Sunday, October 08, 2006

Quality vs Quantity

Recently, one of a StokeMaster.COM member wrote to me personally about the importance of enjoying surfing as an experience of being there rather than thinking in terms of how many waves, what types of equipment etc. I totally agree. These days, we talk a lot of things by numbers and we are almost being controlled by them. Almost any business sections of newspapers talk about the Dow Jones average, and a lot of people think of professional sports like baseball and football in terms of the scores and averages.

I do not particularly disagree with these approaches, but we should not always lose out sight.

I had a late afternoon start today, and I only had about 30 minutes of water time, but I was glad I did.

In the fall especially around the time sun sets, you can definitely feel the changes and experiencing the changes in the water is something that I look forward to this time of the year.

I was at a place where you need to do a lot of ducking through to get to the outside. But the sun was just directly ahead of me, getting lower and lower into the horizon. As I paddled out the sun was shining through everything. It was shining through the nose of my board, backlighting the board. As the wave come closer and ready to dump over, I also get to see the sun shining through the thin part of the water. It is orange on top then gets into the dark green hue into complete darkness. I like the feeling of going through the water as I can shoot for the light.

Other than the sound of the ocean there was not any other. It was so quiet and nice.

There were several people watching the sunset at the beach, but I don't think that unless you surf and in the water they would not experience this type of the mixture of color and light.

And that was a heck of a quality experience even though I only caught one wave.

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