Tuesday, October 26, 2021

Discretion is the better part of Valor

The first big winter swell (for me) of the season. I woke up an hour before my alarm to check the buoy and quickly decided to add the 8'6" Channin to the car. The buoy was in the low teens in feet, and high teens in seconds. The angle was around 305 which was good (I hoped) because it would reduce the wave size as the swell made the turn into the reefs. I made it to tres at first light. In the darkness I could only tell it was big. As it got lighter I could see it was also disorganized. It was still ridable, and luck could result in a good wave, but most of them didn't look good. With the mid-tide on the rise, I wasn't optimistic that it would get better.

JB arrived soon after and was stoked at the chance to get back into big tres waves. I wasn't, but was game to join him. We went down to the jump rock. I was hanging back stretching out my body and JB jumped in. It looked like he timed it right but I guess the light was still too low to read the ocean because he got caught by some waves clearing the channel. He ended up safely on the sand down the beach. He was worked over, but ready for more. But he also encouraged me to jump in first so he could get a small rest. I picked a different part of the rock to jump off and watched and waited. It was difficult to figure out what the best time was to go for it. I watched for 15-min before JB got tired of waiting and moved down the rock to get ready to jump. As he waited, a few waves washed over the rocks and knocked him off his feet. He was able to get back to his feet and get to higher ground, but I could see he was limping. I went over to check in. 

No joint injury, just bruises. He advocated for me to go out anyway but I explained I wasn't really that into it anyway. I decided I wanted to go look around a bit, maybe up the coast. On the way back to the car we stopped to talk to a guy who was going out at tres. He said that things were more messy to the north so I decided it wasn't a good day to recon to the north. Instead we went into town, but just barely.

It was interesting to see how much smaller, and cleaner, the waves were in town. We checked the sidewalk and although it had a handful of people on it, the waves looked fun. JB was done, and since I was still in my wetsuit he was pushing me to go get some waves. The thought of surf matting was getting me stoked this past week, so that's what I decided to do. The way I worked it out was to sit off the edge of the sidewalk and wait for the waves that swung wide or were big and missed the better section. It worked out for about half a dozen waves before the tide seemed to kill my spot. The sidewalk was still going off and there was one guy who I repeatedly thought was going to get seriously hurt on the reef, but instead he kept getting barrels and artfully bailing out on the unmakable ones.

I had to paddle back to the beach because I just wasn't getting any waves for the last 20-min or so. It's now a few days later and I wish I could go do it again!

No comments: