Tag Archives: Tamarack surfing

Adam Wipeout’s Realsurfer Guide- Number 3; The ‘Roll-up-the-window’ and the ‘Double Over-the-falls’

Posted on by under northwest surfing, real surfers, surf adventures, surfing guide, wipeouts

realsurfersOvrtheFlls I actually started doing a drawing/cartoon/illustration for this, but have a time crunch trying to get a major-sized job completed so I can (hopefully) have a day off during the week to hit what looks like the run of swell we’ve been waiting for. Sound familiar? The scheming, hoping, dreaming, mind-surfing, knowing you’re missing good (possibly… no, probably) waves with the promise (often imagined, often broken) of catching better waves?

Anyway, Adam Wipeout is a real person, totally stoked, more of a name-dropper, and definitely more of a name-rememberer than I am; but, since his nickname seems to be sticking, and because I actually got the ‘roll-up-the-window’ simile from him, he seems like the perfect spokesperson for realsurfer hints and tricks and techniques. Try any and all at home.

NUMBER ONE- might be that it’s all right to pee in your wetsuit or trunks, and might actually provide some temporary warmth, provided you’re at least genital-high in the water. It would be kind of embarrassing to be leaking yellow from the leg of a dry wetsuit (though the process of suiting-up with pumping waves visible can create an urgent need to go- at least it does for me). Washing of the wetsuit later is up to your own personal hygiene standards and practices. But, good idea.

NUMBER TWO-  Never do a number two in the water. Okay, maybe, not confessing here, and, besides, statute of limitations, I may have done it once; way back, in an emergency, pulling down the trunks, underwater, and I was the only one out at, let’s say, the Oceanside South Jetty just before dawn, but, since it was a floater and not a sinker… lesson learned, lesson passed on.

NUMBER THREE- The technique is this: It’s a head-high wave, and, because you’re not sure you’ve actually caught it, you jump up, just like you’ve practiced, just like you do several times a day at your work, for more practice. It turns out you didn’t quite catch it, and you’re almost standing, maybe too much weight on the front foot, and you’re dropping in too late and too out of control. You stick both arms out perpendicular to your body, if your body was actually standing straight up, and you rotate those arms, just as if you were rolling up (or down) the windows in your car. I guess this would assume your car was, maybe a tiny smart car without automatic windows. Anyway, that’s the image. Arm rotators. Or, picture you’re at Waikiki in 1914 But, this attempt at rebalancing doesn’t work, and, as the wave drops out underneath you, the lip crashes into you as if you were (like, on purpose) performing a full body head-dip, and you go over the falls.

This is the first one, the single. Then, because the wave is so powerful, you’re sucked up from the trough and… no amount of arm-rolling can save you now, you go up and over the falls the second time, your board… you have no idea where your board is, you just hope it doesn’t hit you. You (and I really mean Adam) don’t need another thigh bruise like the time you tried the SUP, caught the outside (beach side) rail. Ouch! Still better than catching the outside rail, having the board come up, sideways, between your legs, as you do the single over the falls in the shorebreak. Happened to me. Once. Tamarack. Only once, though the-board-to-the-nose when I tried to push out through a wave and lost my grip on the rails… a couple of times. Tamarack, K-54. Oh, and now I’m remembering several instances of the dick-n-balls board slam/slap. Tamarack, Swamis, Pipes, etc.. This is less likely in a wetsuit than in loose board shorts, but usually means you didn’t get the nose-knock but did catch some air on the way out, then… ‘ouch, me hardies!’ (this is a response to this type of injury used by my son, James)

But, we learn. A hint from me, though I don’t remember ever having performed the double over the falls, and I’m way too cool to do the window-rolling thing, more likely to do the dismount/bail with accompanying yelp/scream: When you’re helpless, being thrashed by the wave, and you’re not sure where your board is, and you’re assuming the fetal position, both hands over your head… well, good luck. I have to go.

Thanks Adam. Get working on Number 4; how to look like a surfer and where to find the perfect apres’ surf hangout spot that isn’t actually a parking area or Goodwill, the real surfer’s clothing supplier.

ADRIFT, PART THREE- What I Thought I would Say

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The point I thought I’d be making when I started writing about the sort of existential trip (though so much of what really happens is internal, despite a change of scenery) my friend Stephen Davis was taking was that, though he seemed adrift, taking off across the country with sketchy plans and even sketchier funding, was that, maybe, even probably, all of us are adrift.

Well.

Steve’s currently in Chicago, working for his friend, Cosmo, a landscape engineer who once was a (another) neighbor in Port Townsend. They’re busy reinstalling winter-removed pumps from rich people’s water features, among other things. Stephen is surfing, couch surfing.  His plan to take a train to Colorado, since that project is on extended hold/possibly dead, has been replaced with a ticket to take the train all the way to Seattle en route back home.

He’ll arrive at about the same time as our mutual friend Archie Endo returns from an extended (new) business trip to Asia. More on that in a moment.

I might as well include the remainder of “And So Am I,” a song I wrote more than ten years ago; possibly referencing the times I’ve traveled to make some money. Mostly, and happily, in my case, to San Diego, where I did some painting for Trisha’s brother, Jim Scott (and do some surfing- in the water variety). The lyrics seemed to go with Stephen’s trip.

“…Clouds are spread out like a blanket, to the sea; like a quilted, patchwork blanket to the sea. And it’s all downhill from here, I guess that’s my greatest fear; waves of clouds are breaking, crashing over me; and they’re spread out like a blanket to the sea.

“Rain keeps falling just like teardrops from the sky; tears keep falling just like raindrops from my eyes; with the windshield wipers on, I’ll drive on into the dawn; where the morning sun ignites the clouds on high; clouds are skidding down the highway, and so am I.”

So, I updated Stephen’s and Archie’s progress to another mutual friend, another surfer, Keith Darrock; adding that I was really having some basic problems in trying to establish some connection between those of us who hold desperately to any piece of something that looks like security and those who boldly take off across the country or around the world with some vague romantic notions of…

“Adrift,” Keith said; “we’d all like to think we could be that… adrift.”

And that’s true. Surfing magazines seem to praise surfers who turned their backs on Corporate, lit off for exotic destinations. Miki Dora is legendary for surfing/living off his wits, even if it was, as portrayed, often at the expense of someone who invested, unwisely, in his quest.

Adrift? We all are, really. Stephen has met up with friends established through just being the kind of guy who makes friends with an honest ease (enough so that my client on one of three projects Steve helped me on, calling to see if I’d ever get it done, asked about him and how it was all going. “He seemed to be having a rough time.”). Archie has  also (finally) taken advantage of relationships established through years of toiling all around the world as a roe (salmon eggs) expert. He is taking a job as (again, finally) a middleman, securing and buying and selling seafood from all over the world, and will still, mostly, be able to work from home on the Olympic Peninsula, seeking some ‘surf-able’ waves on the Straits of Juan de Fuca.

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Archie spent some time in Phuket, surfed two two hour sessions in some Andaman Sea shorebreak on a rented board, said it released some of the tension; as did, perhaps, the nightlife he described as (I’ll have to check this) something signifying crazy. “Next surf at home.”

Okay, here’s a surf story: It was one of the first times I surfed Cardiff Reef, racing over after (high) school, and we were probably surfing there because the waves were kind of big; my friend Phillip Harper lost his board. Cardiff has kind of an outside, a middle section, and an inside; all a little nebulous, and, at that size, it breaks farther out than the breaks we were more familiar with (Tamarack, Grandview, Swamis). Maybe Phillip was looking for me to help him. I wasn’t aware of his situation. We’d like to think we have to be responsible to get in when adrift. Sometimes friends help. In this case, it was a stranger who ferried Phillip through the middle section.

ADDED/EDITED: First, I told the above story because I couldn’t think of a story of being rescued in the surf other than when I was eight or so and went over the falls at Oceanside Pier on a styrofoam surfie (kind of like a kneeboard, about three and a half feet long) broke it on the bottom, the back end against my belly. Gary and Roger’s mother, Arthella, had to save me. Really, I was just kind of- yeah, I may have needed saving.  What I’ve realized since I wrote the original piece is, because I get almost all of my work through referrals, I have been rescued innumerable times, a phone call about a job coming along at just the right time.

Second, I did get a comment that, compared to the realities of war and famine and global warming, my subject matter was kind of, well, superficial, perhaps. This came from someone who had a site pushing something “Better than Botox.”

So, adrift? Yes. No. Sure; just in various degrees and at various times; not drowning, just swimming.