Steamer Lane, 29 April 2008

The tide was too high in the morning, so I planned to head to Santa Cruz, escaping the howling NW winds, in the early afternoon. I always have a bit of a motivation problem with surf sessions later in the day, since I have most of my energy in the morning. After I down a short peppermint soy no-whip mocha (which the Oracle of Starbucks says makes me a hippie), I'm energized and ready to go surf, swim a mile (my usual workout), whatever. But come afternoon, I feel more like laying in the sun on a comfy chair with a good book, lazy and sleepy. This makes post-lunch meetings a challenge, and also sometimes makes it difficult to drive myself to the beach. That's where a surf buddy can be invaluable. Before D moved away, I'd motivate him to get out of bed for dawn patrols, and he'd keep me going for the afternoon sessions. Now I have to dig deep for my own encouragement. But I did it, getting to Steamer Lane after four at a mid rising tide.

The swell was also rising, going up to head high on the Point, but the waves weren't wrapping in far and the lulls were long. About 20 people were out at the Point/Slot, but nobody at Indicators, where the waves were mostly breaking too close to the cliffs. I watched for a few minutes, and some bigger sets came through a bit farther out that looked makeable. Hmm, overcrowded good waves or empty worse ones? Easy choice. I took careful note of the locations of rocks I could see from the cliffs, and headed down the stairs at Indicators. The waves were breaking at the base of the stairs, covering the bottom half dozen steps, which were coated in slimy green algae. I timed my entry well but after two steps on the slime I feel on my butt and slid down the rest, trying (successfully!) to keep my board from bashing on the concrete or rocks.

Soon after I started to paddle out, I thought of something else I should have noted from the cliff: the location of a path through the kelp. As it was, I ended up kelp-crawling for a fair distance. Hard work but least it's good exercise. Eventually I made it to where I thought I should sit for those empty bigger sets, but I never could find them. Maybe because of the rising tide or the lengthening lulls, or more likely because they were breaking more scary-close to the cliffs than I'd thought and I didn't want to go there. A sea lion (or seal; I don't know if she had ear flaps or not) popped up nearby, and looked at me curiously as I looked at her.

It was a gorgeous warm sunny day but the wind was blowing me east, so I had to constantly keep paddling toward the Point. In addition to looking less of a kook, there's a practical reason for keeping a shortboard as flat as possible in the water, since if the nose is sticking up, the wind pushes it. I'm pretty good at keeping my nose down now though.

After a while I decided to join the gang closer to the Point, ending up I believe at the Slot. I saw one longboarder with long curly blond hair and thought, at least I'm not the only girl out here. I took up my usual position on the shoulder, but didn't catch anything. Still, I don't think I'm really at risk of becoming the World's Most Dedicated Poser. I don't just paddle out and sit there looking cute in my skin-tight wetsuit on my pretty red board; at least I try to catch waves. And I almost caught a couple - if only they weren't so mushy, if only I was deeper. At one point the longboarder, paddling back out after a nice little ride, came near and told me "it's pretty mellow over there if you want to try," coaxing me off the shoulder. Imagine that, at Steamer Lane! And I thought people were only that friendly at Capitola. So I thanked him and moved in a bit closer to the peak, thinking, sorry dude, that I thought you were a girl, but you do have such pretty hair. I was the only girl after all.

The upwelling continues with the water temperature near 50 degrees. Quite a change from Hawaii. My feet and hands were going numb despite the neoprene so I began to examine the potential exit points now that the tide had risen more. Right at the point, guys were getting in by making what looked like a vertical descent down the cliff and leaping from ten feet up into the smashing surf. No exit there. Paddling farther east, I saw both the big rocks to the stairs near the Slot and the stairs at Indicators were looking dicey. I put the risk of injury to body or board if I attempted to get out at Indicators at around 25%. But hey, this was my exercise for the day, so why not paddle around the corner and get out by the stairs at Cowells? Turned out it was a longer paddle than I thought, but the scenery was cool, with crashing waves and caves in the cliffs. I concentrated on setting my trim perfectly for maximum speed, felt the burn in my shoulders and the sun and sea spray in my face. Any day surfing is a good day.

The Man in the Gray Suit

A swimmer in San Diego was killed by a shark this morning. What a horrible way to die, and something I try hard not to think about while I'm out on the water. From The Man in the Pale Gray Suit by Kalikiano Kalei:

...What are the chances that my dangling arms and splayed out legs
Will end up as a side dish for some ancient, primordial behemoth
That nature has spent 500,000 years quietly perfecting, evolving
The most perfect killing machine ever to swim the shadowed deep?
I am no gambler by inclination, least of all to wager with the sea....

I know quite well it is not a wise idea to be by myself out here,
And yet the sublime beauty of the endless, crashing, coursing waves
Forces me to relax my guard, allay my unreasoned anxieties…until I see
The fin that is 50 yards from me, in a trough between the waves,
Its black scalpel of remorseless precision slicing a fluidic groove....

Update: It just amazes me to read that some San Diego beaches are still closed and a surf competition miles north was "canceled because of safety concerns." Hello, people, there are always sharks in the ocean. They live there. This particular one could be well on her way to Santa Cruz by now. Or maybe her big brother is lurking about, ready to snatch another triathlete, or surfer, or kayaker, next week, or next month. Who knows? The risk remains, forever. If you can't deal with it, don't go in the water. Ever.

Dihydrogen Monoxide in the Surf

Chun's Reef (Oahu North Shore), 21 April 2008

The swell had dropped substantially by the morning of our last day, so I grabbed my board and dashed down the short path from our rented beach house to the sand. (Nothing beats being that close to surf! Wish it was always that quick and easy.) I walked a short way southwest to a point break off of a public park, and picked my way carefully into the water through a minefield of spiny black sea urchins. I was wearing booties, but was surprisingly alone in that, given the sharpness of the reef and its inhabitants.

Although the break didn't look too crowded from the shore, after a few minutes it began to remind me of Pleasure Point. Several good people were taking most of the waves so I'd have to back off, or else there'd be people in my way and I'd have to bail for fear of hitting them. It was more frustrating than fun, especially as the waves were just about perfect for me, shoulder-high and definitely catchable. I did manage to snag one brief ride, but decided to get out and look for a less popular spot.

In front of the beach house there was an empty break that looked doable although mushy and short, but I was nervous about being all alone out there. Sometimes I think fear is my biggest challenge in surfing: fear of getting pounded, fear of sharks, fear of hitting the reef, fear of being alone in a vast ocean, etc. But I thought about the Litany Against Fear from Dune, which I memorized when I read the book:

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

And so I walked into the water and rode the rip current out. I had a brief scare - Don't Panic! - when a creature suddenly popped to the surface about 15 feet away and then disappeared for a few seconds, but it turned out to be a large sea turtle. Cool.

When I got to where I thought I'd seen the breaking waves from the beach, I recalled one of the advantages of surfing with others, which is that they help me to know where to sit. With significant lulls between sets, I paddled around a while before another rolled in and I realized that I needed to be farther out and farther east. By then I was unfortunately getting tired it and was getting late, but I got in a couple short and unmemorable rides before I had to leave the warm Hawaiian waters behind and head in to pack up the Xanadu for the flight home to NorCal.

Photos by guest photographer S. I stayed out too long (!) and didn't have time to take any pix myself before we had to leave the beach.

Surfline's Alternate Universe

Our rental house on Oahu's famed North Shore was near Chun's Reef, which Surfline reported was 2-3' on Sunday morning. As I've griped before, Surfline's given some crappy info in the past, but that report was so far off that I now suspect the Surfline folks inhabit some parallel universe with an alternate reality disconnected from that of our known Earth. On their North Shore, the surf was 2-3'; on the North Shore in my reality, it was 2-3' overhead. At first I thought maybe they were reporting in Hawaiian surf heights, which are about half actual, but the report also said knee-waist high. I've seen some Hawaiians who are much wider than average, but none who are twice as tall, so the report was just totally bogus.

I know my limitations, and the real surf exceeded them. After being spun ass-over-teakettle by a powerful overhead wave I couldn't duck-dive the day before, I didn't want to put myself in the way of even bigger monsters, and I couldn't go searching the coast for a better spot. So I kicked back on the beach with S and his parents, a couple bottles of wine and a good book. After baking for a bit in the hot sun, S suggested a dip in the ocean to cool off. While I was picking up wine and snacks at the grocery store in Haleiwa, he'd been on the beach for an hour and had been in the water already, so I just followed him in, leaving my common sense on the shore and failing to check out the sea scene as I normally would before entering the water to surf. We were both a little drunk, and the bottom dropped off to deep water near shore. After a minute S pointed out that we were very far from the beach - we'd been sucked out by a rip current and were still moving away at a good clip. A little voice in my head calmly said, Swim parallel to shore to escape a rip current. I turned left toward the only surfer in sight, figuring at least he had a floatation device and might help if we really got in trouble. But after swimming for several minutes and starting to tire in the choppy water, we still seemed to be going nowhere, and S suggested reversing course because earlier he had noticed other surfers drifting rightward. So not only had we been fighting to swim against the rip, we'd been going against a sideshore current too. To make matters worse, my arms were already fatigued from all the paddling that morning and the day before. And I was wearing boardshorts that extended below my knees, board crop pants really, which made swimming more difficult; I was contemplating whether it might not be better to take them off. We swam on, and after what felt like ages, with the subtle fear of drowning knawing on the edges of my mind, we finally broke free of the currents and gasped onto dry land. Looking back at the ocean, I could clearly see the current, angling outwards and down the coast toward town. Stupid, stupid me.

Later S and I walked east to another break, perhaps Leftovers, where there were some pro surfers showing their stuff on waves that sounded from the beach like a roaring freight train. At least I'm guessing they were pros, since they were very very good, and there was a guy on the beach training a fancy camera on the action. We sat on a rock and watched them for a while. It looked like they were having a blast, and I hope one day to be a tenth as good as that.

Canoes (Oahu South Shore), 19 April 2008

Before we left for the North Shore on Saturday morning, I headed to the beach for one more sesh at Waikiki. This time I wanted a shorter paddle since my ribs were painfully bruised from laying on my board without the padding of a wetsuit. (See, there is one good thing about wearing a wetsuit!) S and I walked down the beach and I spent just 5 minutes getting out in the vicinity of Canoes. There at the central town beach, even early in the day, it was ridiculously crowded; I'm guessing well over 100 people. Miraculously, though the swell had dropped some from the day before and many of the waves were too mushy, I managed to catch a few and had one decent ride, nothing fancy but it got me stoked! One factor was the relative skill level was much lower than in front of the condo, with many kooks on Soft-tops clueless about where to sit or how to catch waves. Although on the flip side, there were some very good surfers there too, and I'd see the same people taking many of the waves repeatedly from the peak. The lineup was rather a zoo, with snorkelers, SUPers, a couple riding a single long longboard together, and a catamaran cutting through to pick up booze cruisers on the beach. So the people-watching was fun on the lulls, and it was a nice sunny day in paradise.

This statue on Waikiki Beach is based on a children's story about a surfer boy named Mauka and his friend Kila, a monk seal who helps him line up the best waves.