Buoy Illusions

How many hours of sleep did I lose last night, listening to the weather cube? If yesterday was epic, and the reports during the night were saying the swell had increased in length AND duration... how could I sleep? After all, my biking friends wanted to ride EARLY and, yes, I wanted to ride with them, but how could they possibly understand how long we have waited for this to happen?

Ah, life. It throws these tests at me that I continue to fail.

Again, I would try to do it all. I set the alarm for 5:45 a.m. This would give me an hour to surf before leaving for the biking trail. If I could have an hour, at least, it was something. I was a ball of angst. No matter what I did, I felt it closing in, and no one understood. No one except my surfing friends.

So, there I was before sunrise, waxing up on the beach, looking out at the ocean, wondering. Why did it look smaller? How could the buoys and intervals increase and it not look even better than yesterday? Plus, there were the boats. I paddled out to see so many boats speeding by, and remembered the Kingfish Tournament this weekend. Arrgggh! They ruined everything, rippling the swell, causing the waves to warble and warp. And, to make things worse, I realized I had neglected to put the leash back on the Firewire after the Costa Rica trip. It would be a true test of my ability to hold onto my board, I reckoned, and when I lost my board, well, that would be the end of surfing for me for this morning.

I never lost the board, which was a miracle.

There was this one wave that came out of nowhere. Andy had just caught one sizable one, but it was nothing compared to the freak wave that followed it. I looked at that huge wall of water rising up outside, and thought, this is it... I will never be able to hold onto my board through this. But, I managed somehow. Later, Bob would tell me that at about this same time Walter got slammed by a wave so heavy that he got sucked up and over and bounced all around worse than he has been worked for over a year and a half.

It was time to go, anyway. I said goodbye to Andy, and rode one more in.

Then I went to ride with my biking pals. It was a lot of fun riding the Hawthorne trail with them. Lucky for me, the surf was nowhere near as good as yesterday. Otherwise, my biking friends would never forgive me for what I would have had to do.