Session 4.205: Fun before a storm

Sometimes surfing just before a bigger stormy condition comes, or a few days after that is a lot of fun. Waves are just powerful enough to provide good rides, but not so strong enough to smash my board and by body to the bottom of the ocean.

This morning, when I went to take the bi-weekly water samples at the Montara beach, where waves tend to get bigger sooner than other locations, it was already looking like overhead closeouts from time to time. Having not enough time on hand in the morning, I opted to surf in the afternoon. Nice thing about this time of the year is that the wind does not pick up strongly like in the summer time, but the bad thing is that the sun does sets a bit too early for me.

When I arrived at Linda Mar, there were some crushers going on at the north end, so I opted for the middle part. Even there there were mainly a lot of closed out sets, but once in a while they broke in a nice shoulder level sets. The usual strategy I use is that I just sit right in front of where waves close out, and then have it reform slightly inside. These are a lot of fun to ride, first of all because most people, for whatever reasons, don't ride them. They either wait way way far out, try to ride the waves from the outside, or they are way way inside just catching the white water. Taking off into these waves is really fun for me because I can catch almost all of them. I have been wanting to practice faster flick up, so I was really happy to have the chance to do that. I am still messing up a good many of them, or not standing up still fast enough, but a few has worked out really well. The bad part is that when people see me catching lot of waves, then they now start to paddle up my way. The good part is that it is reforming everywhere so I just take a ride, and wait these people to paddle up to where I was, and then I paddle up to a totally new section and fun continues.

As the time went by, the tide went up and situation started to become more mellow, and so I could paddle further out and surf into more real "walls". So overall, this session was a big success.

I used a 6'6 and that just works wonders when the situation is a bit messy like today for ducking through, and when I did get thrown, it is not over-powering to hang on to the board.