Learning from failure

I had field work on the north coast on Friday, and so woke up early to sneak in some surfing at a new spot before starting work. I arrived before dawn and hiked the mile down to the spot. There's no way to check it that I know of except to take the hike down to it. When I got there I must have seen the best set because one or two waves were almost ridable, but those were the biggest and best I would see that day.

It's a rocky spot and I wanted to take a minute to see where the problem rocks were before suiting up and paddling out alone. I waited, but only tiny waves were filling in. Too small to catch and breaking through the rocky piles. I waiting longer, not having anything else to do with my time while I waited for the designated meeting time with my co-worker. It's a nice hidden pocket beach, and probably protected from some of the wind, but hard to get to for sure. After awhile of not a single ridable wave, I decided to run up the coast and reconnoiter another hidden spot. Even if I didn't have time to surf, I could get eyes on it and find the path down, etc. I ran into trouble with my phone not getting enough signal for the maps to work. I did my best to pick the right cove (there are so many coves and headlands!) but I missed it by one and checked out the wrong cove. By the time I figured out my mistake I was out of time to continue exploring and had to head to the work-site.

When I got home I dug into the buoy and wind data from the first time I checked the spot and the conditions of my failed attempt. The two days were very similar, so I'm going to assume the one difference was the critical difference, swell angle. It wasn't even the difference between a N and S, more like the angle of the swell was 10-deg different. So, now I know one more detail about this spot.

Then Saturday JB and I returned to the usual G. It wasn't great, but it was good enough. The weather was good and it was just the two of us. After more than a year of surfing this spot almost weekly during the smaller swells, we have only ever shared it with one other person. The adjacent spot occasionally has some people, but we've surfed that a few times too with nobody, or just one or two people out. Pretty great that we found this spot, even if it's not a great wave very often.