Session 5010: Swamis and the Pipes

We packed up a room in Laguna Beach and headed towards San Diego. Our next destination is Pacific Beach where we will be staying until Sunday morning. I will be using this location to surf La Jolla and San Diego breaks.

From San Onofre to Oceanside is this huge military installation of Camp Pendleton. It is always a boring part of the drive since the highway runs much more inside, and it is hard to see how the ocean is, but I always wonder if this area is opened up to the public, it will open much more surfing options.

We turned at Carlsbad to check out the breaks there, and it was rather mellow there. As we drove south from there though the break size gotten bigger and right where the power plant is, the breaks looked overhead today. But we decided to continue driving.

We finally reached the town of Leucadia, we looked at the neighborhood, and wound up at the Swami's temple ground. I pulled into the parking lot but it was a zoo. There were cars double parked and it was almost difficult to get out of the lot. We drove down the highway a few blocks and finally found an empty spot. It turns out that it was a good spot to take the picture of, so here are couples of pictures. From this cliff, I looked further south; I found the break to be a bit easing up and not as packed. This must be the Pipe that Jocelyn was talking about.





The wave quality looked good. I saw a guy getting ready to leave with his board split in half right in the middle, so wave must be good! So I decided to go in, but as it turned out that paddling out was very hard and I was exhausted in just an hour of surfing, and good amount of sets were closing out inside. The outside waves looked a bit too fast and big for me to catch, but those who do catch were really ripping. I had a couple of good waves, but wish that it was a bit mellower for my skill level. This location felt more like surfing at the OB. It is shallow for quite further out, and if you are further out, and your skill good, it looked really rippable. My wife mentioned after the session that I looked like I was "out of league" and I know that's sums up the skill level of people here.

Today, it looked like further south I go, the waves get bigger. At Pacific beach, it was just a massive close-out mess.