Author Archives: Erwin A. Dence Jr.

Corky Carroll, Billy Hamilton, & a Rising Swell

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CORKY CARROLL, BILLY HAMILTON, AND A RISING SWELL

“There was nothing showing at Trestles; Oceanside was flat, but now, look at this.” Corky Carroll to someone else, while perched on a railing at the top of the stairs at Swamis, 1969.

Though the comment was not meant for me, I did look around. The surf at my favorite point break was- reaching back for the proper phrasing from the time- ‘classic,’ ‘epic,’ just about as good as it gets- four to five foot, glassy, sunny skies putting sparkle on the breaking lips, proper shadowing on the faces.

I’d say it was ‘perfect,’ ‘magical,’ other than the now-growing crowd of locals, semi-locals, and the Orange/L.A. County surfers (we) North County surfers always complained about the most (maybe other than the Texans in the summer).

They came, car-pooling, drifting south like the smog that usually, but not always, stopped somewhere south of San Onofre. They drove away from their crowds, added to ours.

Ours. Not that I wasn’t still an inland cowboy, still living in Fallbrook. But now I was working in Oceanside. This meant something. Maybe not to a true local.

In fact, one of the first surfing-related near-fistfight I ever witnessed was at Swamis, 1966. The older surfer was almost pleading with the guy who’d snaked him, taken off fin-first in front of him on the inside peak.

“I’ve been surfing here for over fifteen years,” the Snake-ie said. “Well,” the member of the Northern Horde said, grinning toward his fellow riders (or raiders, perhaps), “you should have learned to surf it better.”

Paused at the top of the Swamis stairs, I must have had that can’t-wipe-it-off expression of satisfaction, mixed with a sort of righteous exhaustion. The surf hadn’t started this good. When I paddled out, three hours earlier, it was small, the high tide dropping just enough to allow the waves to break outside of the bigger rocks, just far enough out for two or three others and me to get some in-and-out quickies.

As the tide dropped, the swell increased. An hour into it, I was back-dooring the peak, sliding the wall, and, with maybe just a couple of aggressive looks, maybe (I’d prefer to think not- but probably) a couple of whistles or that one syllable war whoop, guaranteeing each wave was just mine.

“Mine.”

Oh, I was dominating; for a while. Now, however, with more surfers, the two peaks working, the group at the top of the stairs, Corky and his crew, and I watched someone smoothly, seamlessly take off, bottom turn, top turn, rise and drop across the wall, and then pull the first one-eighty-plus cutback into a high-and-off-the-curl top-turn into another bottom turn. I’d ever seen. If not the first, definitely the best. I almost dropped my board.

The surfer had the solid, split-leg stance that, if you made a surfer action figure; this all-purpose, any-board, all-wave-size stance would be the one you’d build into the mold. Classic.

“Billy… Hamilton,” one of Corky’s cohorts said. Corky and another Northerner, having already identified the surfer, shook their heads. “We goin’ out?”

I’m sure I gave Corky the same questioning look his car-pool-buddies did. I’d seen Corky in the magazines. I’d seen him on “Wide World of Sports.” He was one of the first world champions. He was competitive; and this was another arena. Now he was perched on the railing, the highest available throne, surveying the surf.

He looked at me, still in awe at the Billy Hamilton move, still anticipating his answer. He looked at his crew, back at me, gave me a ‘keep moving, kid; you bother me’ look.

“Oh, yeah.”

If I chose one session to mark the peak of my own surfing abilities; this would be it. The backside of the peak of wave knowledge/fitness/practice, practice practic- features a slow downhill with some just-as-memorable sessions. For this I’m grateful.

Still, watching the water as I walked to my car, I knew I was no Billy Hamilton. I knew I might never have the audacity to purposefully bounce off an oncoming curl. I also knew I would try.

But, on this day, I had other places to go, and I’d already seen what remains the most memorable single ride I have ever witnessed in person. I didn’t stay to watch Corky and his cohorts. No offense.

Guest Writer Stephen Davis on ‘Nose,’ Talking Story

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            GUEST WRITER STEPHEN DAVIS ON ‘NOSE,’ TALKING STORY   

 “The restaurant smelled like vomit and I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.” I was telling the story to our accountant Dolph, short for Adolph.  “You could smell it in the kitchen, the dish pit, and the twelve-top in the bar next to the wait station could more than likely smell it too”.  

Katrina, my stepdaughter, initially said she couldn’t smell anything.  Five minutes later she said that someone had, indeed, thrown up in the ladies’ room and that I must have a good sense of smell.

Having a discerning ‘nose’ is something I must have developed over a lifetime of cooking food and working in kitchens.  I never really thought about it consciously until now, but you can tell a lot about things just from smell.

 Once I was at a friend’s house when the retired fire chief, who was a neighbor, knocked on the door. He said my buddy’s chimney was on fire. After a career of fire fighting, he had a nose for chimney fires.  Both of us ignorant of the blaze, we were stoked the chief caught it.

“I think it might be a good idea to replace the fan in the ladies’ room one of these days,” I insisted. The fan had burned out two years ago and I had pulled it to get the part number. We never bought a new one because cash had been tight until the thought had dropped off everyone’s radar. 

“Having a strange hole in the ceiling of the ladies’ room for two years is just a buzz kill too,” I said.  No one is super comfortable using public restrooms and one having a strange, pervert hole in the ceiling just makes it more awkward.

The truth is, we’re a good team; Dolph and I.  We opened our restaurant in Port Townsend, Washington just before the banking meltdown and, somehow, we were able to skate through the recession, the Hood Canal Bridge closure, and another ferry crisis.  We pulled it, but it was tight, and the women’s room fan was a luxury no one considered until the smell brought our attention back to it. 

The reason I was involved in the restaurant business at all was because of my love of surfing, not food. I started working in kitchens to get through college by working nights.  As it turns out, working in the evening is great for surfing too, and, being an art major, I  just stuck with it after college. 

What gets confusing is that people think I must love food because I’m a chef.  Recently, reality cooking shows seem to be everyone’s window into the professional kitchen. Food becomes pornographic.  We now watch people eat for entertainment, like drooling dogs begging at the dinner table. 

That’s great, but waves are my true passion, and cooking has allowed me to ride a lot of them.  Having my weekdays free allowed me to surf every day waves were breaking; and I often surfed good spots alone.  I could go on long surf trips during the off season and not worry about losing a good paying job.

Like I had a good paying job.

College was amazing, but I didn’t see how it would help me surf more, so I bailed. That’s how I found myself owning my own place and talking to Dolph about foul smells in the ladies’ room. 

Foodies would often call me on my surf-over-work ways. When I asked a previous employer for a raise, he declined saying I didn’t “put enough love in the food“. 

“Whatever,” I thought,  “he should try putting love into two hundred-plus dinners a night.

 Assembly line workers don’t always put love into the torque wrench either. Maybe they‘re doing their best to make a buck for the fam and do some bowling at the end of it.  My boss had obviously never seen me praying for surf to a barrel-shaped tortilla chip on the dash while driving to the beach. 

People are extraordinarily fortunate when they get to do what they love for a living.  I do enjoy cooking for folks, but surfing is my love. 

I wandered out of the office and down the stairs to get back to work. A few minutes later Dolph comes down and says, “You really know how to tell a story,   your stories are always WAY beyond everyone else’s ”.  

“Oh,” I say, “It’s cause I’m a surfer. Talkin’ story is important to us!” 

 

 

Surfing With Donald Takayama

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                        Surfing ‘With’ Donald Takayama

“I try to meet up with Donald every time I go to California.”

This remark came from a guy who worked for NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). I was doing some painting for the property management company overseeing the house he and his wife were renting in Port Townsend, a house with several Donald Takayama surfboards in the garage.

The surfer/renter/NOAA guy’s remark was in response to my, checking out his enviable stash, and having said, “Oh, I surfed with Donald Takayama once; Seaside Reef, back in, probably, 1969.”

So, now I felt I had to explain what I meant by ‘surfing with.’

“I meant we were out at the same time; not like we, like, went there together.”

Too late; I’d already sinned. I was just making it worse.

My girlfriend, Trish, was supposed to go on this trip, on a Sunday afternoon, to her brother’s house in Solana Beach. Jim Scott, recently out of the Marine Corps as a Captain, having only-recently returned from a tour of Vietnam as a Second Lieutenant, number one target. His tour had also aligned with the Tet Offensive of January 1968. Tough time, life-changing; Jim resigned from a definitely-promising military career

Jim and his first wife, Chris, had a house with a sweeping view of that curve of coast from Seaside Reef to Cardiff Reef and beyond.

Meanwhile, Trisha’s father, Major W.M. Scott, U.S.M.C., was in Vietnam.

Trish punked-out at some point after my surf racks had been transferred to her mother’s Corvair, my board secured. “It’s not weird,” she said, “she’ll just drop you off; pick you up when she’s done visiting.”

“That’s weird,” Trish said as I asked her for a few details while writing this.

Weird or not, Maureen and I were off.

I never called her Maureen, or her husband Wilkens, or Bill, or Dad; always Irene and George- Maureen’s nickname for herself, Trisha’s nickname for her father- or, later Grandmother and Grandfather- formal.

Knowing Irene (from the old song, “Good Night Irene,” one she would quote to stop Trish and I from making out, and/or to send me home) really didn’t consider me a great candidate, or even on the high end of acceptable, for someone dating her daughter, and a bit intimidated by my driver, I tried to make some conversation. “Yeah, Seventh Day Adventist.” “No, not a cult.” “Yeah, I guess; poor man’s Jew.” “Yeah, three brothers, three sisters.” “Yes, my Dad was a Marine; World War II and Korea.” “Sure; they probably ran into each other somewhere. Guadacanal?”

Somewhere before we got to the coast, my future mother-in-law, grandmother to three children her daughter had with me, two Jim had with his second wife, Greer, said, concerning one of the women she’d worked with at one of several jobs she’d had before meeting W.M. Scott; “She was so dumb she didn’t know the difference between Kleenex and Kotex.”

Then she went quiet for a while; maybe a little check in the rear view mirror to catch my reaction without actually looking over.

The waves just weren’t working at the spots we passed. Seaside Reef was the last chance. It was mid-afternoon, lined-up but pre-glassoff lefts breaking out from one of the last remaining trailer parks on the North County coast. There was one other surfer out. We didn’t actually speak much, but we did trade off empty waves for a while. I gave him at least a nod or two; had to. Donald Takayama, wunderkind surfer, had been known in the surfing world since appearing in a Bruce Brown film as a Hawaiian teenager pre-“Endless Summer,” pre-1960, surfing at Velzyland, named after board maker Dale Velzy, for whom Mr. Takayama would shape balsa, and later foam boards.  

This, 1969, was the era, pre-jail time, pre-restoration as a preeminent shaper and builder of long boards, Donald remembered most fondly when featured in “The Surfers’ Journal” sometime before he died in 2012.

I, of course, tried very hard, too hard, to impress him. He just seemed to be enjoying surfing decent lefts with only some random kid out; a kid constantly scanning the parking area for an ugly Corvair with racks on it; someone who looked like he wanted to say something; just didn’t know what.

This was also the only time I ever surfed Seaside Reef or with Donald Takayama. By the time those who waited for the afternoon glassoff arrived, we were both gone.   

 

Joyce Hoffman’s Bra

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JOYCE HOFFMAN’S BRA

My boss, Buddy Rollins, of Buddy’s Sign Service, sold Christmas trees every year at an otherwise empty lot next to Master’s Automotive, right on Mission Avenue (U.S. Highway 101) in Oceanside, California.

Master’s Automotive, or, as we, in my family, referred to it, Mac’s Garage. Mac’s was where my father worked all day on Sundays, Tuesday and Thursday evenings after his regular job. It’s not like my dad and I hung out during the two seasons I untied bundles of trees, cut a little off the bottom, set them up on wooden supports, sold trees, and tied trees onto cars.

I enjoyed the selling of the trees the most. I had received some experience helping out at the lot set up by my Boy Scout Troop (724, Fallbrook, California). At that time, I thought the whole place was like a clean, moveable, and fake almost-Disney Christmas woods. I could easily imagine background music from the March of the Tin Soldiers. I could fully visualize the cute girls who occasionally came in frolicking with me in the big military-issue (originally) tent; the little post-Mouseketeer, pre-Beach Party Annette Funicellos all giggly and…

Hey, I was, like, eleven to, maybe 13.

But now, on this lot, I was eighteen, then nineteen. I had a girlfriend, Trish, a real surfer girl- blond hair, not afraid of and irritated by the sand as Annette had been rumored to have been.

And, in 1970, my second season on Buddy’s lot, Trish worked a few shifts with me. That is, she sold lots of trees, and kept me busy loading and tying, and holding several for her customers to decide between. “What do you think?” they’d ask. They’d ask her.

“Erwin, could you load this please?” Sure.

So it was that I got to carry a tree to Joyce Hoffman’s VW bus, two surfboards on top. Joyce Hoffman, the famous surfer, world champion, everything champion, the first woman to surf the Banzai Pipeline, the only surfer to be named “Person of the Year” by the Los Angeles Times, the first woman to be (later) be inducted into the Surfer’s Hall of Fame.

Blonde, fit, she had competed in a male-dominated sport and conquered. “Hey,” I wanted to say, “I surf. I have a VW bus. I, I surf, too.”  I didn’t. I did say something like, “Joyce Hoffman,” to which she responded with something like a polite, casual, “Uh huh.”

It seemed just knowing who she was would have been enough to prove I was a surfer.

Then she opened the side door. There, on the bed, was a bra. Nothing else. “Um.” I turned around quickly, politely, adjusting the tree a bit. When I turned back, the bra was gone. Joyce looked only slightly less casual, arms kind of crossed.

Near miss. In 1976, living in Encinitas, I was painting most weekends for Two-Coat Charlie Barnett. I had actually gone back to work for the Navy Public Works in San Diego. Charlie wanted me to call in sick a couple of days to help out him and his brother, Olie, on a job in Leucadia, near Moonlight Beach. An added incentive was that the job was for a famous woman surfer, Joyce, and her husband.

I really couldn’t, and I didn’t. It turned out that the job involved bleaching and stripping real wood paneling, and somewhere in the process, Olie, who regularly sprayed lacquer without a respirator, got ill enough to have to be rushed to the hospital, and then stayed there a couple of days. No smoking, either.

Well. Missed opportunities. Had I worked the job at Joyce’s house, I could have said, waiting for the ambulance, probably in an only slightly chemically-altered state, “Hey, I once loaded a Christmas tree in your VW bus, and…” chuckle, chuckle, end of this imagined scenario.

Other than Joyce Hoffman might have said, giving me one more, slightly skeptical check-out, “Uh huh.”  If she’d kind of crossed her arms, I’d have known she remembered.

Darryl Wood- Can’t Hide the Stoke

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                        DARRYL WOOD- CAN’T HIDE THE STOKE

I was heading for my first surf session in the Great Northwest, my truck following Darryl Wood’s truck on the winding backroads west of Port Angeles. It was February of 1979, air temperature about 38 degrees, and I had thought I’d left my surfing life, and what it had become, occasional and too-city-centric, back in San Diego.

But then, a month into my new life, a storm that destroyed the connection from the Olympic Peninsula to the rest of the state set up my connection to Darryl, early northwest surfing pioneer, trailblazer, a guy who actually learned to surf in the frigid waters, who had attacked the rude waves of Westport, Point Grenville, Seaside, and a dozen spots, some still secret, in a short john wetsuit. 

Darryl, de facto leader of the small tribe on the Straits of Juan de Fuca, was another commuter riding on the hastily-set-up passenger-only boat across the Hood Canal. What had, a week before, been a tour boat had a route within sight of the still-connected half of what had been the world’s longest, at over a mile, floating bridge. The Olympic Peninsula half of the concrete and steel structure was separated at the middle, pushed, the connecting structure acting like a twisting hinge before it gave way, the  bridge sunk in seven hundred feet of water by the combined pressure of sudden-and-focused waves driven up a forty mile fetch by hurricane strength winds, a radical outgoing tide.

Darryl and another Port Angeles guy (whose name, sorry, I’ve forgotten) were workers on a construction project at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton. Six or eight other Civil Servants, split between several carpools, and I were on the same boat.

Yeah, a literal usage of the old metaphor.

The State of Washington had set up a bus on the civilized side, and, and it was another half hour on a bus, each way, plus delays. People talk.

“No surf?” Darryl laughed. “No, you’re right; there’s no surf.”

But, this the next weekend, there we were, me with a borrowed wetsuit, my sister’s board (the only one I hadn’t sold) in the back, no gloves, no hood, following Darryl. And then, up a hill, with a slolom-like gravel road ahead down and around trees and stump farms, a flatter plain in the distance, then a line of trees, then water; the truck ahead of me stopped. I stopped. Darryl, a guy who seemed, to me, extremely calm, ran over, opened the passenger door on my vehicle.

“Isn’t this exciting? Are you excited?”

It was. I was.  

Then again, neither of us were even trying to hide the stoke.

Tim Nolan and the Wave of the Day

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TIM NOLAN AND THE WAVE OF THE DAY

“Isn’t there an age limit on surfing here?” Erwin Dence, 2005, Twin Rivers parking area, Straits of Juan de Fuca.

Tim Nolan was loading his boards with another older fellow, both of whom responded to the question by checking out who asked it. I was a mere fifty-five years old at the time and had been back into surfing for less than a year.

Tim was sixty-one. Like most of the surfers north of Santa Cruz and north of forty, he was a refugee. In Tim’s case, he  had learned to surf in Palos Verdes.  He studied boat design and engineering in college, owns a business designing boats,  and, like many of us, had a portion of his life in which he wasn’t surfing. “The trick,” he said, “ is to never quit.”

“Yeah, well; I never quit; I just realized at some point I hadn’t gone in eight or, maybe even ten years.”

Then, properly introduced in that surfers-in-a-parking-lot way, I asked if I could expect, or even had a chance at a worthwhile surfing future, considering my advanced age and all.

Taking an appropriate time to consider, Mr. Nolan said, “Your best years of surfing are ahead of you.”

Slow-forward to January 1, 2013. I arrive at the same beach an hour and a half after first light on a stormy-looking day. Long walls are breaking, some up to head-high on the sets. Tim, on his SUP, is the only one out. I yell a greeting from the parking area as he finishes up a wave in the shorebreak.

When I get suited-up and out, he says, “You must be hardcore.” “Why?” “Because you’re here.” Then he takes off on a couple more from sixty yards farther up the reef than my line up spot, goes in, gets dressed, drives away. Knowing something about him, and how long he typically stays out, I can only theorize he must have gone out at dawn. And now he’s driving seventy miles and probably going to work. Harder core.

Moving to the middle of February, Archie Endo, Stephen Davis and I are surfing Port Angeles Point. The slow curve of the coastline and the steep angle of the swell combine to offer long rides close to a rough and rocky beach. After almost four hours, an equal number of in-the-tube thrashings and long drop/tube/walls, and several come-from- behind-to-the-wall rides, the long ones followed by the walk back up the beach, I can’t talk myself into crashing even one more time through constant sets to get outside.

I watch Archie parallel stance through sections, ease into a few turns down the waves, riding almost to the next takeoff spot around the curve, Muskets. After each ride, Archie paddles back against the current. Tanya, who went out slightly ahead of me, has also paddled back after each long ride. In the lineup I  told her someone should make an action figure in her image, not adding that her husband, Cash, had done the ‘walk back’ at least once before heading almost a half mile back toward the Elwha River to hit some possible rights.

Steve, for only the second time, is walking back up the beach. When I tell him I thought we were supposed to save a little for maybe surfing somewhere else, he says he’s got nothing left. Then he points out that fellow Port Townsendites Wade and Derrick, who were supposed to also ride with us, are out. Then he paddles back out.

As I walk back toward Steve’s van I notice some crazed SUPer, paddling, fifty yards off shore, in this direction. When he comes almost even with me, on cue, one of the biggest sets of the day approaches. It is at this point I recognize the paddler is Tim Nolan. He catches the first wave, farther out and sixty yards farther up the point than any wave caught this day. He leans back into it, paddle stuck hard under the lip.

Later, Steve would say, witnessing the ride from the regular takeoff area; “He was SO slotted.” From my angle, Tim rode on, and on, and out of sight. I have every reason to believe he connected with Muskets and just kept going.

On my way home I decide to call Darryl Wood, the first person I surfed this place with, just about this time of year, 1979. The call is partially to tell him P.A. Point is just as challenging, just as rewarding. Though I surfed there several more times that year, and have surfed the rivermouth side many times, I haven’t surfed this very spot since.

“I was out,” Darryl says; “at Muskets. It was better yesterday.” He asks if I Kneeboarded some waves. I admit I did. “I saw you. You got some pretty nice rides.”

Wow. Rare praise indeed. So, the next day, working in Port Townsend, I stop off at Tim Nolan’s office. He’s not there, so I tell one of his employees about the ride I saw. “He did say he got some long rides,” the employee says.

“Well, just tell him I saw him wailing,” I say.

Long indeed. Steve and I have now decided a long ride will be referred to as a “Nolan,” a very long ride as a “Full Nolan.” Something to aspire to now that I’m the very age he was when I first met him.

So, Tim; never quit.

Who Told You I Was Naked?

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                        Who Told You I Was Naked?

 “And God said, “Who told you that you were naked?’” Genesis, Chapter 3, verse 11

 We’re all pretty sure God’s voice sounds like, and this is a little dependent on our age relative to Creation, John Huston (“Adam, where are you?”- acting as if he didn’t know), or James Earl Jones (“Luke, I am your fa-thuh.”), or maybe like an amplified voice of a deep-voiced policeman.

 I kind of believe God’s voice, this being pre-English, and, really, pre-language, probably sounded more like the language of dolphins, or whales. It’s not like I’ve heard God, but I have heard the recorded voices of John Huston, James Earl Jones, and an amplified deep-voiced policeman or two. “Do not get out of the vehicle.”

 That is not really relevant to this story. Really.

 And so it was, on a sunny-but-cold day, in an otherwise deserted parking area many yards from where I had been surfing, I was sort of half-leaning on the driver’s side of my mini-van, the vehicle pulled forward and tight against the shrubbery-covered rise.

 I was at that most vulnerable part of the wetsuit-stripping process, getting the legs over and off the feet, the rest of the suit inside-out on the pavement. Because I was alone I was not wrapped in the iffy-at-best towel. It has been my experience that towels, held by body pressure against a fragile tuck, are prone to falling, fully, to the ground, at pretty much this exact moment, and, because underwear is (are?) just one more thing to try to get dry in the northwest cold/damp, I was naked.

 Spiritually, technically, legally; my condition of undress was the very definition of ‘naked’ at the exact moment that the yellow school bus appeared. It had taken the two mile trip from the main road, obviously on a mission, had come down the last hill, and was just rounding the last curve onto the entrance/exit end of the flat, barely-wider-than-one-lane-dead-end-road/parking area.

 I did say I was on the farther side of the van, right? Still, I was scrambling- pull, step, pull, my clothes on the driver’s seat. By this time the bus, still 75 yards away, was parking, parallel to the bank, and was unloading. “Towel, towel, where’s my towel?”

 Now, I do believe I had a wool cap on.

 What to do? Do I jump inside, most of my black non-superhero surf suit caught in the door, pulling my clothes over me, wait until the group passes?

 No, in desperation I moved faster; bent down, yanked the now-knotted legs, one at a time, off. Now, it would be amusing if, at that moment, someone walking several dogs appeared from the beach side. Nope, not this time. Pullllll, pull, kick, get those now-bunched, now-clinging undies onnnnn!

 Yeah, I was fine as the group approached; shirtless, maybe; embarrassing enough; rude, but not, technically, illegal. Did I mention I had a cap on? And, thankfully, the school bus had been filled with adults.

 “Surfing, huh?” “Uh huh.” “You must wear a wetsuit.”  I pointed to the dirtied, black pile. No more than one passing adult appeared shocked. Maybe two. The others, well, they were going on a field trip to observe beach wildlife.

 An improvement in wetsuit removal I just learned, and not a second too soon, involves pulling the bottom of the legs tight, then slightly over the heels. The step-pull-step-pull method becomes so much easier, even with the tucked towel barely holding.

 I did once have a terry cloth robe I could wear during beachside/roadside wetsuit removal. But, hanging it in a dampish garage to dry, it, instead, got sort of mildew-y. Besides, it kind of made me look like a pervert.

 Thanks for reading.

Tom Decker and Jeff Parrish

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                        TOM DECKER AND JEFF PARRISH

“You almost killed your buddy. You’re a kook and you shouldn’t be surfing here.”

Jeff Parrish is married to Ruth (formerly Hodgson) a schoolmate of my daughter, Dru, so, yeah, I’m about Jeff’s father’s age.

Jeff and I had a few (each memorable) sessions on the Straits, he coming from Seattle, a ferry and thirty miles before I had to leave home to rendezvous at Discorery Bay. Or, several times, usually around Christmas, he would be at his in-laws’ house.

Frustrated with trying to ride a thruster in typically small conditions, he purchased a long board on Craigslist. This day was probably his second or third time on that board.

Jeff was, he said, so desperate for surf that, when we met at McCleary, he agreed to do the driving. He wanted to try Point Grenville, one of the first places surfed in Washington, a place off limits to non-natives for years.

Because my son Sean had worked on his Masters in Public Administration degree at the Evergreen State College in Olympia along with those in a concurrent Tribal Program, I had checked out Point Grenville. Since nobody told me I couldn’t, while Sean was busy, I walked out onto the beach. I could see how it might be good, imagine hippie/surfers camping on the bluff.  

After Jeff and I made the hour drive from Aberdeen, we saw as much as we could from the bluff, then went to town to get a one day pass or something. With most of the folks on the Reservation busy with a funeral, the person on the other side of the glass at the police station said, “Just go. Just today, though. Huh?”

We drove across a couple of little creeks to the far end, a little hook of a bay. We could paddle across to a point with what looked like four footers breaking with some shape. I was for it. Instead, we drove an hour back to Aberdeen, twenty miles farther to Westport.

Days at Westhaven State Park can be divided into two categories: Days you can paddle out through the waves, and days when you must either paddle out along ‘the wall’ or jump off the jetty. This was a ‘wall’ day, six feet plus, with, maybe, five guys out. One of those guys, we would soon discover, was Tom Decker, long known as one of several local enforcers.

Another surfer was making the long walk from bluff to water at about the same time as Jeff and I. He was telling me about how he’d just ripped it up at the Groins on his new board; but now the tide was too high, and, oh, hadn’t he seen me before at Twin Rivers? Probably.

Paddling next to the jetty isn’t exactly easy, either. There’s still a version of the extra-deep Westport impact zone, bouncy chop, waves to duck under or crash through. Partway out I heard the unmistakable sound of a surfboard smacking full-on into a rock. The owner of the board was swimming. “My son’s out there. Tell him I’m going in.”

“Okay.” I never saw his son. Once I thought I’d made it out I was instantly confronted with an outside wave. I turned turtle, and, I swear, instead of being pushed back but clearing the wave, my big board me hanging onto the rails, was lifted, straight up, just like a submarine broaching way too fast. Or, think whale rider, upside down.

The waves offered two options: A quick left toward the jetty, or a longer right, followed by trying to fight back out. The longer the ride, the worse your chances. So, catch the soup in, battle the wall back out. And, seconds after getting back out again, there’s another outside wave. This is another Westport feature; a wave six inches higher can break fifty yards farther out.

On one particular outsider, the only other surfer who wasn’t Tom Decker, Jeff, the guy who ripped the Groins, or me, decides he should make a bottom turn as close to me as he can get without actually touching. And I get thrashed by the wave.

Three or four waves into the session, my ears already plugging up, I notice Jeff is hugging the jetty, the peak at least fifty yards away. I also notice Tom is sitting inside of me, I’m getting cleaned up, and he isn’t. I also notice Tom and the Groin Ripper are now engaged in some verbal fisticuffs.

Tom Decker was the first surfer I saw ripping across six foot lefts at Port Angeles Point, on the Lower Elwha Reservation. This was early 1979, before access there became restricted. Tom lived as close to the waves as he could, surfed as often as it broke. I borrowed a wetsuit from him a couple of times, negotiated for its purchase, didn’t end up buying it.

When I surfed in my second of the Ricky Young-run longboard contests in the late 80s, early 90’s, seeing Tom was to be in my heat, I told a local I’d heard Tom had moved to Bellingham or something, tried his hand at video production. “Maybe, but he’s been living here awhile.” Yeah, he won that heat, but didn’t win the next.

Still, it’s not like Tom would recognize me. I saw Tom on one of the trips I’d made to Westport with Sean while he was still attending Evergreen.  Each trip featured a late session, a stay at one of the several No-tell Motels, an early session the next morning, sand left in the shower. Mr. Decker was in a car at the pot-hole scarred parking lot overlooking Halfmoon Bay, inside the harbor. He had a dog and a short board inside.

One observation that is almost always true about a guy over fifty who rides a very short board is this: He knows how to surf.

I asked the guy if he knew Tom Decker. He looked me over for a moment before saying, “Yeah, I know him. (another moment) He’s an asshole.”

Back to the jetty session. Evidently the Groin Ripper had irritated Tom by trying for several waves and not catching them. Criminal. I told Jeff I was getting out. I could barely hear, and getting constantly caught inside was really pissing me off.

Jeff and I both went for the same peak, side by side. Jeff started to pearl, bailed to one side, his board jumping, sideways, toward me.

When I came up I was shouting. “Damn it! You do something like that in Hawaii, they’ll kill you.”

That’s what I’d heard, anyway. I caught the next wave. I beat the first section and was going so fast, busting over little choppy sections, farther and farther from the jetty. For some reason I was almost laughing. I caught some soup, proned into a reform, did a few turns. When I got to the beach, Groin Ripper was waiting, ready to report on the unwarranted verbal abuse an the walk back. “Who is that asshole, any way?” Well.

On the next wave, Jeff came in, practically sprinting past us.

By the time The Ripper and got to the bluff, Jeff was down the path and Tom Decker was the only guy out. I guess that would have made him happy.

Sometime after we’d changed out, loaded up, headed back, towards McCleary, after I apologized for snapping, Jeff asked if he’d almost killed me.

“No, not really.”

“Well, that’s what that guy said.”

“Oh.” It’s rude to take a nap if there are only two of you in a car. Somehow, and I’m pretty sure I told Jeff this, I felt kind of good. Tom Decker had pretty much called everyone around a kook. But, not me. Trying to clear my ears, I guess that made me kind of, I don’t know, happy.    

Raphael Reda

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                                                RAPHAEL REDA

            “You have to meet this guy. He’s a surfer. Like you. He’s a real goofball. Like you.” George Hoppe, in reference to Raphael Reda.

It seems I should write these things in reverse order; starting with the most recent event. Then, as they’re posted, a reader could come forward in time.

Actually, one story, even in the planning/remembering phase, leads to another. Once I had written that I’d visited Al Perlee’s surf shop more than twenty years ago, I now feel compelled to mention the circumstances and who I was with when we were told that we could not enter The Surf Shop in Westport in our wetsuits. No way.

It was 1988. Raphael Reda actually put up an argument. “It’s a surf shop.” He looked around as if suggesting the building was not all that fancy. “And we’re surfers.”

“Yeah. So?”

“And we’re planning on going back out again.”

The shop, two disheveled surfers at the door, looked, and looks, kind of like it was a converted garage, with another converted garage added on, not necessarily built by professionals. Still, it was filled with boards and wetsuits and magazines and stuff surfers find fascinating. Mostly it offered the chance, out of a parking lot, to lean on a counter and regale whoever’s there with stories; hopefully enlighten and entertain someone who hears surf stories pretty much non-stop during business hours. “Epic! All time! Classic!”

            But we were outside.

            “We tried the jetty; now we’re going to try the groins.”

“Well, then (nodding as if the groins might be a better choice); come back after that. (appropriate pause) Dressed.”

Raphael and I were in Westport to practice- not just to surf- we were practicing for the upcoming Westport Longboard Contest. The annual event had been started several years earlier by Ricky Young. A former top rated competitive surfer, he sold surfboards in Bellevue, a city across Lake Washington from Seattle, commonly called the “Eastside.” Still, Ricky was able to line up sponsors, organize volunteers, line up surfers and judges. 

At this time, I was still working as a sign painter at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard. While the real work was on ships, I worked mostly in a shop, making me a “Shop Pogue.” I don’t think Pogue is a term of endearment. 

My friend George Hoppe had also moved from the discomfort of the ships to the relative grandeur of operating a spray booth in a large building. He, evidently, had paid enough shipboard dues to not suffer ridicule for his plusher surroundings free of bilges and tanks and endless wireways and pipes.

Besides, George was not a person to be messed with. He was confrontational, a master of blue collar repartee, a sort of Don Rickles of the paint shop, with, merely as an example, a creative list of responses to ‘fuck you.’ George and I got along, perhaps, because I laughed at any putdowns directed towards me, and I could talk way faster than he could, and, well, I could keep up in the repartee department.

George, frequently would get me started on a subject, then stand back, say, “He’s on a roll now.”

Raphael was a carpenter, and, since I didn’t go over to the Shop 64 building to meet him, George brought Raph over to my desk/drawing table.

With George observing, Raphael and I did the “Surfer Sizeup.”

This process begins with an exchange of experience; where and when and how one ended up at this location. “South Bay.” “North County.” “Dewey Weber.” “Surfboards Hawaii.” “Malibu, a few times.” “Swamis, all around; Doheny, before the breakwater.” “Had to get away. Didn’t’ want to raise kids there.” “Yeah, same thing.”

Soon enough, with George having gathered a couple of other non-surfers to witness, Raphael and I got appropriately goofy. “Epic!” “All time!” “Classic!”

“Next,” George said, “They’ll be doing the surfing poses.”

 I don’t recall seeing Raphael when he wasn’t enthusiastic, supportive. Somewhere after I left the shipyard, he (or his wife, Grace, not actually clear on this) inherited a large sum of money, moved to the canyons of Topanga, near Malibu. What George (or I) would say is that he had so much money he had to get divorced. Through another shipyard/surfer, Jim Kennedy, someone I run into every now and again, out at Westport, up on the Straits, Ralph (Jim’s version of Raphael) bought land (new land from lava) on the Big Island. 

It was either that or his land was covered by lava. The last time I heard from Raphael, he, knowing I’d written several screenplays, sent me his. It had a good story, mostly bad dialogue. One line was excellent- I stole it for one of my probably-never-to-be-sold scripts. Then he sent me a link to a YouTube video of him, captain of his own tour sailboat, crashing through several waves closing out the Ala Wai Yacht Harbor.

I wrote back asking if he was the Captain, at the wheel, or the guy hanging on to something at the bow; and if it was a “three hour tour; a three hour tour.”

“The Captain, of course. You know, Hoppe always said you were goofy.”

AL PERLEE

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AL PERLEE

“You’re too old, too fat, and you don’t surf enough.”

This is one of several quotes directed to me from Al Perlee owner of “The Surf Shop” in Westport, Washington. I’ll provide the context. I was looking for a new board, and said I was considering something shorter.

The occasion was some time in 2009. I’d been back, as heavily as I could manage, into surfing, riding a chunky and well made nine foot four inch surfboard over pretty much every rock I could find on the Straits of Juan de Fuca, plus a few on the coast.

When I say the board was well made, that would be the glassing.  And it had come, originally, with a pretty translucent red fin that I weakened striking the already-mentioned rocks. It snapped off at its base while surfing at Short Sands in Oregon, replaced by a cheaper, non-translucent black one.

Yes, I did claim the snap was due to the intensity of my bottom turns. Every one I asked agreed the board’s shape was just wrong; chunky hips, roundy rails. It could have used a little more kick, maybe a concave nose. What it did was float. And I appreciated that.

By the time I went to “The Surf Shop” in search of a new one, my board was yellowed, most of the big dings patched. I had a sort of pride that I’d put every one of those dings in the board riding whatever waves I could find. This one at the Elwha rivermouth, that one at North Beach on a day with a vicious chop and…

I purchased the board at “Far North Surf Shop,” since then a recession casualty, in Sequim, pretty much halfway between Quilcene and the spots I regularly surfed on the Straits. It had been built by a guy up in Sequim whose name I don’t remember. Nothing personal. I’m thinking it was somewhere under the tenth surfboard the man ever built. There was another one in the shop, its shape even more ridiculous-ly wrong.

The price was decent for a new and pure white long board.

Since I’d blown out both knees, one at a time, and was doing way more longboard kneeboarding than riding standing up, and since I wanted to either advance my skills or switch to something I could kneeboard without using swimfins, and with slightly less personal embarrassment, looking for a smaller board seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

In reference to the knee/standing issue: When telling of my latest sessions to one of several ex-surfer-contractors I worked for, Bill Irwin would always ask if I rode “erect.” Jason Queen told me it takes three knee rides to equal one standing up.

Counting waves per session now included stand up rides/total waves ridden; a good day with half ridden erect. I always try for a twenty wave minimum. Sometimes thirty waves would factor down, using the Queen method, to twelve point something.

There I was, in Al’s shop, checking it out. And Al was actually there, holding court. Let me now mention that Al is probably about my age, no thinner than I am.

That being said, the first thing to note here is that, if a kid works in a surf shop, he or she is automatically cool and assumed to be a good surfer. If someone owns a successful surf shop, especially one in such a harsh location, that person is automatically super cool, that coolness magnified over time. Al is a legend.

Further, every customer must provide evidence that he or she is a real surfer. Otherwise, kook. And I, old, fat, and, based on the times he had ever seen me in his shop, despite my telling him I’d spoken to him several times, the first twenty years earlier, and had made significant purchases in his shop, I qualified. As a kook.

The cruel quote was preceded by, “You won’t be happy. You probably really need something longer.”

Al gave me a great deal on a 5’10” Bic “Peter Pan” fish, a lightly-used rental board. I’ve ridden it twice, loaned it out for extended periods. I did get a smaller board, custom, its shape (concave nose, down rails, professional outlines) widely admired by those I’ve shown it to. I love the board, use it when the waves are bigger, faster, more powerful. Mostly it rides on top of the big ass SUP.

I’m not saying Al was right; I do say I don’t seem to be getting any younger. And, though I surf as often as I can, I don’t seem to be much skinnier, either.