Posts tagged ‘surf’

Jan 11

big thursday

I cruise down the beach and pass through a parking lot littered with sand and kelp, the sure signs of a high tide and a big swell. Normally, there aren’t really even waves on this part of the beach. I look out to overhead sets, brown with churned up sand. Even from the beach, I can see how the long period swell is moving water deep beneath the surface. It’s anything but playful.

A pair of guys walk down the beach carrying Wavestorms under their arms. I laugh. Where there’s a wave, there’s a Wavestorm. They look excited and optimistic. The Harvest buoy off Point Conception reads 23.3ft, 18 seconds, 283 degrees. The ocean laughs at your optimism.

“We are all the idiots,” my friend writes in a text. “We just don’t know it until our luck runs out.”

the fabulous and ridiculous adventures of surfline man

Hapless yet determined, annoying yet impossible to hate, Surfline Man loves surfing more than anything else in life. He reads every last forecast like it’s truth and he spends so many hours thinking about surfing. More, in fact, than he spends actually doing it. Surfline Man knows what’s up, and has many opinions which he’ll share with you at length. But he’s also the most stoked guy you’ll ever meet. Surfing, it’s like his favorite thing!

Yes, of course he drives a Sprinter van. And yes, he bought the red fins, because the looked cool, not because they would actually work with his board. He can’t help but buy every latest and greatest piece of gear in the hope that somehow this one thing will make his life complete. You see how it is.

Here is the full archive of Surfline Man’s fabulous and ridiculous adventures over at Beachgrit, where he was born and continues to live out his days.

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It all began one fateful day: I did not know it was a Surfline Day, when untold hordes come crawling out from every nook and cranny. There is surf today! Everyone go surfing! Omg! And, obediently, Surfline Man and all his besties go surfing. — Surfline Man: An Anthropological Study

Feb 27

surfing, a love story

I originally wrote this story for The Toast, which was one of my favorite sites in the era of The Awl and The Hairpin, among others, when there remained space online for weird, funny things that weren’t really relevent at all. They were just fun to read. Anyway, I wrote this for an audience of women who didn’t surf. It’s about surfing, California, the miracles nature creates, and how our illusions stay with us, despite or maybe because of their distance from reality.

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The clutch pedal feels cold under my bare foot, and there’s sand lodged in deep between my toes. I’m pretty sure I have ten of them, but I can only feel two or three. Sky, air, sea, they’re all grey, so much so that it’s impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. The heater in my VW is episodic. It works, but never until it’s good and ready. My hair smells like kelp. My feet are so cold. I pull my beanie down lower and drive faster.

The surf is best in the winter here, when the winds in the North Pacific whip up storms that hurtle toward the coast. That’s where the waves come from; they come from the spinning winds and they come from a long way out to sea. Sometimes the storms make a wrong turn and tuck up into the armpit of Alaska never to be seen again. That’s good for Alaska’s massive snow-fed rivers and mighty salmon runs, but not especially good for surfing in California.

The best storms for surf hang out around Hawaii — because why wouldn’t they? — or they crash into the coast somewhere north of San Francisco. If the storms are too close, the surf is wrecked. If they’re too far away, the waves are too small by the time they arrive at the beach. To make good surf, the storms have to be just the right size in just the right place. It’s a miracle we ever surf at all.

But surf we do. We surf when it’s clean and perfect. We surf when it’s big and we surf when it’s small. It’s best on the low tide, but we surf the high tide, too. We have boards of every size and shape for every possible occasion — long boards, short boards, boards with wide tails, boards with pin tails, boards with a little more foam, boards with a lot more foam. They come in every shape you can imagine and some you can’t. Blown out, knee-high slop or head-high, reeling perfection — We surf it all.

Dec 3

the womens sports challenge

It’s the unique burden of women athletes that they have to argue for the existence of their sports. If an event isn’t interesting, critics are quick to jump to the conclusion that women shouldn’t have contests and shouldn’t compete at all. Men’s sports, well, of course, we have men’s sports. Men are considered the default. No one would really argue that men’s sports shouldn’t exist. And yet, it happens all the time with women’s events. No one got barreled? Well, why do they even have a contest of their own. Or at least, so runs the argument. — You can read more if you like!