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.