Tag Archives: surfing stories

Seahawks Hangover

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There’s no surf in the forecast, but I’m planning on some sort of surf trip. It’s as cold as it gets on the Olympic Peninsula, and I’m about to get past the previous football season. Just, not yet. Not quite yet.

The big game’s over; we won. Still, we can’t get enough. We watch highlights, stay up to watch Russell Wilson on Letterman, munching on the leftovers of chips and dips, wondering if we still have a few buffalo wings, think about the possibility of going to Seattle for the victory parade.

[update; didn’t go, but over 750 thousand other screaming fans did, and I listened to a lot of it on the radio while working, watched taped highlights last night]

We are so unfamiliar with this feeling, evidently the thrill of victory.  

I may have made too much of a deal out of how Trish might be the worst person to watch a Seahawks game with. Sure, she does actually run into the bedroom when any other team gets even close to getting a score, does yell “Nooooooo!” or “How can they be so stupid?” or “Oh, that’s it; it’s over,” sometimes several times during a game, even if our team is only a few points behind. Yes, she does have a tendency to blame herself, or me, or some official, or some twisted part of the greater Fates when things look bleak.

And, yes, she does get loud and proud when our team pulls ahead (and any opponent is never far enough ahead to positively avoid a comeback). “I’m passionate,” she’ll explain; “What’s wrong with you?”

Well; I do have a fear of publicly sobbing; and I do buy into every sport-related story, ready to tear up at previews.

Trish and I (and all real fans) did endure incalculable stress over the protracted break between the nailbiter with the 49ers and the Superbowl, constantly checking with the NFL Network, ESPN, any national (understanding local bias) news outlet that had any sports commentator who would give the underdog Seahawks a chance against the perfect Peyton and, oh yeah, his team of Manning support staff.

I did try to go surfing Sunday morning, to get away from the stress; listening to NPR instead of KIRO, their pre-game coverage having started the previous Wednesday. By the time I got halfway back, I just had to listen to people who would actually predict a Seahawks victory. 27-24 seemed to be the average score.

And, close to game time, already working on heartburn and creating future problems related to downing five or eight deviled eggs and almost tasting five or seven buffalo wings, I was positioned in front of the flat screen. And, because my father-in-law was a lifetime sports fan, we positioned his ashes on a TV table with a view, and, his daughter having already promised to try to maintain her sense of coolness (after all, we were not favored to win, so, why worry?), we prepared to watch the game. Calmly, coolly.

Then the game started.

The image of the first snapped ball whizzing past, the startled expression on Peyton Manning’s face, this will long be freeze-framed in our memories. WOW!

By the time the Seahawks, Denver still scoreless, seemed to recover yet another fumble… NO! That’s Too Much!

No, it wasn’t too much. Though some would say it was a boring, one-sided blowout, Trish and I would say, agreeing with some suddenly-Seahawks fans in the National media, “It was great!”

No tears, and may the hangover last until at least the next pre-season.

And Trish is still my favorite person to watch anything with.

 

If You Look Closely

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If You Look Closely

Here’s a peek into the very manic-depressive swell ‘window’ on the north shore of the contiguous United States. This is the last of a swell that missed most of the Straits of Juan de Fuca, somehow caught on the last possible corner.
If you look closely, you can see several people chatting, parking lot surfing. Some of the crowd that came and went in this particular parking lot had been out, couldn’t go out because of inconveniently-timed illness, or were just waiting to see. Meanwhile, chat about waves caught and waves missed. Others had come and gone, several surfing until the tide got too high, took naps in their cars, checked it again, drove away.
My friend, Archie “Atsushi” Endo took the photo, with me, mostly suited-up, beside him. Tim Nolan had just gotten out of the water, having been in it since the tide dropped enough to allow the waves to clear the rocky beach.
And now, the swell, reported by local surfer Keith Darrock (I’m going to say I called him- knowing he’d know) at half past dawn as “three to four feet. I’d give it an A minus.” “I should come up.”
Others did. What was unusual is that Dave, way-formerly of PB, had come here from PA. That wouldn’t normally be a sound bet. Tugboat Bill had turned right instead of going straight. New kids (there are always new surfers in PT; most move on eventually) had found the spot, hit it or missed it, or, for one reason or another, passed.
Well, no; I hadn’t gone up early. No. I put it off, had to, just had to finish some work. Archie and I had gone west on Friday evening, sure our favorite low tide right would be working. It was, at about one to one and a half; but, yeah, we went out.
And we caught a lot of waves, long, perfect, glassy, fin-draggers; in a pouring rain.
Meanwhile, on that same Friday, the corner was catching the long period, but kind of southish swell. All day.
Supposedly. And everyone I spoke with seemed to have hit it.
I checked this spot on Saturday. There’s something so alluring about an offshore wind holding up a three foot wave. See the last place in the photo, where the point hits the water? Now imagine a long line curling onto it, top blowing back. But the tide was high; too high, and, though I did some parking lot surfing with Jesse Joshua Watson, local artist, soon to have some work featured on this site (Yeah, I’m always pimping realsurfers), I couldn’t wait to see if the swell would hold as the tide dropped. The Seahawks were about to play.
In retrospect… it’s always in retrospect; I could have come here on Friday; I could have surfed first, worked later. I could have…
Well, I got five or six long lefts, had to bail once as a bigass rock unsubmerged in my path as the tide and the swell dropped in unison. Worth it.
Now, I’m totally considering deleting this post in a few days. I don’t want to further antagonize the PT locals; but, let me say this: This is the first swell that really caught here since late September.
Meanwhile, Archie is going to Japan to work for three months or so in the prime season, such as it is, for America’s bi-polar north shore. Good luck Atsushi; hope you do some surfing.

Frank Crippen and North by Northwest Surf Shop

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Something About Surf Shop Owners

You already know that anyone who works in a surf shop is automatically a good surfer, one, and automatically cool, two. Too. What’s apparent to me is they’re sort of automatically, and sometimes cruelly, honest.

Really, is being honest cruel?

I’ve been going into Frank Crippen’s Port Angeles store, North by Northwest Surf Shop since I got back more fervently into surfing nine or ten years ago. Yes, he automatically thought I was a Kook. And he was right. My skills hadn’t instantly come back after years of neglect. My wave knowledge was still there, but muscle memory…

Of course, I did drop a few local PA names. “Hey, you know Darryl Wood?”

“Of course. He came in here this morning on his way to…”

“His way where?”

I think Frank actually rolled his eyes. He wasn’t going to tell me, fifty-something formerly (and only self-professed) real surfer.

Fine. “Cold water wax.”

“Only kind I carry. Sex?”

“What?”

Sexwax. Oh, yeah. Now, what I do appreciate about Frank is his website, nxnwsurf.com

I can access the available cameras (nothing on the Straits), get a forecast, get the actual buoy readings. I check it at least daily, sometimes multiple times.

By cruising through his shop occasionally through these years, my surfing progressing so very slowly, and by seeing him on several surf checks in the area, and by always giving him a report on where I surfed and how much better it could have been, and complaining about all those Seattle surfers who read the same forecasts… somewhere Frank has gotten a little friendlier.

Oh, not discernibly friendlier. I have, being honest myself in my assessments, said Frank lacks people skills.

This doesn’t mean he can’t make a sale. I witnessed him sell about three hundred bucks worth of wetsuit and gear, some for skiing in the nearby Olympics, in about one minute. The brother of the guy trying on the wetsuit broke out his card. Maybe it’s all because he seems difficult to impress.

“And a beanie?”

Image

 

So, okay, here’s the Frank Crippen Quote:

No, first, I have to say that I told Frank that Al Perlee, owner of The Surf Shop in Westport, when I told him I wanted a smaller (than my 9’4” piggie model) board, had told me, “No; you won’t be happy. You’re too old, too fat, and you don’t surf enough.”

Brutal.

Okay, now Frank’s Line: “It’s easier to get a bigger board than to get in shape.”

So, even you Seattle surfers: check out and support your local Straits surf shop. Maybe you can impress Frank; I’m still working on it.

Mostly I want him to link realsurfers.net to nxnwsurf

Archie took this photo after I bought some new gloves. Yeah, the ones in the photo. “They’re thinner, but they keep you warmer.” “How long do they last?” “No gloves last forever.” We were on our way back from surfing at… somewhere on the Straits. Ask Frank; let me know if he tells you. Let me know if he rolls his eyes.

Hey, I forgot to ‘tag’ Al Perlee. When you’re down in Westport, tell him I have mentioned him several times on realsurfers.net Now, Al is actually about my age; not sure how big a board he rides. And, he was right; I’ve gone bigger; it was either go big or go home.

San Onofre Tales & Phillip Harper and the Sailfish

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San Onofre is surfing history.

Particularly for the early surfers who parked on the beach, camped out there, built a few palapas, rode the rollers. It seems, to those of us reading about it, checking a few photos, a friendly sort of place frequented by people who saw themselves as rebellious and wild, but, by today’s standards, quaintly so. 

Located (I know you know this) near the northwest point of the massive Camp Pendleton…wait. I should explain, just to be clear, that Camp Pendleton is roughly a triangle, with Oceanside at the lower point, San Clemente north, and, twenty miles inland (as the seagull flies) Fallbrook. That’s where I was raised, and, from my house, I always sort of believed, if I stood on the fence on the front edge of the property, and looked west, somewhere just over those coastal hills, that late afternoon glow was a reflection off the unseen water, just below our horizon, at San Onofre.

At some point the San Onofre Surf Club made a deal with the Marine Corps allowing club members access past the guard shack, down a winding little road along a riverbottom, and then past the railroad trestles (yeah, those Trestles), then near the Officers’ Club, the buildings a last remnant of a time when the entire area was part of a Spanish Land Grant. Nice location, in some trees in a usually sedate (wave-wise) cove right between Church and San Onofre.

Beach access was also given to Marines, and dependents. In Fallbrook, most of my friends’ dads, or moms, or both, worked on the base or were Marines. Kids of Marines came and went, on some three year cycle. My family was in Fallbrook because, once there, my mom didn’t want to move the increasingly large family elsewhere. Though my father remains a Marine (of the Corps, to the core), he went to work splicing telephone cables all over the base for the rest of his career.

Children of Civil Service workers didn’t have beach parking privileges, and any other surfers granted access on the base had to park in a lot* separated by those whispy trees particular to windy parts of California. I think, of all the times I went to San Onofre, mostly between 1966 and 1969, whoever I was with got to park on the beach.

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PHILLIP HARPER AND THE JUMPING SAILFISH- 1967

There were fishing boats offshore, seagulls circling them. The waves were glassing-off, decent sized, and it wasn’t even crowded for a Saturday afternoon. Phillip had talked my parents (my mom, mostly) into allowing me to go with him. My mom loved Phillip from all the times he went to the beach with her driving the big wagon, he almost like another one of her seven kids. She probably bought Phillip’s ‘otherwise I’ll have to surf alone’ argument.

“Just don’t go 101,” she, no doubt said. “Slaughter Alley? No, Mrs. Dence, we’ll go across the base.”

Phillip had a vehicle, probably the VW truck that he and I tried to sleep in on the cliff above Swamis. There’s a house there now, and, somewhere after midnight, we were rousted by the cops.

Wow; I got immediately off subject.

Okay, so we were 16. “We have our parents’ permission,” Phillip said, me backing him up with a “Yeah; we do.” “Well, kids; you don’t have ours.” “So, what do we do, Officers?”

We actually drove halfway home before Phillip pulled over, asked himself and me, “What would Bucky do?”**

“He wouldn’t go back home,” each of us said. “No way.”

Still, by the time we got back to Swamis, others were in the water. Three, five… others.

But, at San Onofre, that Saturday afternoon, between sets, a fish leapt out of the water. It was huge, with a spear-like nose, and mid-leap, mid arc, seemed frozen in the air. Both Phillip and I saw it, looked at each other. Maybe one or both of us screamed. Phillip broke (first) toward the beach. He paddled so fast he almost outran a wave, but didn’t (of course), and it broke right on his back and he had to swim.

I’d like to think I gave him a lift.

When Phillip and I got to the shallows we looked back out at the glassy afternoon waves, sparkles on the incoming lines, the fishing boats motoring back and forth offshore.

San Onofre, we told each other, and others (critics always mentioned ‘Old Man’s’), was a place where you could make the waves as difficult as you wanted. You could ride like an Old Man, or you could take off behind a peak. Indeed, there was at least one guy out, “Probably on the Hobie team” Phillip said, who was back-dooring the peaks, ripping across the faces.

“Why’d we paddle in?” One or both of us asked. I’m guessing we laughed, paddled back out, warily scanning the water around us, at least for a while.

*This will show up in a story of “Bill Birt, ‘Skip-rope,’ and the Stolen Racks.”

**Bucky Davis was a surfer, probably my second surfing hero, and dated Phillip’s sister Trish. He’ll show up again in a (not yet written) San Onofre story, “’Cowabunga!’ and ‘Everybody Must Get Stoned.’”

In fact, telling that story is the reason I started Real Surfers.

We’ll get there.

Thanks for coming along.

Bill Birt and the San Onofre Octopi

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Bill Birt and the San Onofre Octopi

Weekly (until I run out of them) Bill Birt Story
Before I posted it here I ran my story, “The Ghost of Bill Birt,” past the only friend from my Fallbrook surfing days I’m still in contact with, Ray Hicks, now living in Carlsbad, and still surfing.
“What a character,” Ray wrote, also mentioning in the e-mail the story he claims he’ll never forget; the one about Bill and the octopi at a minus tide 1967 San Onofre.*
With the rest of some subgroup of Fallbrook Sophomore surfers- Phillip Harper, Ray Hicks, probably Mark Metzger, Billy McLean, me, standing around a beach fire between sessions, standard practice in those days of short john wetsuits, Bill was down with the old beachcombers and the young kids examining the tide pools.
You should bear in mind that most of us were sixteen, Billy fourteen**, and we didn’t get all excited about sea urchins and starfish and the like. That is, we wouldn’t want someone else in our group to see us get excited about the perfect sand dollar. We were, no doubt, talking about whether we’d go out again, comparing rides; some talk, no doubt, about girls- so much more mysterious than waves.
So, here came Bill, glasses on but fogged by salty damp air, trudging up the fairly level beach- maybe more like marching- huge smile on his face, and, when he got close enough, we could see he had an octopus wrapped around one arm, another sort of cradled at stomach level.
There was a moment of…”Wait! What? Hey!”
Bill threw one of the live creatures onto into the fire. It just as well could have been a grenade. We all leapt backwards.
“Bill!”
There were, of course, other first verbal reactions, most one syllable; or an extended “Shhhhhhhhhiiiiiiiiii…..” Someone may have shrieked.
No, not me.
And if I did; well; there was an octopus in the fire!
Bill looked at each of us, each of us equally horrified, and said, quite matter-of-factly, lifting the remaining octopus, obviously still alive, to eye level, moving it in a circle for each of us to appreciate. “This one’s smaller; we’ll eat it first.”***
*Because one story leads to another story, or even another group of stories, in writing this I discovered I have to tell more ‘San Onofre Tales.’ I’m working on it.
**Billy McLean is another character from my past. His slightly-crazed personality, his knack for getting otherwise-peaceful friends into trouble, no doubt aligns with some member of at least one subgroup of your own surfing contemporaries. I’m working on a few Billy McLean stories (physically wincing at the thought).
And, of course, I have a few more on Bill Birt.
***The second octopus went back in the tide pools, all of us marching down to make sure; someone apologizing to it for the murder of its friend.
No, not me. And if I did…

Thanksgiving Sessions

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Thanksgiving Sessions

My answer to any question about what my family did on Thanksgiving, or Easter, or even Christmas- any holiday, was, “once I started surfing; we first went surfing.”
New Year’s Day, several memorable early morning (while partiers are still partying or passed out) sessions at Swamis.
Super Bowl Sunday; great time for an afternoon surf session.
It’s Thanksgiving Day and I have to get some work done; and, besides, the surf is not cooperating on the Straits. If I’d gone down to my Dad’s, it might be great conditions for Seaside. No; it’s (at least partially) the work thing.
However, I have had several memorable T-Day sessions. Two years ago, the morning low tide and a properly aligned west northwest swell. The few surfers out left the water before I had to; headed back to Seattle. So, just me, not quite surfed-out; saving a little energy for helping Trish out with the setting-up. Last year it was the day after Thanksgiving Day, me and a few surfing power couples, some others who camped out or just took a long weekend.
So, hopefully you’re having (or had) a surf session to be thankful for.
Already having worked this morning on a future piece on San Onofre sessions, I have to go. Now.
Now, Monday, swell moves more northerly. Always thankful for lined-up waves, I’m always scheming, looking forward to the next opportunity.

A Painting by Stephen Davis

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A Painting by Stephen Davis

Stephen Davis is a surfer/painter/kite-surfer (and much more) living in Port Townsend.
He was exhausted and surfed-out by the time I disenfranchised the rest of the local surfing population by wave-hogging.
But he heard about it.
Stephen continues to amaze me with his combination of casualness and his ‘gleam in the eye’ enthusiasm, his deep love of the (he’d say) intense emotions and excitement from riding on the natural energy occasionally thrown our way.
And yet, the first thing I liked about him is he said, “Your wave, Erwin; go for it.”
And I, of course, did.
If that says something about me, it says more about Stephen.

Sliding a Secret Straits Spot

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Sliding a Secret Straits Spot

With a little time, I’ve gotten over (some of) the guilt I felt immediately after taking more than my share of the waves that, all so rarely, find their way deep into the Straits of Juan de Fuca.
In my defense, there was only one other surfer and a kayaker when I went out on my SUP.
AND I didn’t want to be intimidated by the kayaker.
AND the waves were pretty small when I did go out.
AND, I am 62 years old, eligible for Social Security, senior discounts…
AND I can’t help it that so many other eager surfers came out AND the waves came up…
AND, still, I was still ‘circling,’ taking off farther out and over, repeatedly taking off farther over and out, riding all the way to the shorebreak, where the choice of trying to pull out, pull through, do a ‘fall back,’ or sideslip onto the sand was dependent on whether the wave was still barrelling.
Many were.
I had my leash ripped off twice, my connecting tie to the board broken once, got thrashed several times, and actually pulled out a couple of times.
Very hard to do a standing island pullout on such a floaty board.
So, I did wave hog to the top end of my ability, I did take more than my share of waves.
I did probably irritate the local surfers.
I confess these sins, hope for forgiveness; and must admit that I have committed this same sin in the past.
AND I must add I may recommit.
Many thanks to my friend Archie Endo for taking this and other photos, some providing proof I gave a lot of room to Cody when he took off behind me.
I could say, as part of my ‘guilty with an explanation’ plea, that seeing a camera when I was already frothing, Archie and I having been skunked farther out the Straits on the same day, hearing numerous phone reports of epic conditions, and having several irritating delays thrown in, including a bear raiding our storage locker for bird feeding (old people activity) did add to my being over-enthusiastic.
I could. I’m still, with a focus always on the story, contemplating the rewards and pitfalls.
I did love the rewards.