-foot blue whale and her fetus. Scientists, who carved a chunk out of her body, believe she was a victim of a nautical hit and run. It was very sad, and very, very smelly. The odor permeated our clothes and lingered in the car for hours.

We checked just about all the spots I know along the Lonely Coast between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz, including Tres Rocas, which wasn't getting enough south swell to break properly. Having exhausted the little known, we turned to the well known breaks. The forecasters had lied, and the wind was coming up, but Davenport looked the best of the lot. Unfortunately, there were already about five surfers on it, and four more headed out as we did a surf check. So we continued on south, all the way to Eastside Santa Cruz, which was next to flat. The Hook was was only waist-high but crowded, with other hopefuls dotting 38th and Pleasure Point, waiting for little waves. Arrgh.

C'mon, let me carry your fish!

Back to Davenport we went, since surely the other surfers must be done by now! Indeed they were; the lineup was empty. We felt a breeze where we parked the car and suited up, but it wasn't until we reached the part of the beach unprotected by the headland that we felt the full force of the sideshore wind. J-Bird and I had trouble holding on to our longboards, and Dwayne only laughed when I suggested we swap so I could carry his fish instead. (Chivarly is dead.) We made it out to the break, then struggled against the wind pushing us away from the peak and down the coast. The water was choppy and whitecaping all around us, truly the windiest surf session I've ever experienced. I was beginning to think this might be my first skunking on Magic since I got it a year ago, but then I paid attention to Dwayne.

The last time I surfed Davenport with Dwayne was 3 years ago, and he kept trying to coax me into moving off of the shoulder and closer to the peak, where he was catching waves. Timid on large waves, unskilled on a shortboard, and lacking in confidence, I didn't do it then. This time I observed that, as at Rachel's Point, you had to be at the peak to catch the wave; shoulder-sitting would get you nada, and Dwayne was proving it out. I paddled to the edge of the broken-wave bubbles near him and waited, and sure enough, a wave came to me and I caught it. A clump of kelp near the shallow take-off zone proved a useful anchor against the near-gale. I got a few more waves, some from too far inside, riding the whitewater down on my belly until the spray cleared enough for me see the way forward and pop up, but one nice long right along the cliff to the shallows of the reef, dropping off the back in a flat-fall over sea grasses. Magic's reputation and my stoke were preserved.

Shivering as I stood on the reef after my last ride, I filmed Dwayne riding, then J-Bird. A windsurfer was sailing out from the beach as we vacated the peak, and he soon took over the spot, using the wind to get onto the waves and surf.

Surfline: Well exposed combo beach-breaks continue to see a fun, peaky mix of mid-period NW swell and old, fading Southerly swell with waist-chest zone waves and occasional shoulder high+ sets. The more sheltered spots are seeing much smaller surf overall. Buoy 46012: (Wave) SWELL: 3.9 ft at 10.0 s NW / WIND WAVE: 1.0 ft at 5.0 s WSW / WVHT: 3.9 ft / APD: 8.2 s / MWD: 307°

Better with Buddies (Kelly Ave)

My first and bestest surf buddy, Dwayne, drove up from SoCal for a wedding this weekend, arriving a day early to surf with me. It was a great excuse to take a day off and comb the coast for surf. With a deep high tide around noon, we needed to get out early, kill some time at midday, and then hit it again on the falling afternoon tide.

Dwayne wanted to see my secret spots, so I thought we'd start our surf safari at "Rachel's Point" and work our way south from there.  In Half Moon Bay we met up with my newest buddy J-Bird, who we also crammed into my MINI, and Dwayne's friend Rush, but Rush had come with an East Bay dude named John, and I wasn't too keen on sharing the special spots with a local stranger. Luckily, I didn't have to. Rachel's Point was looking too mushy for the shortboarders and John knew of it already, so we drove south, stopping at Kelly Ave in Half Moon Bay. It's not a secret spot, but the $10 parking fee for the state park is a deterrent. The guys looked at the waves for barely a minute before figuratively jumping up and down and striding back to our respective vehicles to get suited up. There was no one out, it was glassy under the warm sun, and the waves were around shoulder-high.

We had the entire break to ourselves for the hour-and-a-half we were out, and it was pretty sweet. Dwayne duck-dived his way to a peak while J-Bird and I rode a handy rip current for a dry-hair paddle-out. My hair didn't stay dry for long, though. Just after I reached the lineup, regular-foot Dwayne took a left, and I rode a nice right backside, bailing out before the sand-sucking shorepound. A good time was had by all, and I snagged some good lefts too. One wave I rode too far in, falling into the shorepound and getting sand everywhere, even in my mouth. I also earned the prize for best wipeout, getting barreled while free-falling. (Sadly, I landed on my board, and while my bruises will heal, it's got a significant ding perilously close to the wood stringer, which I'll have to get repaired soon.) Backwash from the rising tide started to limit the fun after a while, and with the four others watching from the beach, I caught my last wave, sticking the nose on the steep drop (D'oh!) and crashing (too much pressure?!) then getting a fast belly ride in past the shorepound for a graceful exit. It was time for a long lunch break, waiting for the tide to turn.

Surfline: Well exposed combo beach-breaks continue to see a fun, peaky mix of mid-period NW swell and old, fading Southerly swell with waist-chest zone waves and occasional shoulder high+ sets. The more sheltered spots are seeing much smaller surf overall. Buoy 46012: (Wave) SWELL: 3.9 ft at 11.4 s NW / WIND WAVE: 0.3 ft at 3.2 s WSW / WVHT: 3.9 ft / APD: 9.1 s / MWD: 308°

Pushing Boundaries (Rachel's Point)

When I pulled into the parking lot near "Rachel's Point", Luke was changing into his wetsuit behind his truck. I rolled down my window to ask how the surf looked, and he said, "It's double-overhead." Aaah!

Climbing the hill to survey the ocean myself from the top of the bluff, I found J-Bird and Jacob already checking the waves. I didn't see any roll through that were 2xOH, but they assured me they'd seen some too. Folks on the outer peak, mostly shortboarders, didn't seem to be catching much, and there was an inner peak that was smaller, about head-high+, with no one on it. While we were ruminating, Luke passed by on his way to the surf, gun in hand. J-Bird and Jacob decided to try farther south, and I could have gone to the much smaller but crowded Jetty. But I didn't; I decided to go for it.

There was a time, not long ago, when I would have been scared shitless to paddle out into and try to catch overhead waves. But that barrier has been broken with the handful of bigger waves I've ridden recently, and by my confidence in riding Magic. So I suited up and hauled my 8'3" up and over the hill to the beach. I was surprised and concerned to see Luke already on his way back to the parking lot, but he said he was just tired, and that I'd be fine out there. I felt some trepidation facing DOH waves without a buddy, but I was already on my way.

At the beach, a blond woman was just coming out of the water as I strapped on my leash and helmet, and she walked over to introduce herself. Kerri was a local and said she hadn't seen other girls at that break, which I told her I'd surfed a few times before. She seemed a bit unhappy with her session, having ceded several waves to a particular guy who kept dropping in on her, but she wished me better luck.

Luke about to paddle out

I had a dry hair paddle-out via the channel, dunking underwater when I reached the lineup because I was feeling hot in my new Rip Curl 4/3 on a 60-degree day. Once there, I did paddle for some of the big ones. Trouble was, they were shifty, mushing out and hard to get into, and I wasn't ever in the right spot given the crowd of nine in the lineup. A dude on a big orange SUP was absolutely killing it, but rides were few for everyone else, and I heard some grumbling about it "shutting down", "probably the tide's too low now," and "haven't gotten one since I've been out here." So I don't feel too bad, but I wanted to ride something, and moved to the inside peak.

Just like before at this break, the inside peak was jacking, and I wasn't able to land the steep drops on the few lefts I caught in the greenwater. I got one fun fast ride catching the whitewater reform on an outside bomb, and a few other short ones. The inside was choppier, and my board felt like a skipping stone on a couple waves as I got bounced along and off my ride. But sitting inside has its dangers, when the huge outside sets rolled through. Paddling like mad toward the horizon, I realized I wouldn't make it when a DOH wave detonated just in front of me, and I turtled Magic. But there is no turtling a wave like that. I was flipped and spun, the board soon torn from my grasp, pushed deep and invoking my "DON'T PANIC" mantra when the holddown went on too long. Somehow my leash was in my hand, and I climbed it hand-over-hand to reach my board, the surface, the air. I paddled back out for more, until I was too tired to play with the beast any longer. Muscles aching all over my body, I felt a bit like I'd been in a fight, but it was worth it to push the limits of my comfort zone. Next time, I will go farther.

Surfline: Long period NW groundswell peaks with shoulder-head high to 2-3' overhead range at well exposed spots, although inconsistent at times. Standouts deepwater breaks produce occasional plus sets. Small SW swell mixes in the background. Buoy 46012: (Wave) SWELL: 7.2 ft at 14.8 s W / WIND WAVE: 2.0 ft at 5.0 s WNW / WVHT: 7.5 ft / APD: 8.3 s / MWD: 281°