Session 5186

So, in this sort of swells that are coming and at the level of my surfing, I should either have not surfed or should just have gone to some other (you know where) place this morning. But you know, if you have other buddies who'd respect is a seasoned local, you'd have to respect his opinion too. In fact if I have chosen other places it probably would not been good for me either. But then there still is a "poser" nature in me that would cause me to say, "I wish I would have?" I am sure you can all relate to that.

So this is one of the mornings that we have conspired to surf in a local beach when they are not even supposed to be "open" and then go and park where "No Parking" sign is posted all over the places and snack in to the beach and try to catch a few waves before we hit the desk.

Well, even around here, we could not escape the swells and so the breaks were ugly and not really catchable "you break your nose if you mess up" sort of waves. Plus they are beach breaks as such they were shifty and the "best" peeks seemed to have moved around a lot. This is to mean that I say "Let's go there!" and we paddle 5 minutes straight to "there." Then, what happens, "was there" start to break with nice shoulders. I don't think that people living in Santa Cruz or Rincon would totally appreciate what we have to live by, but in most of the times that we have to live with. The funny thing of this is that after a while, you'd say "Hey this ain't too bad." And I guess, you might call us either "addicted" or "nuts" of sorts. But may be it is not bad, even if this means duck diving with sand stuck in our eyes and gritting our teeth, and creating a straight horizontal stress lines on our boards. Every once in a while a surfable shoulder would come by, it is just fast enough and we take 10-second rides, while we hope that one of these days when we hit a nice big break we'd surf better than anyone because we paid our dues.

Of course that's the story that I am telling. As for me, I am just sitting duck and duck diving too like a mad man each time a bigger outside set come in.

This morning though, I finally got to surf one of the local legendary surfer that I only heard on the lineups and the Surfrider meetings!

Gosh he was good.

He takes off in the waves that I could not, then he manages to go down and kick out through the waves back out back into the back side of the wave! I have not seen that happen before!

Then he paddles back and says to me "Minikui Nami" (Ugly waves) in Japanese. What a dude!

So if the waves suck there always are all sorts of excitements on the water!

The adventure continues.