Session 5018

5018

Today, I had a few not so surfing related errands to do in Santa Cruz. But having said that everything I do in Santa Cruz, or for that matter, anything I do leads to surfing, right? At any rate, driving to Santa Cruz means to take the highway 1 and that means basically my eyes are cocked 45 degrees away from the highway.

On the drive down definitely looked disorganized gnarly mess until Waddell Creek, at that point I am fairy certain that Manresa will be breaking, but not in the city breaks. Took care of fixing the bathroom fan in my apartment and by then it was close to 4 PM, and it was now on an incoming tide so we (my wife and I) went out there. It was sunny in SC and that was good but a bit windy and cool. But the wind basically mellowed down at the beach so we had some decent beach afternoon there.

When I got there, it looked like the typical summer wind swell breaks at Manresa with a lot of chest level breaks inside and some shoulder high level breaks from the outside that came may be every 5-10 minutes. So I pulled out, as you know already my favorite Fish. This board has been performing so well in my past several sessions that I am so happy that I got it. It was in the used section of Freeline shop with fairly shotty rail ding fix work, so I took it and fix it up "as we go." Now it is in a very decent shape, and it just let me catch just about every wave I go for in these types of conditions, and especially with some recent advancement in take-offs, I am doing a lot better in terms of the initial get-go parts now.

Today my wife was watching and critiquing my surfing. I tried my best to show my best ripping available, and usually when she is around I don't do very well or when I had the best ride in a session, she was looking the other way etc. I did warn her that I do rip every once in a while but these are very rare so make sure to keep watching every ride. And finally she saw me one ride, according to her "I was trying hard for it."

So this confirms the following aspects of my current state.

? I am definitely catching just as many waves as some of the better people. That's good. The initial take off positioning is better now and also I have much more paddling muscles to get into the wave regardless of the size or the speed. Along this line I am judging the wave a bit better too that is contributing to the success.
? I don't have the speed and agility yet. I am keenly aware of this issue, and I still hit the bottom of the wave too soon and too straight too often then stalling out. Better surfers seem to manage to do turns sooner towards the top to get into the wall soon then gain the speed as they descend on the wall. This means that they are up on the board even sooner than me and taking advantage of the power of the wave.

So while I try to polish up the take-off skills, I now need to start to perfect what comes after that, the actual riding part of the wave.