The Old Year---The New Year

Farewell 2007! To all our friends and readers out there, happiest and healthiest of New Year 2008! We hope you will be informed and entertained by KYScoast in the coming year. We look forward to your comments and we'll see you on the other side.

Please Speak to Us

We want everybody to know we welcome your comments on this blog, its subject matter and what interests you particularly. We realize we have regular readers and would love to have your feedback especially.

We are most interested in recording the experiences of those in our community who have fashioned a lifestyle (especially surfing) in this remote, young, non-urban community and either grown up in or raised a family here. The focus here is local surf culture. Our Outer Banks retrospective is long overdue. The cup of local characters overflows.

We'll begin featuring interviews with those we consider iconic surfing and cycling figures on this part of our coast early in 2008. We expect you'll recognize someone you've seen in the water or on the road over the years, but didn't know anything about. You'll most certainly see someone you already know. You may even be a part of their story. So enjoy our story being told and please join in.

We can begin our conversation by using the "comments" button found at the end of each blog entry. Or you may want to email us at skip.saunders@gmail.com. If you read a few of the blogs already posted, you can get an idea of the kind of stories we want to tell. It may be a defining moment in your surfing career, the moment you realized how important surfing (or road cycling) was to you in choosing a place to settle, or even what motivates you to keep at it.

We would love to hear from you. And thank you for visiting our blog site. Your feedback will help shape it.

Thoughts Between Sets

It was another kamikaze. Again it looked like it was coming right at him straight out of the sun as he stood at his bridge station. His crew was firing everything at it that could shoot. Ack-ack, the mid air explosions from their anti-aircraft fire, pocked the sky around its target. The deafening din spiked into his skull. Everything he saw seemed to slow down as this one of Japan's Divine Wind came steady at him, as if standing at the center of the bull's eye.

There was nothing left he could do now that he had learned since becoming first an enlisted crewman turned officer, then captain of an LSM, an armor and marine carrying amphibious ship. This was the U.S gator navy, full-size ships which landed in the surf to deliver their deadly loads. This was the invasion of Okinawa after all, their first landing on Japanese soil---the enemy's homeland.

He could make out the Zero's markings now, crouching down into the false safety of the bridge's steel railing about to be gone forever.

The impact did not come. He could have reached up and touched the underside of the enemy aircraft as it passed over the bridge. He rose back up full of adrenaline and hope. The fighter cleared the ship's mast, circled tightly, and suddenly flopped down skimming across the ocean's swell crests shattering its prop and halting abruptly engulfed in spray, tail and fuselage settling back to the ocean surface. This enemy aviator had made a choice. The plane's canopy slid back as the pilot stood in his cockpit swinging one leg then the other out onto the plane's left wing. The aircraft would not float long in these seas.

Upon seeing this person who had risked an open ocean belly landing, when only seconds ago surely could have killed him and rained hell on his ship and its company, he felt a strange kinship despite the death and mayhem all around them both. He felt a responsibility to now help him. This after his Pearl Harbor, his Guadalcanal, his Saipan, his Iwo Jima, and on and on---all the young faces lost, some his friends, all the potential gone forever.

He ordered a rescue boat over the side to pick up this man who, in a moment had killed them all, and then given them back their lives. Around them still the chaos as the kamikazes screamed down and the ack-ack cracked the sky.

When they picked him up, he begged to see the ship's captain, this diminutive man-boy who did not look a warrior at all, but instead a schoolroom teacher. When brought to the bridge, he fell at the captain's feet, wrapped his arms around the captain's lower legs and, crying through tears of joy, thanked him in perfect English for saving his life.

The U.S. Navy captain with the Tidewater Virginia dialect and 9th grade education, was stunned to hear what this desperate Japanese aviator said next in clear American English, better English than himself, he thought.

He was in college at Harvard before the war and was called home to Japan as the war was about to begin. Things were beyond desperate in his country now. He had been given enough flight training to take off and fly the plane and only enough fuel to reach the U.S. Fleet off Okinawa. He had not wanted to die like this and especially for what his country had now become.

I squinted out through the early morning sun to the ground swell coming steadily at me only, it seemed, and thought about the day when I was fourteen, my Dad told me his story. He was the ship's captain that day, 26 years-old, about to turn twenty-seven, at the height of his young man's immortality. His enemy chose to live so my Father lived, so I live, and so do my children. It took a stranger to him from the other side of this world---one man's fear-filled decision balanced on a pin point to change so much. I'll never know him, but for his choice that day, I am grateful. Thankful for my life, I turned and paddled into the next wave.

The Perfect Day

Nineteen seventy-eight. My friend, Woody, and I stood on the small dune across from the original location of the Holy Redeemer Catholic Church, Kill Devil Hills, looking seaward under a bright hot sun hung in a clear, blue sky. We had checked it in the morning---flat everywhere. We had a day off from waiting tables at A Restaurant By George, and I guess we hoped we could will something out there to be rideable. We just stood there saying nothing. I put my hands on top of each other on my head like a captured prisoner-of-war as sweat began to form on my brows and shoulders as we stared to the east.

It appeared to be the same as this morning until small lines showed on the horizon. We watched these waves from nowhere make what seemed a cautious approach to the beach, as there appeared none preceding them. We watched in silence seeming to both at once decide subconsciously that to speak might spook the potential magic before us.

The first wave presented a long upright face, shuddering and then feathering in a breath-light offshore breeze. It peaked, tossed itself outward into a curl and peeled off from the center, to the right and to the left. It just kept peeling off down the line, uniform and perfect on this perfect stage of sun and sky. Three or so waves followed this one in precisely the same manner.

It was difficult to judge their size as there was no one in the water. But it looked big enough. Without saying a word we trotted obediently back to the car to grab our boards. We waxed up and paddled out. We waited and waited and waited some more. Nothing. I kept my eyes fixed on the horizon, one hand shielding from the glare, water dripping from my fingers and into my sight.

Here it came after almost forever:the next set of waves was showing way outside. As they moved across the sandbar we both made a pick and took off. As I took off on a beautiful left, I could see the sand bottom passing below. The wave was shoulder high at this point---just fine.

Woody and I harvested wave after wave from each set. We got into a kind of rhythm which had us getting to watch each other ride a wave as we paddled back out. This was total stoke. There were small tubes and clear, warm water, and wave upon wave.

I noticed someone standing on the dune watching us and could tell by the silhouette it was my brother Jamey. He shrugged his shoulders extending his arms out away from his sides as a way of saying, "Where's the surf?" I signaled back with one index finger extended upward saying, "Just wait a little bit," which he did. The next set arrived and Woody and I each took off, flying down wave faces, him right me left. I kicked out, looked back over my shoulder to see what Jamey thought, and saw only the sand his feet flicked into the air as he had turned to run back to get his board.

The three of us surfed this swell for another hour or so. The perfect swell vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Over. Gone.

My bet is most surfers have a memory like this of a perfect day. We had nothing to explain why there was excellent small surf for around and hour and a half out of the blue that day. But there was, we were there to get it, and I suppose I'll remember it forever for who I was with, the crowd I wasn't with, and the perfect conditions. These days are what make us who we are over our years in the water. They permanently imbue us with the hope and faith that we can attain this focus and camaraderie again. We all understand how mercurial and fleeting these types of conditions truly are. They are as temporary as the human shells in which we live our lives. But demand we get their best when we find it.

Moving Sand Around

We do a lot of moving sand around on the Outer Banks. And when we're not moving it we seem to be thinking about moving it, or where we should move it.

We debate beach nourishment, rebuild dunes with dump truck-delivered sand and then re-plant it with sea oat sprigs and sand fence after storms (as done by the Town of Kitty Hawk), and push beach sand back into dunes by oceanfront homeowners (This is when oceanfront property owners replace dune sand lost to storms in front of their homes with sand on the beach pushed into a kind of dune by a bulldozer. Yes, this is a somewhat desperate act.) The various towns will even dump sand in the parking accesses' ramps to the beach to block the ocean overwash usually pushed into these parking areas and the beach road beyond by big storms, especially at high tide.

The sure result of all this is often new sand being fed into our beaches' sandbar system. The net effect is just as often improvement in how the sand bottom around these sandbars influences breaking waves. This is one of the things I entertain myself with during the winter as I scout various sandbars up and down our local coast.

Three years ago, the Comfort Inn in Nags Head sported sand added to the beach by property owners following the carnage of Hurricane Isabel. Sand was lost during the storm, so more sand was added back by people. During the time afterwards, the new sand was slowly chewed away and pulled down into the first slough between the beach and the first sandbar. You could look at the escarpment along the beach and clearly see where the sand had come from. This created a situation unlike any I've seen few times before along a beach dominated by sandbars. It created a beachbreak that stayed around for over two years. You could take off on a wave over the first sandbar there and ride it right to the dry sand along the beach, as there was no deep slough where the wave would stop breaking.

Also looks like the current and swell along the beaches created by Hurricane Noel at the beginning of November all but eliminated the prime sandbar that had stayed with us so long at First Street in Kill Devil Hills.

We'll see what the rest of this winter brings. The only constant, I suppose, is all the changes on the coast.

My Road Cyclist/"Bike Path" Rant

The time has finally come for me to vent something that's been on my mind for a long time. This concerns road cyclists and car/truck drivers sharing the road on the Outer Banks. My experience is mostly related to roads from Ocean Hill to Coquina Beach, and Kill Devil Hills to Stumpy Point and Lake Mattamuskeet and all roads between.

When I moved here out of college in May of 1975, the rideable shoulder, or "bike path", was the 4-inch wide painted white stripe at the edge of the beach road (Va. Dare Trail). Right beside it was sand. I had left a major university where I rode my bike everywhere for virtually every reason. It was as much a part of my everyday life as starting a car and driving.

One day while riding on the beach road, on the white stripe, a tourist charter bus passed me at speed such that it touched my left elbow and made continuous contact with me down the entire side of the bus. I gave my bike to a friend preparing to go to college the following week.

Much has changed here since then, and not enough has changed. Large portions of the beach road now have shoulders 2-4 feet wide to the right of the white stripe. There are even residential neighborhoods whose roads connect along the sound in Kill Devil Hills and Kitty Hawk. And there are what all of us living here year-round call the "bike paths", for example in South Nags Head and the Kitty Hawk Woods Road.

But at a time when there are more reasons than fitness and racing for us all to be riding bikes, I find there are many incidents regularly occurring on the roads of our community which will eventually result in someone's death. I've witnessed and even been involved in several of these incidents myself.

I was hit by a car while crossing Limulus Street in South Nags Head and while riding on the "bike path" in 2004: Contusions, concussion (even with a helmet), torn jersey, bent wheel rims, ambulance ride to emergency room.

I've had numerous drivers make vehicle maneuvers intended to provoke and intimidate a cyclist. I'm a builder here and I'm ashamed to say that almost without exception, virtually every one of these incidents was carried out by someone driving a pickup truck or van.

Road cyclists do pose a quirky looking culture to the outside eye. I do understand that. But the folks I ride, train, and race with are also drivers as well. We understand what dangers motor vehicles pose to a cyclist, as should all drivers. But both communities of road users could do a better job of sharing the road (please see "sharing the road"). I doubt either group will be giving up the road any time soon.

I believe that drivers are incensed by road cyclists' not using the nearby "bike paths" when they must pass us as we ride at the road's edge---their road. I know this because they often scream this at us when passing us on the road: "Get on the _____ing bike path!"

The "bike path" thing, I think is really at the heart of the local misunderstanding though. The devil is in the nomenclature (the use of words to describe) here. As I understand the role of these "bike paths", they are actually "multi-use paths", meaning they are for the use of everyone, from mothers pushing strollers to dog walkers with dogs on extended leashes, to slogging beach cruiser bicycles.

Road cycles are not meant for "multi-use paths". Road cycles are the bikes with the curled down handlebars and the riders hunched over, you know, with tights and helmet. These bikes are usually doing around 20-28 miles per hour with riders often wheel-to-wheel working in a paceline. These speeds are far too great for the multi-use paths and would pose a serious danger to the other users of the path. Because we are all drivers too, we understand how this looks to someone driving on our local roads. Why aren't they on the "bike path"? Because the road is the only place for road cycles, as it is one of the only places for motor vehicles. We must co-exist peacefully.

We do try to schedule our rides together when there is less traffic or on roads with more limited traffic exposure. We could certainly improve how we ride as a group with drivers around us on the road and we are working on that.

My hope is we can all get along on our local roads in the coming new year, and that no one is hurt, or even worse killed. I also hope more drivers find their way to a bicycle. It's a great way to see our community.

Baptism, Part 2

(Editor's Note: Part 1 was published on this blog yesterday, Dec. 8th)

It was almost first light---Steve and me, fall 1970, "Road's End", Buxton, North Carolina---one eight of a mile south of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse. "Road's End" was our name for a parking lot behind a huge oceanfront dune. A state highway sign had given us the name. It said: "Road Ends 3/10 mile".

This was one of our favorite spots featuring a great sandbar. The sandbar was fed by the erosion of the huge dune before it during the winter. You got there by turning left off Route 12 at the entrance to the National Seashore at Cape Point. You followed the road around a lily pad-covered freshwater pond to an intersection of two-lane paved roads: left went to the lighthouse and keeper's quarters, right to the campground, straight led to Road's End.

There was a slow-moving tropical storm several hundred miles offshore---an east coast wave machine. We thought it would be pretty big so we wanted to get there and get out before everybody else. We had no idea what was waiting over the dune.

It could be heard long before it could be seen. We climbed over the dune and looked at it, spread before us, vast and deafening. It was huge by anyone's standards---even the surf flicks. We felt small. We were eighteen years apiece. One guy was already out, a mere dot on the outside, maybe three sandbars out or more. Sunlight was fingering through the clouds lying heavy on the horizon. These were the biggest real waves we had ever seen. Nothing before was even close.

We waxed our boards. My heart beats were so close and fast it felt like there was a humming motor in my chest. The rich, pungent smell of salt air and sea life alive and formerly living laid heavy in the mist sprayed into the air by the surf. It gave us some comfort as it always did. We were already trained to associate that smell with the pure joy of wave riding.

There was no hesitation whether to go out. Our moment was here. We did have to time our sprints through the shorebreak (the waves breaking right on the beach) in order to get off the beach. It was quite large, 5-7 feet, thick overhead, and seemed to suck all the water off the beach as it reeled back and up before slamming the wet sand before it. I watched and waited and watched and waited some more. Then in an instant went straight out from where we were. Steve walked about 200 yards to the south where he thought he could paddle out faster in a rip (riptide). I always admired his independent way of taking on a good challenge. Surely we had one now. I also always coveted Steve's longer arms for better paddling. Steve stood about 6'2" and 160 pounds. I was smaller, about 5'11" and 145 pounds.

Rips are out-flowing channels of water whose flow seaward from inside the surf near the beach often cause a kind of slot in the waves where the waves aren't breaking as large or often. They can be easier places to paddle out, but can be fickle and sometimes undependable. They can also be a swimmer's nightmare, but for a surfer trying to get over the sandbar to the lineup, a best friend. At this time we were surfing before the widespread use of the surf leash. So having no leashes, we were surfers until we lost our boards when it became necessary to be a swimmer. We kept our eyes on surface conditions so that we would know where the riptides were at all times.

Riptides are caused by large waves carrying lots of water across the sandbars at low tide. The extra large amount of water floods in against the beach, forms a current between the sandbar and the beach, and flows parallel to the beach until it finds a deeper cut or a gap in the sandbars which let it back out to sea. In the meantime, more large waves ram even more water over the bars behind it.

Sometimes waves will cross the bar and crash face-to-face against waves rebounding off the beach causing backwash. A real wildcard situation if you are riding a wave in and your wave collides with a backwash wave. Surfers usually go airborne when that happens. Most of the time it's great fun to get tossed up and off a wave face like this. You really must give yourself up to the circumstances, I suppose. The ocean's a good teacher that way.

My board was a 7-2 (7'2" long) scarlet red Harbour, 19" wide, shaped by Randy Rarick---and of course, a single fin. We had no surf leashes, as I noted earlier, and would count on our ability to swim or our buddy if we were separated from our boards and in trouble.

To paddle out through large waves with boards like these, when confronted with a wave about to break on you or a rolling wall of whitewater about 5 to 6 feet thick, you grab your board's rails tightly and roll over upside down. This was called "turning turtle" during this era. Your board would now be bottom up at or near the water's surface, you beneath it, underwater waiting (not long) for the impact. When your beating was over (we'll talk more about the beating later), you would roll over almost weightless in bubbling whitewater afterwash, dragging you back toward the beach, and continue paddling in a sprint over the sandbar where the waves are breaking---the "impact zone". If your timing is unlucky, you can be pinned down over the bar while being hammered repeatedly by all the waves in the set. At the end of this punishment you are often just outside the shorebreak where you began.

Waves or ground swells, coming from a far off source like a tropical depression, storm, or hurricane (the best wave makers on our coast), travel to the beach in sets of waves of 3-4-5 or more, each with a signature amount of time between waves, time between sets, and size. How close the tropical system is to the beach, how fast it is moving, how low its atmospheric pressure is, and which direction it is moving, influence the wave quality followed by local influences at the beach itself, for instance wind speed and direction and, of course, the tide.

East coast surfers, like all surfers. know there are a multitude of conditions which must align before the surf gets really good. The hardcore surfers are always watching the weather forecasts, especially the marine wind forecasts and tides, and checking the actual conditions at the beach regularly during the day they expect the swell to hit. The anticipation in the surf community with the approach of one of these storms offshore is difficult to accurately capture in print. Anyone with work obligations is killing themselves to get things in place so they can surf when the swell hits. The excitement explodes when swells line up, stacked to the horizon, pressing toward an offshore wind.

Okay. We're paddling out.

When paddling out in surf like this, there is usually a relatively calmer area between the shore break and the waves breaking over the first sandbar. The first real proof of close proximity to the impact zone are rolling walls of foaming whitewater which come one after the other almost appearing to be stacked up in layers. As you get into the thick of this you instinctively paddle harder and faster, arm muscles burning, shoulders, back, and down to your toes, all lit up. Paddle, paddle, turn turtle, flip back over---paddle, paddle, paddle, turn turtle, flip back over, again and again, and again until you reach the point of futility and total muscle exhaustion. You always hope to make it through the exact place where the monsters slam the surface water over the sandbar without taking direct hits. Sometimes you're unlucky. Direct hits are punishing to the body and psyche. They break surfboards. Most surfers who have surfed in fairly large waves or larger, have depressions in their boards where their fingertips have crushed into the fiberglass when gripping their boards tightly while paddling out.

Eventually we both made it outside to the relative safety just beyond the place where the most waves seemed to be breaking over the second or third sandbar out. We were hundreds of yards apart by the time we got outside. The other guy we had seen in the water alone was farther out than us. It wasn't clear why he was so far outside. We three were the only ones out.

When the surf is this big, 15-foot wave faces and up, it is especially eerie to the average surfer to sit alone outside picking and choosing the right wave to ride. We didn't think so at the time, but we were average surfers I suppose. It's the sport itself that has a way of making you feel special as athletes and sportsmen.

It's extra difficult to position yourself near the breaking peak of a large wave (the optimum place to take off) when it breaks over a sand bottom because the bottom gets so stirred up as to become semi-liquid a few feet or more from the bottom, with huge quantities of sand suspended in the ocean water. This often makes the shape of the breaking waves less defined and consistent, and more or less uniform than the preceding wave. The peak shifts along the wave face until the wave breaks, unlike waves breaking over rock or reef in other parts of the world. Here waves break a lot closer to the same place time and again.

We were nervous. There were few waves breaking consistently and ridable. The ocean was steel gray seeming to cast a sinister snarl, threatening these boys now in its grip. Steve had broken his nose after turning turtle under a huge wave and getting smacked by his board.

We could see a number of people gathered on the beach. A few were park rangers we discovered later. We didn't know it at the time, but a newlywed couple from Pennsylvania had drowned earlier at the lighthouse and the rangers weren't letting anyone else into the water, including other surfers. I guess they were mostly watching us and we weren't much to watch because we were already plotting our escape back to the beach.

Steve took off on his first big wave, a huge right. It was about 7-9 feet overhead and nasty as I watched him disappear out of sight as he dropped in. He made the drop, rode to the wave shoulder, kicked out, turned quickly around and paddled for his life back out of the impact zone over the sandbar. I picked out another big right, made a big drop in a crouch, made a conservative bottom turn, streaked down the line, and kicked up, up the wave face and out. The speed of it all was incomprehensible. I wasn't sure whether I was going to make it back out unpunished, but was just brushed by the whitewater of a few large ones on the way back outside.

We looked at each other and it was clear that the joy wasn't with us in these conditions. This swell was out of control. Many waves were unmake-able, meaning you really couldn't ride the wave face without having it break on you or ahead of you. In either case, the ride was shortened in these conditions and the risk of a catastrophic wipeout and swim to the beach were great. Surfers call these "closeout" conditions. The looming question now became: how are we going to get back to the beach through the shorebreak?

Now, paddling to the beach through the shorebreak racing to the beach from behind you is even more tricky than charging out through it from the beach. Sometimes, most of the time when it's big, you must sit just outside the breaking waves and wait for enough of a lull to get far enough toward the beach to get your feet down on the sand. You lift your board up above the water, shoulder high at your side, and slog/sprint to dry sand.

We did make it safely back to the beach. We met at the base of the big dune where we had begun, laid our boards down, and looked back at what we had just left behind. As I remember, there wasn't much heroic proclaiming or verbalizing about what this meant for us in terms of our surfing resumes.

I'm sure every surfer has a feeling of gratification at having faced his first huge swell, and answered the call. This first big swell had left its stamp on us. It was our baptism. I knew I had come closer than ever to realizing my physical limits. I suppose that is what some young men must need to know about themselves. I was one I now knew.

Big Waves, Part 1

Every surfer dreams of riding the big wave. I mean the really big wave. Now when we talk about big waves, we're seeing big wave surfers travel the world to challenge breaks like Teahupoo (Tahiti), Maverick's (Half Moon Bay, northern California), Todos Santos (Mexico), Jaws (Maui), and now, Surfer Magazine reports, Shipstern's Bluff, Ours, and Cyclops (all in Australia). Technology in marine weather forecasting, marine geology, and oceanography have now combined to predict the best time to be at a particular break any place in the world to catch epic conditions. Although sometimes still an email or phone call from an observant friend will do.

When surfers of this caliber take on waves like this, today it can easily be captured on film or DVD like no other era prior to this one. A big wave surfer's fantasies and nightmares can be laid before him and the world to see.

The known big-wave world we saw in the 196o's surf flicks featured Greg Noll, George Downing, Buzzy Trent, and Woody Brown riding monster swells in Hawaii at Makaha, Sunset Beach, and of course Waimea Bay on the north shore of Oahu.

These guys were taking off on racing mountains of seawater thrust at immovable reefs which in turn, tossed these 25'+ mountains and their riders toward the sky as the wave took form. Wipeouts were disastrous. We'd see a rider taking off on the wave's peak in a low crouch, gripping his board's rails (edges) trying to make the drop. Huge winds scouring up the wave face would lift his surfboard's nose into mid-air, heaving him up at first, then dumping him down the wave face and launching the board into a vertical spin some fifteen feet above the wave. We'd sit there aghast seeing ourselves on those waves.

We thought this was how we would learn how crazy it could be in big waves. You see we memorized these sensational wipeouts. We knew them well through the safety of the camera lens.

We did not yet know however the reality, that instant when a surfer gets one of three things at the point of takeoff in big surf: attempting the terrible drop and taking off down the wave face; pulling back behind the peak fast and hard enough so as not to be pulled over the "falls"; or being pulled over the "falls" to be pile-driven to the bottom by tons of water, hoping he gathered enough air to stay conscious until able to swim to the surface. At this point he must swim to the beach with other monsters bearing down from behind.

Was all this punishment worth it? If the thrill of riding smaller waves was any measure, without a doubt, we would find the worth. We all hoped our day would come. We did believe it would. Could we measure up? Everything we intended to do in the water until then was to ready us for our baptism.

Here on the East coast we saw the surf stars from Hawaii and California on surf flicks at special showings in the theaters of Virginia Beach in the 1960's. We strode into the theater with our buddies feeling like we were the core surfers on our piece of the coast---special---the real guys. We weren't I'm sure, but we felt that way and it felt good.

We'd look around the theater to see who was there. Were there any local big names like Bob Holland, of Smith and Holland Surf Shop, or Bob White, of Wave Riding Vehicles fame? There weren't many other names we knew for this was close to the birth of surfing and surf culture on our coast. In fact I was positive we wouldn't be surfing after say, age 30 because we didn't know hardly anyone older than us who surfed, except maybe Holland and White, but they owned surfing-related businesses.

I sat in the wash beside my best friend, Steve, at Croatan Beach south of Rudee Inlet in the late fall, 1969. I was seventeen. We were taking a break from surfing clean, but small waves. Steve and I shared the dream of riding big waves at exotic locations. We were the "Endless Summer" generation of surfers as well and Bud Brown's film was woven neatly into our dreams. This vision of traveling the world surfing seemed possible for us.

I carved the number "30" in the sand between us as the shallow wash receded. Steve asked, "What's that?" I told him that's about how old we'll be when we probably won't be able to surf anymore. The wash ran over the 30 and left two seventeen-year-olds sinking into the wash sand and thinking.

Could this be true? We didn't really know anyone much older than us who surfed, so maybe this theory held some truth. Maybe we would change that, but we never verbalized it. You have to understand how deep this subject ran in us and the urgency it bred. Yeah, we were boys worried about life as men with full time office jobs and Vietnam and riots off in the distance and our beloved sport even farther away.

The After Swell Hangover, The Winter Cometh

Real winter for us loams just ahead. It's the first week of December when we typically get our first shock of cold weather here on the Outer Banks. For some our cold is not your cold, but ours is simply our very own reality---our cold. It's just as cold to us as yours is cold to you no matter the temperature, wind, and humidity. Right now high 30's to low 40's at night, north winds around 20+ mph, and ocean water temperature now plowing down into the mid and then low 50's. Winter of '05 boasted the coldest winter ocean temps I could remember in many years, reaching down to a shocking 36 degrees.

Wetsuit design and materials have never been better though and let the brave-hearted surf right through our winters nowadays. This is a far cry from my first attempt at surfing in winter water in a wetsuit.

I was sixteen in high school around 1968 in Virginia Beach. I had a friend who knew someone who had a wetsuit. So we visited to see if that guy would loan it to me. I tried it on and it seemed to fit well enough. The loan was on. My best friend Steve Hudkins had come up with one as well so we were set. We just needed worthy conditions.

It was February, it was snowing, and we knew there was a swell associated with the snow storm. We went directly to Croatan, a home break on the south side of Rudee Inlet. The sand bottom formed a simulated beach break there beside the rock jetty. It was our kind of wave.

The wetsuit I struggled into was 1/4" thick "sharkskin", a diver's suit. The wetsuit arms were so rigid, that they would hold my arms inside them out at 45-degree angles from my sides if I relaxed. There were thick boots. I felt very special and very rigged up. Gloves? No, but I had solved that with my Mom's Playtex dishwashing gloves taped at the wrists with black electrical tape. No hood, but I was ready.

We paddled out, just the two of us, in snow-glassy 4-5 foot faces, mostly lefts. Everything felt heavy and slow, because it was. I took off on my first wave, a left. I have no memory of riding the wave, just wiping out, struggling underwater to find the surface and feeling water so cold I lost orientation as to which way was up. No, I mean really lost my way! I swam hard to the surface and kept swimming about to burst holding my breath. I knew I was about to bust through the surface any second. And then the top of my head butted hard against the sand bottom.

When something like this happens---you can't see cause of the cold, you can't breathe cause of the cold water, and you lose your inner compass cause of the cold---there is a dialogue that starts up in your head between you and your soul. "Am I about to die?" asks your soul. Your answer is surprisingly cogent, articulate, logical, but at the same time completely panicked about the possibilty of dying because you were stupid or dying as pitiful testament to Darwin's theory of survival of the fittest. This is the adrenaline talking. Nonetheless the inner voices agree this is not the way you envisioned going out. So you get into the "do-whatever-it-takes" mode. You turn 180 degrees, push hard off the bottom and find your pathetic way out of the mess you're in.

Needless to say, I waited many years for wetsuit design and material technology to reach a point of safe functionality. And because I was becoming a young man, I walked out of the water that day with my immortality still intact (I had conquered) so that I could find myself in similar predicaments surfing in the 40 years to come.